tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27998701346082618912023-11-16T08:25:41.210-08:00Around the Randroid Belt<b>This blog practices "Randroid Diminishing": The lampooning and lambasting of the major sites and personalities that worship Objectivism.</b>seymourbloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02843717286012748265noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-13120520673098344982012-06-25T00:33:00.001-07:002012-06-27T20:13:33.886-07:00A Dead Fish Rots from the Head Down: The End of Objectivist Epistemology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /><br /><br /><br />What follows is a work-in-progress. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Alisa Rosenbaum's brief "<i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>" has too many errors, contradictions, non-sequiturs, and loose ends to critique concisely in a single post. Instead, I will focus on individual premises and post intermittently on the subject.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I begin with her concept of "<b><u>unit</u></b>" since that lies at the heart of her ideas regarding the structure of concepts and how a conceptual consciousness proceeds to form them. If her idea of "unit" is found wanting — or, as I see it, found to be unintelligible — much of the system of epistemology that depends on that idea will collapse.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">My reference is her "I<i>ntroduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Expanded Second Edition, Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff</i>," published by Meridian in 1990.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><b><u>On Units</u></b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Rosenbaum writes:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;">"A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. (Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.)" [ppg 6-7] </span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br />This is her definition of unit, though she spends the next paragraph on additional explanation. Before attending to that, however, we'll look first at the definition itself, especially the beginning in which she claims that a unit is an existent. <br /><br />If we check what Rosenbaum means by "existent," we find the following: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;">"The building-block of man's knowledge is the concept of an 'existent', of something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute or an action." [ppg 5-6] </span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br />An "existent" is a thing, an attribute of a thing, or an action of a thing. That's certainly a clear enough position. She then writes: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;">"Since it [i.e., 'existent'] is a concept, man cannot grasp it explicitly until he has reached the conceptual stage. But it is implicit in every percept (to perceive a thing is to perceive that it exists) . . ." [pages 5-6] </span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br />That statement, I submit, is gibberish. A human consciousness doesn't grasp the idea of "implicitness" until, again, it has reached the conceptual stage. So the statement that a <i>concept</i> is "implicit" in a percept <i>before</i> one has reached the conceptual stage, is (among other things) blatant concept-stealing: a human consciousness at the <i>conceptual</i> stage can grasp the notion of "implicitness" and claim that, upon perceiving something, the concept "existent" or "it exists" is implicit in its perception of it; one cannot, however, take one's existing consciousness — including ideas about "implicitness" — and turn back the clock to infancy, a time when one did <i>not</i> have a conceptual consciousness — and still claim that any idea or concept is "implicit" in a mere percept. <br /><br />"Percept" and "implicit concept" are mutually exclusive. <i>nothing</i> is "implicit" in a percept qua percept. A percept merely <i>is</i>. <br /><br />When you look through a camera at an object — a tree, for example — and carefully focus and adjust your exposure, <i>you</i> — the adult photographer with the conceptual consciousness — might implicitly realize that to see the tree is to also admit that "it exists"; but the camera itself — as an analogy to a human infant who, presumably, <i>only</i> perceives — has nothing to do with "implicitness." Whether the lens of a camera, or the lens of a human eye, "perceiving", per se, is all about the explicitly <i>given</i> of the perception; there's nothing implicit about the percept, per se. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Observe how idiotic Rosenbaum's position is: if the concept "existent" is implicit in the simple perception of a tree, qua percept, then it must also be so for a non-conceptual consciousness, like a squirrel's. A squirrel perceives the tree, just as the child perceives the tree (how the image of the tree appears in a squirrel's mind is, of course, an unknown, but it most certainly perceives the tree on which it climbs up and down). Would Rosenbaum claim that the concept "existent" is implicit in the percept of the tree in a squirrel's mind? We hope not, because it's a foolish position to hold. Why, then, would she claim that a concept is implicit in the percept of a tree in a human infant's mind? If she is indeed claiming the latter, then it must be because the child is <i>potentially</i> capable of grasping concepts at a certain point in its growth. So, is Rosenbaum saying, therefore, that to a potentially conceptual consciousness (such as an infant's) concepts <i>as such</i> are <i>implicit</i> in percepts <i>as such</i>? If so, is this true for all of its percepts, or only some of them? If true for only some of them, why? If she's going to assert that the concept "existent" is implicit in every percept of a not-yet-conceptual human consciousness, then why not other concepts as well? Why not the concept "<i>generates a gravitational field</i>"? That's a sophisticated higher-order concept — the idea that all masses have the attribute of gravitational attraction — and, of course, we wouldn't expect any consciousness to grasp that concept until it was both conceptual, and had received a good deal of training in physics. But since it is <i>true</i>, is it not also true that it is implicit in the infant's perception of a tree? <br /><br />What Rosenbaum is doing here is very similar to what she did with the characters of Dagny, Francisco, and Eddie, when she portrayed them as children in <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>; and it shows, among other things, that the method she chose to investigate the subject of epistemology was the method of the creative writer, not the method of the diligent scholar. In <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>, she first conceives of these characters as adults for the sake of her characterizations; then she simply turns back the clock until they become children, but apparently with all the same attributes of adults except they appear "in miniature". <br /><br />Similarly, in her system of epistemology, she starts with an adult conceptual consciousness that grasps the idea of "implicitness" — an implicitness that is a function of its own thinking about a percept, not an implicitness that is part of the percept itself qua percept — and capable of understanding that when one perceives a tree, there is much more than just pure perception occurring, but also lots of implicit thinking about the tree; thinking that is on the subconscious or unconscious level and can be brought to light either by personal effort, or through an outside agency (like a teacher) making clear and explicit to the perceiver what he may not have noticed about his own thinking about the percepts. Then she simply runs the clock backward and assumes that this same sort of unconscious or subconscious thinking/processing of percepts is occurring in a purely perceptual consciousness assumed to be the normal waking state of an infant. This procedure is a form of concept-stealing: you cannot take an adult conceptual state of awareness that is also aware of the notion of "implicitness" and run it backward in time by assuming that it exists also in a state of awareness that <i>by definition</i> is "perceptual only"; i.e., <i>non-conceptual</i>. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">If it isn't concept-stealing, and Rosenbaum is claiming that the "implicit concepts" are somehow inherent in percepts qua percepts, then it strikes me as a form Platonism: conceptual knowledge reaching us by way of perception rather than some special mode of intuition. The error here would be in assuming that conceptual knowledge is dormant, sleeping — i.e., "implicit" — within percepts qua percepts. Nothing is implicit in a percept, and nothing is objective about it, either. The fact is, nothing is more subjective than a percept: my percept of a tree is <i>mine</i>; an image that falls on <i>my</i> retina and is transmitted to <i>my</i> visual cortex where it displays in <i>my</i> consciousness. Your percept of a tree is <i>yours</i>: a separate image that falls on <i>your</i> retina and is transmitted to <i>your</i> visual cortex where it displays in <i>your</i> consciousness. There's precisely zero "public verifiability" here. There's nothing objective about a percept qua percept, since the entire process of perception takes place within one's subjective self. <br /><br />Rosenbaum writes the following: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;">"A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members" </span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br />We've already seen that a "unit" is NOT an existent; at least, not according to the way Rosenbaum defines "existent", which is an entity, an attribute, or an action. A "unit" is a <i>relation</i> between consciousness and existents. <b>Without consciousness, there's no such thing as a unit</b>. <br /><br />Rosenbaum parenthetically cites examples of what she means by units: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;">"(Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.)" </span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br />As a kind of afterthought, she tepidly admits that "unit", indeed, requires an "act of consciousness" but that it is not an "arbitrary" act of consciousness. Her idea, apparently, is that since one actually perceives the attribute of length of an existent — the attribute being objective, existing independently of consciousness — any unit of length that consciousness might invent, though optional (i.e., the foot, the meter, the yard, the inch, etc.), is nevertheless rigidly determined by the objective nature of the attribute itself. And I suppose the idea here is that whatever applies to the attribute "length", must also apply to a unit of length. <br /><br />It is trivially true that what applies to "time", per se, applies to any unit of time; what applies to mass, per se, applies to any unit of mass; etc. And although trivially true, Rosenbaum unwittingly brings up a point that undercuts much of her theory about units, and therefore, of concepts, and therefore, finally, of her entire epistemology. <br /><br />To understand why this is so, a brief digression into grammar is necessary. <br /><br />There's a lot of misunderstanding about a construction we all know as the "prepositional phrase". Most of us were taught that it comprises a preposition — e.g., "over" — and the noun or pronoun coming after it, called the object of the preposition — e.g., "rainbow". A preposition, however, is a kind of connecting word, similar in certain ways to a conjunction ("and", "or"), and to understand fully a phrase with a conjunction requires that we acknowledge the terms on both sides of it, and not just the term appearing after it; i.e., "bacon <i>and</i> eggs", not just "<i>and</i> eggs." Similarly, we need to be aware of both terms that are being related to each other by means of the preposition. So the full prepositional phrase is not just "over the rainbow" because we don't know what word "over" is connecting to its object "rainbow." The complete, intelligible phrase is "<u>Somewhere</u> <i>over</i> the <u>rainbow</u>." "Somewhere and "rainbow" are brought into relation with each other by means of the preposition "over," which specifies how the two terms are to be understood together.