Objectivist or not he sure can spout Objectivist boilerplate:
hayhillgallery·com/minns/atlas1.htm
“… because of increasing government controls to establish a state of total collectivism, the weight of freeloaders is too much [for Atlas] to bear. … Atlas breaks out of the suffocating World of Collectivism. … After Atlas is free of the world of Collectivism, he will then create his own perfect world …, conceived in freedom of individual rights and embodied in laissez-faire capitalism …
artlyst·com/whats-on-archive/richard-minns-meet-the-artist-evening-hay-hill-gallery
“[Atlas] challenges us to exert our individual force, shatter the state of total collectivism and live freely. This struggle of individualism versus collectivism is not a political ideal but concerns a man’s soul. The idea mirrors Ayn Rand’s beliefs that the individual is of supreme value, the “fountainhead” of creativity, and that selfishness, properly understood as ethical egoism, is a virtue.”
Properly understood! Express your disgust in 25 words or less.
It’s pretty obvious. Independent, unorganized, intellectuals promoting the best of Rand.
Rand in The Objectivist, May 1968, refers to “a philosophical or intellectual movement, in the sense of a growing trend among a number of independent individuals sharing the same ideas.” She approves of such an intellectual movement but not an organized movement (like ARI, which of course she doesn’t mention explicitly not having a crystal ball).
Rand in The Objectivist, June 1968: “I regard the spread of Objectivism through today’s culture as an intellectual movement – i.e. a trend among independent individuals who share the same ideas – but not as an organized movement."
Perhaps we can all agree on this: ARI is the sort of organization that promotes the likes of Carl Barney (predatory Church of Scientology honcho turned government fraudster) and Richard Minns (self-righteous murderer, braggart, egomaniac, and textbook psychopath).
Aren’t we back to the initial point regarding Carl Barney and the “weird” TOS article, only instead of directing your concerns to Craig Biddle and staff, it would take the form of the following.
Have you directed your concerns to the folks at ARI?
If the distance away from proof was far enough, it would be gossip. If there is reason to be confident, even if I can’t prove with certainty, there can easily be enough information to judge moral failing. Or I can use other moral failings to infer how confident I should be about allegations on them.
9 hours ago, MisterSwig said:
New TAS leader, Grossman, then does what she can, visiting him in London in the fall of 2016
I’m not saying they didn’t seek money from him, I’m saying they probably sought money from him because he manipulated them. Nothing complicated.
10 hours ago, MisterSwig said:
Have you read the article at ARI Watch?
I don’t trust that source, and when I looked at it, nothing was super concerning to me. I honestly don’t care about ARI, it’s just interesting to me to think sometimes what the Oists in that type of world are like. I don’t think I would like them very much anyway.
Rand in The Objectivist, June 1968: “I regard the spread of Objectivism through today’s culture as an intellectual movement – i.e. a trend among independent individuals who share the same ideas – but not as an organized movement."
Something has occurred to me, but it’s a deeper and broader issue than the current focus. So if Dupin is not interested perhaps this post can be deleted or moved to its own topic.
When we ask “what is an Objectivist movement?” we are not only trying to identify a particular type of movement, but we are simultaneously trying to differentiate it from that which it is not. And since an intellectual movement is simply a number of like-minded idea-spreaders, we are essentially trying to distinguish one class of idea-spreaders from all the others in the world. This basic fact explains why serious idea-spreaders regularly attack those whom they regard as charlatans in their midst: they don’t want these fraudulent types seen as representatives of the class to which they themselves belong. It’s an effort to apply identity to their very existence by promoting proper, objective classifications.
Another, more universal example of this primary motivation is the ongoing criticism of transgenderism. Many people resist the attempt to classify men with women, particularly in the biological, anatomical, and sexual senses. Like those of us who resist the inclusion of pseudo-Objectivists in the Objectivist class, there are those, myself included, who resist the inclusion of pseudo-women in the women class (and vice versa), no matter how feminine they look and act. We don’t do this because we hate pseudo-Objectivists or pseudo-women. We do this because consciousness is identification. Pointing out absurdity and irrationality is an aspect of our proper mental functioning. To look the other way and go along with contradictory nonsense would be us literally not conscious of reality–or us evading facts and evidence as best we can.