<br /><br />And to be perfectly clear about it, we can call the word that comes before the preposition, the "antecedent", and the term that comes after it (usually called the "object of the preposition"), the "consequent." <br /><br />Thus, in "Somewhere over the rainbow," we have: <br /><br />antecedent = "somewhere" <br /><br />preposition = over <br /><br />consequent = the rainbow <br /><br />Very often, one and the same preposition may be used with very different meanings, depending on the terms being brought into relation with each other. Take the preposition "by", for example: <br /><br />"He walked <i>by</i> the lake." <br /><br />"He read a novel <i>by</i> Hemingway." <br /><br />The first "by" makes reference to a spatial relation between "walked" and "lake"; the second, an authorial one between "novel" and "Hemingway." <br /><br />Now, the preposition "of" is quite interesting in that it has many meanings: <br /><br />"A chain <i>of</i> gold" means, A chain made of the metal gold. The "of" connects "chain" and "gold" by means of the idea of "material composition." <br /><br />"An age <i>of</i> reason" means, An age whose distinctive and memorable quality was that "reason" was the guiding cultural idea.<br /><br />"A symphony <i>of</i> Beethoven" means that Beethoven composed the symphony. "Of" connects "symphony" and "Beethoven" by means of the idea of creator. <br /><br />"A quarter <i>of</i> the population" means a certain part considered apart from the whole. <br /><br />This last example is of special relevance to this discussion. The preposition "of" is said to be <i><b><u>partitive</u></b></i> in this construction; i.e., it considers the whole of something to be, for example, a pizza pie, which appears to the right of the preposition as its object; the individual slice appears to the left of the preposition, and represents the part. The part is then grammatically related to the whole by means of the preposition "of" according to the schema, <br /><br />antecedent / preposition / object <br /><br />or, <br /><br />antecedent / OF / object <br /><br />For example: <br /><br />Slice <i>of</i> pizza; <br /><br />Piece <i>of</i> pie; <br /><br />25% <i>of</i> the population; <br /><br />or more generally, <br /><br />Part <i>of</i> the whole <br /><br />Now, we see that this grammatical construction shows the logical relation between the antecedent and the consequent (i.e., the prepositional object). And in the partitive relation, it is always the case that the antecedent is of the same "stuff" as the consequent. In other words, a <u>slice</u> <i>of</i> pizza is itself a little piece of pizza; a <u>piece</u> <i>of</i> pie is itself a little bit of pie; a <u>quarter</u> <i>of</i> the population is itself a little population; etc. If we apply this same schema to the idea of a unit, we get: <br /><br />"A <u>meter</u> <i>of</i> length" or "A <u>lightyear</u> <i>of</i> distance." <br /><br />A meter is itself length; a lightyear is itself distance. <br /><br />"A <u>liter</u> <i>of</i> volume" <br /><br />A liter is itself volume. <br /><br />"A <u>gram</u> <i>of</i> mass." <br /><br />A gram is itself mass. <br /><br />"A <u>second</u> <i>of</i> time." <br /><br />A second is itself time. <br /><br />Now, this all becomes extremely relevant when applied to Rosenbaum's statement above. To repeat: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;">"(Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.)" </span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br />We see at once that her second example, "two square feet <i>of</i> ground", fits the partitive schema above, and exhibits the same logic as "Slice <i>of</i> pizza", "Piece <i>of</i> pie", "A second <i>of</i> time", and "A gram <i>of</i> mass." (To be precise about it, instead of "two square feet of ground," we ought to say "Two square feet of area" <i><u>instantiated in</u></i>, or <i><u>mapped to</u></i>, "a continuous stretch of ground.") So far, so good. <br /><br /><b><u>But her first example doesn't apply at all</u></b>. If "Two stones" are two units, then we must be able to put the phrase into the usual partitive phrase schema as above with the preposition "of": <br /><br />"Two stones <i>of</i> ____" <br /><br />"Two stones" are two units <i>of <u>what</u></i>? <br /><br />A unit of length must itself be a length; unit of time must itself be time; a unit of mass must itself be a mass; etc. If "two stones" are "two units", then it follows that "one stone" is "one unit", and again we must insist that Rosenbaum or her acolytes answer the question: "a stone" is a unit <i>of what</i>? Of itself? Can we say, "A stone is a unit of a stone?" That's gibberish. We would never claim that "A foot is a unit of a foot." <br /><br />Rosenbaum is either using the word "unit" in a highly idiosyncratic way, and then immediately using it in the standard way when speaking of "two square feet of ground" (indicating an equivocation on her part within that sentence), or she was just plain wrong. <br /><br />To give her the benefit of the doubt, what she appeared to have in mind was the idea that the divided concept — the object of the preposition "of" — was the general idea of "stone"; the antecedent partitive concept to the left of the preposition was "a stone"; thus, "a stone <i>of</i> stone." Meaning, an individual, concrete instance of a general concept. <br /><br />If this is what Rosenbaum intended by her statement that "Two stones are two units", then she is confused. "Two stones" are not two units of "the general concept stone"; they are <i>concrete instances</i>, or <i>instantiations</i>, of the general concept "stone." She has confused the idea of a "concrete instance", or the concept of "instantiation" of a general concept, with the idea of "unit." <br /><br />The relation between "an individual physical stone" and "the general concept of stone" is not the same as the relation between "an inch" and the general idea of "length". An inch is itself length. "Inch" is an abstract idea; "length" is an abstract idea. "Inch" is a creation of consciousness by means of considering the abstraction "length" combined with abstractions like "limit" and "convenience " (an "inch" is "length <i>limited</i> for <i>convenience</i>" to a certain arbitrarily small size.). "Inch" is then instantiated in a physical medium (e.g., notches on a piece of wood). "Stone" is an abstract idea, but "A stone" is not. "A stone" is not "stone" considered in a certain way by a consciousness. "A stone" is not a creation of consciousness by considering "stone" in a certain way. <br /><br />In fact, even according to Rosenbaum's own theory of concept formation, it's the other way around: she claims that the general concept of "stone" is arrived at by first observing and considering concrete stones, and then integrating them to form the general concept. By her lights, the concrete particulars come first; the abstract concept comes later. There's nothing wrong with that assumption; but if we tentatively accept it as true, then we must also accept that it is the exact opposite of the partitive relation that applies to units; for in such a relation, the whole pizza pie comes first; its division into slices or "units" ("Slice <i>of</i> pizza"; "Piece <i>of</i> pie"; "Gram <i>of</i> mass"; Year <i>of</i> time; etc.) comes later. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Concept formation" and "unit formation" not only have nothing to do with each other, but in fact, proceed in opposite ways. Concept formation — at least, according to Rosenbaum's lights — starts with individual concrete instances of something and then through a process of differentiation followed by integration, builds an abstract concept; unit formation reveals itself in the partitive phrase "unit <i>of</i> X", where "X" is some attribute that exists first, followed by a limitation of the attribute that is convenient.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">(We will leave for a later post a discussion of the intelligibility of Rosenbaum's position that concept formation requires differentiation, followed by integration that blends what was just integrated into a new single whole, and which then must "unite" this new integration by means of a linguistic definition. If something is a "single, blended whole," then there's nothing to "unite" by means of language. Conversely, if one actually does "unite" that which was differentiated, then it proves they could not have been integrated or blended into a single new whole.")<br /><br /><b><u>To Summarize</u>: </b><br /><br />1. Rosenbaum commits a fallacy of the stolen concept" by starting her psycho-epistemological investigations with an adult, conceptual consciousness (hers, of course), and running the clock backward until she arrives at what she imagines to be the percept-only consciousness of the human infant. She then sneaks into that imagined percept-only consciousness notions like "implicitness", which is a notion that could only exist in a consciousness that is not percept-only, but fully conceptual. <br /><br />2. If we deny that Rosenbaum is committing the fallacy of the stolen concept, then we must assume that she believed certain concepts (e.g., "existent") were somehow contained "in" a percept qua percept (e.g., "tree"). That's not only wrong but vexing: it suggests that since we all, presumably, perceive the same things in the same ways, and therefore have "access" to the same implicit concepts tucked away in our percepts (because concepts, by her lights, are implicit in percepts), objective truth, by her lights, is "manifest"; it's "objectively out there", just waiting to be acknowledged. And if one doesn't acknowledge these implicit truths when one is able to apply language to them and make them explicit, the reason must be that our thinking has gone awry. The idea that "truth is objectively manifest in perceptual data", and that it simply awaits our conscious acknowledgment upon reaching a certain stage of development, and that failure to acknowledge these truths must therefore be traceable to some deficit of consciousness — bad premises, evil intentions, wrong ideas, bad philosophy, etc. — is truly the basis of <i>rationalism</i> at its worst. <br /><br />3. Rosenbaum confuses the idea of "unit" with that of "concrete instantiation." That is apparent from her own examples: there is nothing in common between "two stones" and "two square feet." The acid test of this is a simple grammatical substitution: the latter can be put into a prepositional phrase that explicates the partitive relation between the antecedent term and the consequent one: Slice <i>of</i> pizza; Piece <i>of</i> pie; A second <i>of</i> time; A gram of mass; A pound of weight; A liter of volume; <i>a square-foot of area</i>. The former phrase — "two stones" — does not fit into that scheme: "Two stones <i>of</i> _____?" Two stones of <i>what</i>? The grammatical substitution test fails with the phrase "two stones"; ergo, "two stones" are NOT two units of anything. They are concrete instances of a general idea, "stone". <br /><br />4. Rosenbaum reverses cause and effect within her own theory. She claims that percepts come first and that concepts are built on top of them and derived from them. Thus, according to her lights, first we perceive individual concrete stones; then we can form the abstract concept "stone." Fine. But if "two stones" are, indeed, two units (as she claims), then the consequent term (the object of the preposition "of") must be "stone"; and it must precede its units, just as "length" precedes "inch", "time" precedes "second", and "mass" precedes "gram"; indeed, just as an entity, attribute, or action, necessarily precedes any unit of such entity, attribute, or action.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Though this critique is a work-in-progress, our conclusions so far don't augur well for Rosenbaum's system of epistemology. Randroids venerate her system because they believe epistemology is the "head" of the social organism called "civilization" or "human culture", and that what they claim to see as the latter's corruption must be traceable to thinking errors on the part of non-Randroids (a/k/a <i>normal people</i>). As we see, though, the head of the Objectivist organism (which we compare to a big fish) — Rosenbaum's system of epistemology — is rotten with notions that both confuse and conflate the distinctly different ideas of concept-formation, unit-formation, and instantiation, accomplished mainly by means of a simple equivocation: "two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground..." If much of the body of Objectivist opinion on cultural matters such as sex, music, painting, literature, psychology, etc., appears rotten to many normal people (perhaps secretly even to a few brave-but-silent Randroids), they'll know that much of it is traceable to her system of epistemology. Once the head of a philosophical system rots, the body inevitably follows.</span></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-53956499381497153172012-06-06T23:44:00.004-07:002012-06-26T12:35:11.366-07:00Cosmopolis Review: DeLillo and Ayn Rand - Eric Packer and Francisco d'Anconia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Eric Packer:</span></b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #cccccc;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">When he died he would not end. The world would end. </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;">(C p.6)</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><i style="color: blue;">Freud is finished. (dead)</i><span style="color: blue;"> <i>Einstein is next.</i></span><span style="color: red;"> </span><span style="color: blue;">(to die)</span></span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"><b style="text-indent: 4ex;">Their worlds are dead</b><span style="text-indent: 4ex;">.</span><span style="text-indent: 4ex;">(</span><span style="text-indent: 4ex;">C p.6)</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b>Ayn Rand liked to say:</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #cccccc;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">"It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end,</span></b>"</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"> It is a favorite quote of hers her fans like so much.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; text-indent: 24px;"><i><b><span style="background-color: blue; color: white;">Eric Packer</span></b>: <span style="color: blue;">This was the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at night, these long weeks, one breath after another, </span></i></span><span style="font-size: 14px; text-indent: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="color: blue;"><i>in the rotating room at the top of the triplex.</i> </span>(C p. 5 </b>)</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: blue; color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; text-indent: 24px;"><b>Gail Wynand</b> in </span><b style="font-size: 14px; text-indent: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Fountainhead </span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; text-indent: 24px;">has his bedroom at the top of his penthouse where it is glassed all around. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; text-indent: 24px;"><i><b>"When she entered his bedroom, she found it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished</b></i>.<b>(F p. 482)</b></span><br />
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<i><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: blue;">Recognizing that the movement of the system itself is</span> </span><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: x-large;"> irreversible</span><span style="background-color: white;">, <span style="color: blue;">that there's</span> </span><b><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">no possible get-out within the logic of the system.</span></b><span style="background-color: white;"> <span style="color: blue;">That logic is really global, in the sense that it has absorbed all negativities, including the humanist, universalist, resistance, etc</span>. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-weight: bold;">Pushing to the limit means<span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: red; font-size: large; font-weight: bold;">acknowledging this </span><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow; font-size: large; font-weight: bold;">irreversibility</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-weight: bold;"> and pushing it to the limit of its possibilities, to the point of collapse. Bringing it to saturation point, to the point where the system itself </span><b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: blue; color: white;"> creates the accident.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"> </span></span></b></i><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"><i>Thought contributes to this acceleration. It anticipates its end. This is the provocative 'commitment', but giving <b>all it's got</b> to imagining the end.</i> <b>(Baudrillard - Paroxysm p. 23)</b></span><br />
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<b style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: blue; color: white; font-size: large;">There is no outside. - Foucault </span></b><br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: blue; text-align: justify; text-indent: 4ex;">Vija Kinski - "But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."</b><span style="text-indent: 4ex;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: blue;">(C. p. 90)</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: blue;">"The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system."</span><span style="color: red;"> </span> (C. p. 90)</span></b></span><span style="text-align: left; text-indent: 4ex;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><b style="background-color: white; font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. ...For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Jean Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death p. 37) </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"><b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- Baudrillard </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My idea was to end this era not over a period of weeks and months as happened, but in one day.</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com/2012/04/delillo-krasny-cosmopolis-publication.html?zx=1b809e53de77e4ce">DeLillo /Krasny you tube interview</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here DeLillo is mistaken as he and everyone else regard the 2001 dot.com crash (which did take time) as the stock market catastrophe "predicted" by Cosmopolis. My opinion, and others are either following me or changing on their own are now seeing the derivative crash as the "predicted" catastrophe on Wall Street. That weekend during the 2008 presidential election campaign.</span></b><br />
<b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #999999; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But there's something you know. You know the yen can't go any higher. And if you know something and don't act upon it, then you didn't know it in the first place. There is a piece of Chinese wisdom, she said. To know and not to act is not to know.</span></b><br />
<b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #999999; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: #999999; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">...That wants you to believe there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it's all random phenomena. You apply mathematics and other disciplines, yes. But in the end you're dealing with a system that's out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, ......</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(C. p85)</span></span></b></div>
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<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You have to understand.”</span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He said, “What?”</span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. </span><span style="background-color: blue; color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is the flaw of human rationality?”</span></b><br />
<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He said, “What?” (C. p. 91)</span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: #b7b7b7; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: #999999; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b>Testifying before Congress Greenspan admitted a flaw in his system. </b></i></span></span><b style="font-family: Arial; text-align: justify; text-indent: 24px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">The flaw is rational self-interest </span><span style="background-color: blue; color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span">(Ayn Rand)</span>. </span><span style="color: #999999;">Why would these financiers destroy their financial empires? </span></b><br />
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<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“How will we know when the global era officially ends?”</span></b><br />
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<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He waited.</span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhatten.... “(C. 90-91)</span></b><br />
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<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: red; font-family: Arial;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>......It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations - and that the lights of New York had gone out.</i></span></span></b><br />