It is why those in the Objectivist intellectual movement, especially those who want to promote its concept of egoism (and even if they disagree among themselves on some other matters) must separate themselves from Barney and Minns and call them out as the phonies that they are.
Consider O.J. Simpson. Even after being found innocent at trial (incompetent judge, incompetent defense attorney, jury with an agenda) there is no question he was the murderer. Leonard Peikoff wrote a brief article in Tracinski’s now defunct The Intellectual Activist at the time decrying the verdict.
That Minns wasn’t even questioned in the Piotowski Affair says more about Houston Police Department corruption than it does about his innocence. Minns was the prime mover in the shooting, the trigger-man behind the trigger-man.
Now that Peikoff is retired he is not paying attention to what is happening in the very organization he founded.
Now that Peikoff is retired he is not paying attention to what is happening in the very organization he founded.
It took Peikoff to push out McCaskey, which he would have done quietly, had McCaskey not insisted on publishing the email to Arline Mann. Perhaps he pushed out Barney behind the scenes. Of course that’s pure speculation. But I’m not buying the official excuse for Barney’s departure. I think he was reluctantly nudged out.
I suspect – don’t know – that Barney organized this get-together to give the impresstion that Peikoff believes in him, that is, believes his story about the Church of Scientology being a benevolent enterprise when he ran five missions for nine years, and that Peikoff believes he runs his colleges honestly now.
It looks like either Peikoff does believe these things or he isn’t paying attention. He has some excuse today for not paying attention because he’s quite up in years but he had no excuse 14 years ago when he allowed Barney on ARI’s board of directors. That was four years before Peikoff had McCaskey thrown out.
He has some excuse today for not paying attention because he’s quite up in years but he had no excuse 14 years ago when he allowed Barney on ARI’s board of directors.
Why should we expect Peikoff to know fourteen years ago what you only revealed to us a couple years ago? Most people don’t conduct journalistic investigations into their friends’ histories or business practices.
Andrew Bernstein, long on the Objectivist scene and these days a contributing editor of Craig Biddle’s The Objective Standard, posted
“A Tribute to Carl Barney”
on his personal blog. A friend of Bernstein, who hates the Church of Scientology, tried to get him to take it down, to no avail. If you search on the three B’s:
… Biddle Bernstein Barney
using Google you’ll find a recent review of Bernstein’s tribute. (Bing and DuckDuckGo don’t have it indexed.)
Andrew Bernstein, long on the Objectivist scene and these days a contributing editor of Craig Biddle’s The Objective Standard, posted
“A Tribute to Carl Barney”
Bernstein makes an astute identification in this blog:
One uplifting principle of the Objectivist ethics is that it is more important to reward the good than it is to punish the bad. That which promotes life is vastly more important than that which harms it.
One of my favorite presentations by Bernstein, a precursor to The Capitalist Manifesto, was the no longer available set of talks on The Robber Barons. The historians managed to turn a group of value producers into villeins by failing to integrate the relevant factors.
Bernstein makes an astute identification in this blog:
One uplifting principle of the Objectivist ethics is that it is more important to reward the good than it is to punish the bad. That which promotes life is vastly more important than that which harms it.
It sounds like rationalistic, context-dropping nonsense to me. I’d like to know where Rand presents this so-called “principle of Objectivist ethics.”
Was Atlas Shrugged written to glorify the train wreck in the tunnel or the destruction brought about by project X, and how the passengers or physical and mental mystics of muscle and their supporters deserved the identified outcome Ayn Rand had identified and written for them?
Also, it is expressed indirectly in Galt’s speech:
Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.
and that does need to be considered in conjunction with:
that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement
Is an objective example to be better set by being obsessed with pursuing values, or to be perceived as being obsessed with dis-value?
If evil extorts values from the good, then punishing evil is rewarding the good. It is helping restore what rightfully belongs to the good. It is justice.