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<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: red; font-family: Arial;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>She remembered the story Francisco had told her: "He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and <span style="background-color: #cccccc;">when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done. (AS p. 1060)</span></i></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around him, the gassed men and women in their defiance, waving looted Nasdaq T-shirts, and to realize they’d been reading the same poetry he’s been reading.”</span></b></span></div>
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<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He sat down long enough to take a web phone out of a slot and execute an order for more yen. He borrowed yen in dumbfounding amounts. He wanted all the yen there was.(96-97) c 96-97</span></b><br />
<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He thought Kinski was right when she said this was a market fantasy. There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating. It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture's innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it. <span style="background-color: #999999;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: #999999; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Marcuse's apt metaphor of Pac-Man here.)</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></b><br />
<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric all the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at a pause, the protesters and riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: large; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What did this change? </span><span style="background-color: blue; color: #f3f3f3; font-family: Arial; font-size: large; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everything</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: large; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, he thought</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Kinski had been wrong. The market was not total. It could not claim this man or assimilate his act. Not such starkness and horror. This was a thing outside its reach. (C. pp. 96-98)</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: large; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(</span></b><span style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0px;"><b><span style="background-color: #999999; color: white; font-size: large;">Kathy Chang(e)</span></b><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-size: 11px;"> was a performance artist whose outrageous public performances and leftist politics were largely ignored by the University of Pennsylvania students she performed for, until she set herself on fire. Her 1996 self-immolation prompts an inquiry into the effectiveness of public suicide as a mode of <a href="http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DRAM_a_00070">political performance.)</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: red;">This is Eric Packer's Epiphany. </span>The <span style="color: red;">Burning Man </span>is the pivotal point in the novel.</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i style="background-color: white;"><b>The car was parked outside the hotel and across the street from the Barrymore where a group of smokers gathered at intermission, tucked under the marquee. He sat in the car borrowing yen and watching his fund's numbers sink into the mist on several screens. Torval </b><b>(lav-rot/rat) </b><b>stood in the rain with arms folded. .....</b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b style="background-color: white;">The yen spree was releasing Eric from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual, attuned to the register of his lower brain and gaining distance from the need to take inspired action, make original judgments, maintain independent principles and convisctions, all the reasons why people are fucked up and birds and rats are not.</b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i style="background-color: white;"><b>The stun gun probably helped. The voltage had jellified his musculature for ten or fifteen minutes (</b><b>and here we have the "near death" experience where your life before and after separate and diverge, growing farther and farther apart. His </b><b>Double now is more separated in time than it has been, as we will see in the end.)and he'd rolled about on the hotel rug, electroconvulsive and strangely elated, deprived of the faculties of reason. (Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar is echoed here as she writes a first person narrative of suicidal depression, the electro-convulsive experience and its immediate and long term aftermath.)</b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b style="background-color: white;">But he could think now, well enough to understand what was happening. There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading. He found the humidor and lit a cigar. Strategists could not explain the speed and depth of the fall. They opened their mouths and words came out. He knew it was the yen. His actions regarding the yen were causing streams of disorder. He was so leveraged, his firm's portfolio large and sprawling, linked crucially to the affairs of so many key institutions, all reciprocally vulnerable, that the whole system was in danger. </b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b style="background-color: white;"><br /></b></i></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: blue; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b style="background-color: white;">He smoked and watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior. He was also bored and a little dismissive. They were making too much of it. He thought it would end in a day or two .....and looked more closely at one of the women standing there. (C. p. 115-6)</b></i></span></span></span><br />
<b style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: black; color: red; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">!IMPLOSION! </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: white;">-</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"> Baudrillard through Nietzsche</span></span><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i></span></span></b><br />
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999;"><b><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After seeing Elise outside the theater, eating dinner with her.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Arial; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><br /></b></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He knew he was going in. But first he had to lose more money. ...Then he went about losing the money, spreading it systematically in the smoke of rumbling markets. He did this to make certain he could not accept her offer of financial help. …..but it was necessary to resist, of course, or </span><span style="background-color: white; color: red; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">die in his soul.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">...He was making a gesture of his own, a sign of ironic final binding. Let it all come down. Let them see each other pure and lorn. This was the individual’s revenge on the mythical couple.</span><span style="color: #cccccc; font-weight: bold;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: x-large; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">….The number seemed puny....But it was all air anyway. It was air that flows from the mouth when words are spoken. It was lines of code that interact in simulated space.</span></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span><br /><span style="color: blue;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Great financiers know that money does not exist.Gamblers know that money does not exist.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Jesuits know that God does not exist.- Baudrillard</span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Didi Fancher - "Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," she said. "I grew up comfortably. Took me a while to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt intensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>But I don't know what money is anymore." (C. p. 29)</b></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vija Kinski - ....Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself. (C. p. 77)</span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He watched the president of the World Bank address a chamber of tense economists. He thought the image could be crisper. Then the president of the United States spoke from his limo in English and Finnish.....</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>He knew they would figure it out eventually how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now.(C. p. 140)</b></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><br /></b></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Eric Packer will end up in Hell's Kitchen where he grew up, where he goes for a haircut, where he is hunted by his assassin where Gail Wynand was when he was young and prey and where he goes when he caves in to save The Banner, betraying Roark. Eric Packer will die there and Gail Wynand will have Roark build the skyscraper with his name there.</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i>_______________________________________________________________________</i></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he’d always known would come clear in time. </span></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b style="font-size: medium; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now he could begin the business of living.“</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(C 107)</span></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: blue; color: white; font-size: x-large;">Dagny has gone to the Wayne-Faulkland Hotel to confront Francisco as the San Sebastion Mines have been seized by the People's State of Mexico.</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: red;"><b>I came here to ask you a question</b>.</span><b> <span style="color: red;">...The San Sebastian disaster....You did it consciously, cold-bloodedly and with full intention.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">What was it I did with full intention? he said.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">The entire San Sebastian swindle.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">What was my <i>full </i>intention?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">That is what I want to know.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">...Don't start telling me that you gained nothing. I know it. I know you lost fifteen million dollars of your own money. Yet it was done on purpose.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">You didn't give a damn about that Mexican government,...because you knew they'd seize those mines sooner or later. What you were after is your American stockholders.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">...That's part of the truth....It was not all I was after. ...They thought it was safe to ride on my brain, because they assumed that the goal of my journey was wealth. <span style="background-color: white;">All their calculations rested on that premise that I wanted to make money. What if I didn't?</span></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">...If you didn't want to make money, what possible motive could you have had?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Any number of them. For instance, to spend it.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">To spend money on a certain, total failure?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">How was I to know that those mines were a certain, total failure?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">How could you help knowing it?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Quite simply. By giving it no thought. </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">...Did you intend for me to notice that if you think I did it on purpose, then you still give me credit for having a purpose?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">...didn't you enjoy the spectacle of the behavior of the People's State of Mexico in regard to the San Sebastian Mines? Did you read their government's speeches and the editorials in their newspapers? they are saying that I am an unscrupulous cheat who has defrauded them. They expected to have a successful mining company to seize. I had no right to disappoint them like that.....</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">He laughed lying flat on his back: his arms were thrown wide on the carpet, forming a cross with his body; he seemed disarmed, relaxed and young. </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">It was worth whatever it cost me. I could afford the price of that show....</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">And that's not all they didn't know, he said. They're in for some more knowledge. There's that housing settlement for the workers of San Sebastian. It cost eight million dollars. Steel-frame houses, with plumbing, electricity and refrigeration. Also a school, a church, a hospital and a movie theater. A settlement built for people who had lived in hovels made of driftwood and stray tin cans. My reward for building it was to be the privilege of escaping with my skin, a special concession due to the accident of my not being a native of the People's State of Mexico. That workers' settlement was also part of their plans. A model example of progressive State Housing. Well, those steel-frame houses are mainly cardboard, with a coating of good imitation shellac. They won't stand another year. The plumbing pipes - as well as most of our mining equipment - were purchased from dealers whose main source of supply are the city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. I'd give those pipes another five months, and the electric system about six. The wonderful roads we graded up four thousand feet of rock for the People's State of Mexico, will not last beyond a couple of winters; they're cheap cement without foundation, and the bracing at the bad turns is just painted clapboard. Wait for one good mountain slide. The church, I think, will stand. They'll need it.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Francisco, she whispered., did you do it on purpose?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>...Whether I did it on purpose, he said, or through neglect, or through stupidity, don't you understand that that doesn't make any difference?</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>...She looked at him blankly. What are you trying to say?</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>I am saying that the workers' settlement of San Sebastian cost eight million dollars,...The price paid for those cardboard houses was the price that could have bought steel structures. So was the price paid for every other item. That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins. That money will vanish in projects such as the San Sebastian Mines.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>...Is that what you're after?</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>Yes.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>Is that what you find amusing?</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>Yes.</b></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">I was thinking of your name, she said....It was a tradition of your family that a d'Anconia always left a fortune greater than the one he received. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;">(Here's the "gift" and the "counter-gift".) </span></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Oh yes, my ancestors had a remarkable ability for doing the right thing at the right time - and for making the right investments.</span><span style="background-color: red; color: white;"> Of course, 'investment' is a relative term. It depends on what you wish to accomplish. for instance, look at San Sebastian. It cost me fifteen million dollars, but those fiftteen million wiped out forty million belonging to Taggart Transcontinental, thirty-five million belonging to stockholders such as James Taggart and Orren Boyle, and hundreds of millions which will be lost in secondary consequences. That's not a bad return on an investment, is it, Dagny.?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">She was sitting straight. Do you realize what you are saying?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Oh, fully! Shall I beat you to it and name the consequences you were going to reproach me for? First, I don't think that Taggart Transcontinental will recover from its loss on that preposterous San Sebastian Line. You think it will, but it won't. Second, the San Sebastian helped your brother, James, to destroy the Phoenix-Durango, which was about the only good railroad left anywhere. </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">..Do you _ ...do you know Ellis Wyatt?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Sure. </span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Do you know what this might do to him?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Yes. He's the one who's going to be wiped out next. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;">(AS pp. 115- 121)</span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;">There are more resonances for the reader to find if she wishes. After reading this does anyone dare to say that Francisco d'Anconia was a self-destructive loser who lost millions? No? I thought not. And if anyone had dared say that, Rand would have chopped her up in teeny tiny pieces. </span></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: large;">Why then have all the reviewers, all the academics, Cronenberg, and all blogs on Cosmopolis said that Eric Packer is a self-destructive loser? Are there really that many people out there who have misread DeLillo's book?</span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: large;"><br /></span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white; font-size: large;">Yeah. I guess so.</span></b></div>
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</div>seymourbloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02843717286012748265noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-82574959062823715132012-05-06T23:50:00.004-07:002012-05-07T00:15:44.281-07:00Ayn Rand, Michel Foucault and Atlas Shrugged:The Power/Knowledge Relation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EmWmVWiclv6gePWoNvYULGKFWPb1Cm79ej7mFgOXGghstC68-F02U60NWiamhb0m0aMqJeP9DeOrS0XFrO-VArBj4x7f_GAxfnAP99fSS-bXPbAr_g_xNAVBEhd-E2b3Zaa3bwnMeSLL/s1600/atlas+1999.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EmWmVWiclv6gePWoNvYULGKFWPb1Cm79ej7mFgOXGghstC68-F02U60NWiamhb0m0aMqJeP9DeOrS0XFrO-VArBj4x7f_GAxfnAP99fSS-bXPbAr_g_xNAVBEhd-E2b3Zaa3bwnMeSLL/s320/atlas+1999.jpg" width="320" /></a>The 45th anniversary of the publication of <b>Atlas Shrugged </b>(Signet 1996) was announced with a new edition and an introduction (1992) by <b>Leonard Peikoff </b>who has wisely let Rand speak for herself in the intro, taking excerpts from her unpublished Journal.<br />
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<b>Atlas Shrugged,</b> according to Peikoff's recollections, did not become the title until Frank O'Conner suggested it in 1956. Up until then she had titled it <b>The Strike</b>.<br />
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After finishing <b>The Fountainhead</b> and having <b>Nietzsche's</b> quotes scrubbed out of it, Rand <i><span style="color: blue;"><b>probably</b></span></i> put her obsessive reading - from age 16 to her late 30's, early 40's - of him aside, as <b>Baudrillard</b> did after he failed his exams on Nietzsche, and <b><a href="http://aynrand2.blogspot.com/2012/03/baudrillard-reading-himself-and-rand.html">Nietzsche went underground in Rand as in Baudrillard.</a> </b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: blue; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">The earliest of Rand's notes are dated January 1, 1945, about a year after the publication of The </span><span style="color: blue; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Fountainhead. Naturally enough, the subject on her mind was how to differentiate the present novel from its predecessor.</span> (p.1)</span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b><i style="background-color: white;">Theme. What happens to the world when the Prime Movers go on strike....</i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTvI_J75M6oZV1SlMlw5PdJEvk6ym5w2k93UuOQnX2X6SB5lBd244u5oAcFj41a6Iqw7ZrkN6Mm57aclwQ2v80xGeBIn9tXb2jbOpVrZtY99ixg7Sw2WFmGdY7I5y5v7CrK9wDc-lcI3ub/s1600/rand+journal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTvI_J75M6oZV1SlMlw5PdJEvk6ym5w2k93UuOQnX2X6SB5lBd244u5oAcFj41a6Iqw7ZrkN6Mm57aclwQ2v80xGeBIn9tXb2jbOpVrZtY99ixg7Sw2WFmGdY7I5y5v7CrK9wDc-lcI3ub/s320/rand+journal.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="color: blue;"><b><i style="background-color: white;">The theme requires: to show who are the prime movers and why, how they function....</i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i></b></span><br />
<b><i><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;">First question to decide is on whom the emphasis must be placed - on the prime movers, the parasites or the world.</span><span style="background-color: black; color: white;"> The answer is: The world. The story must be primarily a picture of the whole. ...</span></i></b><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i style="background-color: white;">In this sense, The Strike is to be much more a "social" novel that The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead's ...primary concern ... was the characters, the people as such - their natures. Their relations to each other - which is society, men in relation to men - were secondary, an unavoidable, direct consequence of Roark set against Toohey. ...</i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><span style="background-color: white;">Now, it is this relation that must be the theme. therefore, the personal becomes secondary. That is, the personal is necessary only to the extent needed to make the relationships clear;...But the theme was Roark - not Roark's relation to the world. </span><span style="background-color: cyan;">Now it will be the relation. ...</span></i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i style="background-color: white;">I start with the fantastic premise of the prime movers going on strike. This is to be the actual heart and center of the novel. A distinction carefully to be observed here: I do not set out to glorify the prime mover. ...I set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers....what happens to the world without them. ...</i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><br />
<b><i><span style="background-color: blue; color: white;">This must be the world's story</span><span style="color: blue;"> -<span style="background-color: white;"> in </span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: red;">relation</span><span style="color: blue;"> to the prime movers. ...</span></span></i></b><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><br />
<b><i><span style="color: blue;"><span style="background-color: white;">I don't show directly what the prime movers do - that's shown only by implication</span>. </span><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">I show what happens when they don't do it. </span></i></b><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><br />
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<span class="gs_ctc" style="color: #0000cc; font-weight: bold;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: small;">Astonishingly Rand is here applying Platt's famous Strong Inference to her fiction in 1946, almost 20 years before Platt published his famous paper in 1964, the basis of which Crick and Watson posited the DNA spiral</span></span></h3>
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<span class="gs_ctc" style="color: #0000cc; font-size: xx-small; font-weight: bold;">[PDF]</span> <b><a href="http://www.asbmb.org/uploadedFiles/ProfessionalDevelopment/Education_Small_Meetings/science64_strong_inference.pdf">Strong inference</a></b></h3>
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<a href="http://www.cdl.cbcb.umd.edu/files/PDF/strong-infrerence.pdf" style="color: #551a8b;"><span class="gs_ctg2" style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: bold;">[PDF]</span> from umd.edu</a></div>
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JR <b>Platt</b> - science, <b>1964</b> - cdl.cbcb.umd.edu</div>
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<b><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the</span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we</span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other ...</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0qPoygR2kKtaGmbth9R83DhE_JrFwfOTou4Jg9hLeLr6-4ry-a7P73lcgrqr3q9vuC1EZeXuKnrZtFEpFYy8r8-byq2LIHe55IMOCQydCb80pg0zD11PdlFKqRIbUGqZdOjVsZbyuWyt/s1600/foucault+wiki+laughing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: red;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0qPoygR2kKtaGmbth9R83DhE_JrFwfOTou4Jg9hLeLr6-4ry-a7P73lcgrqr3q9vuC1EZeXuKnrZtFEpFYy8r8-byq2LIHe55IMOCQydCb80pg0zD11PdlFKqRIbUGqZdOjVsZbyuWyt/s1600/foucault+wiki+laughing.jpg" /></span></a></div>
<b><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">Rand has intuitively identified Foucault's power/know</span></b><b><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">ledge relation so laboriously and elegantly recorded for us in</span><span style="background-color: white; color: yellow;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;">The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: blue;">Madness and Civilization, The History of Sexuality, </span><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">and all his genealogies published and archived now, his great method taken from Nietzsche. Rand does it in one fell swoop in Atlas Shrugged.</span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: blue; color: cyan; font-weight: bold;">Foucault has relentlessly delineated the relation of power and knowledge. Power does not exist by itself. It cannot be given, taken, conferred, lost, held. Power is</span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="background-color: red;"><b>ALWAYS</b></span><b><span style="color: cyan;"> <span style="background-color: blue;">in relation to knowledge;</span></span><span style="background-color: red;"> the two cannot be separated</span><span style="background-color: white;">.</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: yellow;"><b style="background-color: red;">Rand has written a fiction whereby she is removing knowledge from the world. She is saying that the knowledge of the prime movers is what powers the world!</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: red; color: yellow;">Remove the prime movers and knowledge is removed from the world, <span style="font-size: large;">but so is power! </span>The world sinks into chaos, starvation, and death.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;"> </span><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">She is saying that - understand this in relation to the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge -</span><span style="background-color: black; color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: black; color: red;">knowledge and power are relational in the world</span><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">. She is saying this in her Journal in 1946, when Foucault is 20 years old, long before he studied Nietzsche and applied Nietzsche's genealogy to human behavior. </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">And she is saying this fictionally in Atlas Shrugged published in 1957.</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Rand has heralded Foucault's lifetime study of the relational necessity of power/knowledge in Atlas Shrugged. Power and Knowledge are FUSED, inseparable, joined, married to each other!</span></b></div>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3eWa0sSyVuZXdLyBNEIMMepTyAG7LlncpGj2DNvmWbyY1gmKmx6psK0e5NwUvHmTDzLavlTKR4YU8SkyJ-aVUr1JIWag44zRptL5Sy7Kz2T_2fQreH7vzdMJvHL0ZJUgEzfFO_GSjQ4Ht/s1600/rand2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3eWa0sSyVuZXdLyBNEIMMepTyAG7LlncpGj2DNvmWbyY1gmKmx6psK0e5NwUvHmTDzLavlTKR4YU8SkyJ-aVUr1JIWag44zRptL5Sy7Kz2T_2fQreH7vzdMJvHL0ZJUgEzfFO_GSjQ4Ht/s1600/rand2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Ayn Rand </b></span></td></tr>
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</div>seymourbloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02843717286012748265noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-73393480493216705092012-04-23T01:16:00.003-07:002012-04-24T15:36:10.766-07:00Atlas Shrugged, Part II (Not Showing at a Theatre Near You)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/20/on-the-set-of-atlas-shrugged-part-ii">http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/20/on-the-set-of-atlas-shrugged-part-ii</a></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><b>Yay!!!! Atlas Shrugged, Part II, is filming at this very minute! I can't wait for it to appear in theaters this coming fall so that I can save $14 by not buying a ticket to see it!</b></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /><span style="background-color: black;"></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The Reason Magazine article linked to above is unintentionally hilarious. Read the following excerpt, especially the statements by co-producer Harmon Kaslow:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">“In a move that might prove controversial to fans of <i>Part I</i>, this new movie has been entirely recast—not a single actor reprises their role . . . '</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #ffd966; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">The message of <i>Atlas</i> is greater than any particular actor, so it’s one of those pieces of literature that doesn’t require in our view the interpretation by a singular actor,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">' Kaslow says. “</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #ffd966; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">But just from a practical standpoint when we set out to make <i>Part I</i> we had a ticking clock where if we didn’t start production by a certain date John’s interest in the rights could lapse</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">." </span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Wow! LOL! First of all, this is an unbelievably cutting and insulting remark toward the hard-working actors who appeared in Part I ("This movie is bigger than you are, Taylor Schilling! ") Nice one! Actors love hearing that! (We all know how small their egos are!); and then he adds salt to the cut: "Besides, uh, we were in a rush when we cast you. You see, baby, we had this legal deadline we had to beat regarding the option we held on the novel; so casting you was sort of like . . . like . . . like a shot-gun wedding. We had to do it quickly or not make the movie at all. We really had no choice."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Sure you had a choice. You could have started the project much earlier and given yourself more time to do things right. If it was true that there was "drop-dead" date for the option to run out, the producers could have done a workaround, for example: <u>cast one actor only</u>, let's say, a supporting role such as Eddie Willers. Just shoot some of the scenes requiring Eddie Willers and nothing else: by definition, you've fulfilled the terms of the option (you have, after all, started production) and now you're under less of a time constraint to do the other things right, like casting the right talent for the leads, polishing the screenplay, etc.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">No. This workaround is too obvious for them not to have considered it. What imposed a time constraint was not the option deal, but the producers' fat egos: their desire to make a political statement by getting Part I out in time to premiere on April 15, Tax Day. <u><i>That</i></u> was the real deadline.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Always the apologist for cult mind-control, Ed Hudgins of The Atlas Society recently blogged this on SOLO regarding the role of his boss, professor David Kelley, in the film's production: </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">"David Kelley [h]as spent time in California on the set to make sure the script is consistent with Objectivism."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">LOL! Kelley was in California <i><u>not</u></i> to ensure that the script was dramatic and exciting and something that would hold an audience's attention; <i><u>not</u></i> to ensure that the shooting schedule is maintained; <i><u>not</u></i> to ensure that everything is on budget; no, he is there as an ideological, Soviet-era political cadre officer, ensuring <i><u>compliance</u></i> with the <i><u>Objectivist canon</u></i>. See the blog post in Around the Randroid Belt titled "Objectivism in One Word."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">In the 1950s, producers of certain Hollywood films were concerned about public demonstrations against provocative content (mainly because it would hurt box-office). They therefore willingly submitted their films for review and "vetting" by a Catholic censor board calling itself <b><i>The Legion of Decency</i></b>. Stanley Kubrick's excellent early film, "Lolita," with James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, and the young and very seductive Sue Lyon, actually has some opening text — appearing before the title crawl if I remember correctly — that says something like, "This film has been approved by The Legion of Decency."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">David Kelley is a one-man compliance officer for the "League of Objectivist Decency." Shame on him for assuming the role of judge and jury. He should stay <u>off</u> the set and let the people whose job it is to make the movie, do their job of making a movie.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Following the example of "Lolita," perhaps AS-2 should begin with a still frame of text saying "This film has been cleared by The Objectivist League of Decency." (In other words, "It's safe to watch, Randroids. You won't be offended by seeing some personal statement by the director or screenwriter that might deviate from your preconceived expectations regarding a novel you've read 20 times and have memorized.")</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The rest of the Reason Magazine article continues in the same unintentionally funny vein, especially the quotes from Harmon Kaslow:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">"We didn’t have the luxury at that moment to negotiate future options with the various cast members."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">LOL! Wow! Apparently, Harmon Kaslow assumes we all just fell off the turnip truck! Um, Harmon, it isn't <i>solely</i> up to <i>you</i> and the production team to negotiate future options with the talent. This is Hollywood, remember? All working actors have <i><u>agents</u></i>, and it will be up to the agents to make very serious inquiries and proposals regarding future options on behalf of their clients, especially in multi-film projects. That's how agents make their living!</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">We "didn't have the luxury . . . ?" Can you imagine, for example, Taylor Schilling's agent telling her "Listen, honey, take the AS-1 gig. I have no idea if this will lead to more work for you in Parts II and III — I asked, but Harmon Kaslow told me he was in a rush and just doesn't have the luxury of thinking about the future, or negotiating an option for you. Don't worry about it; whatever happens, happens."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 14px Georgia; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">No actor would accept excuses like that from an agent; no agent would accept excuses like that from a producer; which is why I don't believe a scene like that ever occurred . . . which means I think Harmon Kaslow is bullshitting us.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">"Their eagerness to keep the project moving made arranging schedules with the dozens of speaking roles in <i>Part I</i> hugely impractical, so they chose instead to concentrate on making sure the look of the movie created the world they needed it to create. As Kaslow put it, “we just gave ourselves a clean slate put together what we think is a real terrific cast."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 13px "Helvetica Neue"; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I'm sorry, but I've read this last paragraph about 12 times and I still can't determine what it's about. Let's parse it:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><i style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">"Their eagerness . . ."</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">This refers to the eagerness of the producers.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><i style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">"to keep the project moving . . ."</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">This refers to the supposed option deadline; i.e., apparently, if the producers did not start production by a certain date, they would lose the option to the novel; meaning, they would lose the right to make the movie in the first place. OK, let's assume we are being told the truth about this.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><i style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">"made arranging schedules with the dozens of speaking roles in Part I hugely impractical"</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040;"> — </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">For the life of me, I can't figure out what the fuck this sentence means! </span><i style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">"Made arranging schedules"</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"> — <span style="color: white;"><u><i>what</i></u> schedules? Does the writer mean <i><u>auditions</u></i>? Talent auditions for the leading roles in Part I? If so, does it strike anyone else other than me as weird that the producers claim they didn't have time to complete a proper audition phase to cast their film? And are they talking about Part 1 or Part 2? The sentence seems to specify Part 1; if so, then it seems to be saying that the producers were so concerned with simply getting the film out — any sort of film, so long as it had the right "look" — that they took an unbelievably cavalier attitude toward the casting. Indeed, even if this is simply an excuse for justifying the re-casting in Part II, that first statement of Harmon Kaslow is indicative of the level of cavalierness:</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">"The message of <i>Atlas</i> is greater than any particular actor, so it’s one of those pieces of literature that doesn’t require in our view the interpretation by a singular actor,"</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Hey, Harmon! That's assuming that <i><u>only you</u></i> (and a few other Randroids) will comprise the ticket-buying public! What about <i><u>everyone else</u></i>? Do <i><u>they</u></i> believe that Atlas Shrugged The Movie, for which they've just spent money buying a ticket, is greater than any particular actor? Or is it more likely (as I believe) that they will find it jarring to have Dagny portrayed by one actress in one film and another actress in its sequel . . . with no dramatic explanation in the screenwriting permitted, of course, because the narrative is so tightly constrained by Comrade David Kelley and his Compliance Squad.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The Reason Magazine article goes on to mention how encouraged Aglialoro was by the sales of DVDs. Usually, in Hollywood, these sorts of numbers are published and available somewhere; not here, though. So I suspect that the only people purchasing these DVDs are members of the Randroid Belt who waft in and out of sites like The Atlas Society, which peddles the DVDs, as well as other merchandise ("Who Is John Galt?" t-shirts, for example).</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">So it appears to this lone-wolf movie critic that the producers of the AS trilogy decided early on — probably when they saw the collapse of the box-office for AS-1 less than two weeks into its run — to market a cinematic version of their Bible specifically to their acolytes; a ready-made audience, as it were. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Atlas Shrugged The Movie, Part III were made direct-to-DVD; for as long as Randroids are going to be almost the sole market for the film, why bother negotiating all those irksome licensing deals with theatre-owners for public exhibition? Who cares about the public? Just market the film directly to Randroids!</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">(The one propagandistic advantage to letting the two sequels have public runs rather than marketing direct to DVD is that, when they inevitably fail at the box office <i>and</i> get panned mercilessly by critics, the members of the Randroid Belt can sniffle and point their fingers at the critics and complain how corrupt the critics' premises and aesthetic sensibilities are, and blame the sequels' failure on them. That, of course, might actually help boost DVD sales to members of the Randroid Belt, since the movies will now have romantic "battle scars" inflicted by the moochers and looters.)</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 13px "Helvetica Neue"; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Nothing wrong with any of this, of course, and by doing so, one now has the liberty to re-cast again and again, to one's heart's content; for acolytes will be looking at the movie not as a movie — the way the normal public would experience a film, i.e., as a stand-alone entertainment experience — but as a <i>simulacrum</i>; they will judge the movie by how well it mimics a literal reading of the novel. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font: 13px "Helvetica Neue"; margin: 0px 0px 15px 1px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The implication of all this, however, is that it makes the AS sequels no different from the special feature films made by and for explicitly religious groups. Just as there's a genre of popular music known as "Christian Rock" so, too, there are specifically Christian films (as well as specifically Orthodox Jewish films), specifically illustrating Biblical themes that often go direct-to-DVD and are meant only for a small, select, religious audience. These are true "niche films" produced for, and marketed to, "niche audiences."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><b>Atlas Shrugged, The Movie is a niche film</b>. The project may not have started out that way, but that's what it became. And it took the collapse of the box-office of Part I to convince producers to continue with production of parts 2 and 3 with the explicit intention of making them niche films and marketing them to a ready-made niche audience, i.e., members of the Randroid Belt.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Again, there's nothing wrong with any of this, but it does point up the closed, cult-like nature of the Objectivist movement — or what's left of it.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The one person who must be extremely saddened by all this is Ed Hudgins at The Atlas Society, and frequent blogger on Sense of Life Objectivists (SOLO). He PROMISED readers at that site to keep them apprised of "breaking news" regarding production when he boasted of the following:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">"Linz, et al. -- I’m planning to provide insider updates on the film as they become available . . ."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Insider updates," eh? We actually got nothing from Hudgins since that boast on 5 February 2012 at Sense of Life Objectivists. Instead, we learn from a completely different source — Reason Magazine — that Atlas Shrugged, Part II, is already more than ten days into lensing!</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Hudgins also made the following asinine statement regarding Yours Truly:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">"Of course, Darren apparently has far more detailed and reliable insider info than me on the exact nature of David Kelley’s contributions to the first film and his current and future tasks concerning the second film"</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">He made that statement after I had pointed out on SOLO that David Kelley's role in AS-1 appeared to have been that of an ideological compliance officer, ensuring that the production (including the screenplay, and without doubt, the creative choices made by the director and the editor) complied with, i.e., was consistent with, a canonized body of opinion by Alisa Rosenbaum. At the time, Hudgins chuckled at my suggestion, but as pointed out above, he now admits to the following regarding <i>Atlas Shrugged, Part II</i>:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">"David Kelley [h]as spent time in California on the set to make sure the script is consistent with Objectivism."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Thanks for admitting I was right, Hudgins, you fat-headed dolt. But I'm going to expand on this last statement of yours a bit, because you're so fucking ignorant about filmmaking that you're blind to the uncomfortable implications of what you've just admitted: </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">If Kelley really is acting as Chief Compliance Officer, then his footprint cannot be constrained only to the screenplay, because <i><u>everyone</u></i> involved in the creative team (the director, the actors, the editor, the production designer) is constantly engaged in making creative choices during the production of the movie. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">What if — as happens all the time during the shooting of a movie — the director decides to take a few creative liberties with the screenplay? What if the director says to the talent in some particular scene,</span> "<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">You know something? I thought it was simply your delivery, but now I see that these lines themselves are stilted and just don't work. We'll throw them out, and I want you to say this, instead . . </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;">.</span></i><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">" And then gives the actor some <i>ad hoc</i> lines to say that, in his creative judgment, work better? What if the director — as Sidney Lumet did in his excellent '70s film "Dog Day Afternoon" with Al Pacino — throws out parts of the script entirely and tells two actors in some particular scene, "</span><i style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">Look, you two have worked together and done scenes together for years. You understand what this scene is about, emotionally and psychologically on the part of the characters you portray. Make up the dialogue as you go along; I want to see how it works.</span></i>" <span style="background-color: black; color: white;">And in that film, the way it worked was so good in Lumet's judgment, that he kept the impromptu, off-script scenes in the final cut . . . and what was even funnier, was that the screenwriter — whose original work had been greatly altered by both Lumet and the actors by the time it reached the screen — nevertheless won an Oscar for "Best Screenplay"! In his creative autobiography, Lumet claimed that they all had a good laugh over that, but what are you going to do . . . turn down an Oscar?</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The point is, Kelley's involvement as Compliance Gestapo cannot stop merely at the stage of the screenplay; it <i><u>must</u></i> bleed over into the director's choices and the editor's choices, too, because personal judgments and choices on the part of these key creative team members can (in principle, at least) greatly alter the meaning of events in a film, as they might have originally been intended by the screenwriter. This happens all the time in filmmaking.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The upshot of this is that we will be seeing David Kelley's tone-deaf, ham-fisted influence throughout Atlas Shrugged, Part 2, just as much as we did in Part I. (Can't wait . . . !)</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Anyway, sorry, Hudgins! Maybe the honchos at The Atlas Society will let you break exciting "insider updates" to the rest of us outsiders by keeping you in the loop on Atlas Shrugged, Part III . . . when they re-cast the film yet again.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Until then, Eddie, we hope you enjoy Part II.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-31444917079536003432012-04-19T02:48:00.001-07:002012-04-19T02:55:53.558-07:00Yentavist Alert: Ellen Stuttle Stutters & Stumbles<br />
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<a href="http://i.imgur.com/4mMpk.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/4mMpk.png" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: small;"></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">This is typical of long-time Randroid Belt members: even in attempting to reply to a fellow Randroid Belt member, they pass the buck and seem to be unaware that they haven't answered a thing.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The reason this occurs is that, around the Randroid Belt, it isn't really ever necessary to refute, rebut, or substantively reply to an opposing argument (that would be difficult since all Randroids are notoriously ill-informed about most things, and most Randroids are notoriously ill-informed about all things); the main thing is to strut about in such a way so as to convince other members of the Randroid Belt how sincere one is in one's extreme disagreement with the opposition, and how shocked and disgusted one is that anyone could even hold such an opposing view.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Just spend a little time on any typical site floating aimlessly around the Randroid Belt — <i>Sense of Life Objectivists</i>, <i>Objectivist Living</i>, Diana Hsieh's <i>Noodle Food</i>, etc. — and you'll quickly find this to be the case.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">There are a number of psychological reasons for this, but one of the most obvious is that Randroid Belters mentally operate most often on the level of "buzz" words — shibboleths. Instead of pheromones, for example, Randroid Belters recognize one another by way of certain words spoken in a certain way, or written with a certain emphasis: words like: "integrate" or "differentiate" or "context" (often preceded by the qualifier "full"). These are the equivalent of pass-words (or, alternatively, closely guarded Masonic handshakes) that members of a secret society, for example, might have to say to an armed security guard at the front door in order to let him know that you are "One of Them" and allowed onto the club premises.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Today we have the pleasure of witnessing Ellen Stutter attempt to answer Xray's query:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>"What is it that Darren does not understand about the Seconcd Law of Thermodynamics?"</b></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><i></i></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Instead of answering it in a straightforward way, such as <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">"Darren asserts X about the 2nd Law, when the latest edition of Halliday & Resnick assures physics students that the truth of the matter is Y"</span></i>, Ellen Stutter passes the buck by essentially saying:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;"><i>READ BRIG KLYCE'S ARTICLE AT HIS BLOG, "PANSPERMIA"; THAT SHOULD HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM UNABLE TO EXPLAIN.</i></span> </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">This buck-passing is then followed by the required Yentavist Randroid disclaimer: <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">BUT PLEASE DON'T THINK THAT I ACTUALLY AGREE WITH ANYTHING ELSE ON THE PANSPERMIA SITE! I ONLY AGREE WITH THE ARTICLE ON ENTROPY THAT I HAVEN'T FULLY READ AND DON'T COMPLETELY GRASP, BUT WHICH MENTIONS SOME SORT OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO KINDS ENTROPIES THAT DARREN APPEARS TO CONFLATE. SINCE THE ARTICLE APPEARS, ON THE SURFACE, TO TAKE ISSUE WITH SOMETHING OR OTHER THAT DARREN HAS BEEN WRITING ABOUT, I AGREE WITH THE ARTICLE AND CAN RECOMMEND IT TO YOU.</span></i></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Verdana; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">To answer in advance any silly responses to Stutter's Stumble, I'll post this brief excerpt from "<a href="http://aynrand2.blogspot.com/2012/03/ayn-rand-and-myth-of-chemical-evolution.html" target="_blank">Ayn Rand and the Myth of Chemical Evolution</a>" [linked]. But first, take note:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Verdana; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I was careful to point out in that post that there are different ways of looking at entropy, depending on whether we are looking at the energy in a system, or whether we are looking at its arrangement of particles. The former has PHYSICAL UNITS (such as "joules per degree-kelvin"); the latter is simply a PURE NUMBER; but aside from that, the mathematical relations are IDENTICAL. The former way of looking at things is part of <i>classical thermodynamics</i>; the latter is part of <i>statistical mechanics</i>. They are simply two ways of looking at the same thing. Additionally, as I also point out, they are linked: as an array of particles becomes more randomly dispersed, energy becomes LESS AVAILABLE for use (entropy — irrespective of how it is measured, thermally or configurationally — increases); as an array of particles becomes less randomly dispersed, energy becomes more available for use (entropy, whether thermal or configurational, decreases).</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I wrote:</span></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">"There are different ways of thinking about entropy, but they all involve the idea of "states of disorderliness" of a system. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Disorderliness</span>, not orderliness. As a system becomes more disorderly, its entropy is said to increase; conversely, as a system becomes more orderly, its entropy is said to decrease. <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>If the metric one uses to measure disorderliness is a macroscopic one like "energy," then entropy can be thought of as the amount of energy in a system that is unavailable to perform work; if the metric one uses is a microscopic one like "the configuration or arrangement of particles comprising the system," then entropy can be thought of as the inevitable tendency for the particles comprising a system to move from some initial arrangement that is improbable toward an arrangement that is more probable. The microscopic and the macroscopic are related, of course, for as a configuration of particles moves from one of low probability to one of high probability, less energy is available in the system to perform work. The arrangement of particles that corresponds to the maximum amount of unavailable energy is one that has the least order, i.e., that arrangement which is the most random and the most probable.</b></span> Thus, the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that Time's Arrow move any system of particles <i>from</i> states of orderliness <i>to</i> states of increasing randomness. In other words, the inevitable result of time on any system is to cause it to have more disorder and more random configurations amongst its constituent elements."</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Just for fun, let's don our funny caps with the Randroid Belt Listening Devices and tune into what the great Yentavist is webcasting:</span></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span">"I got around to reading the rest of the thread where thermodynamics became the main topic.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">I found a number of Darren's posts enjoyable to read, especially those in which he was calmly explanatory when answering you, and tangentially he triggered some thoughts along lines relevant to my thinking about volition. However, he made the mistake over and over of substituting "entropy" in what he calls in his blogspot post the "logical" meaning for "entropy" in the thermodynamic meaning and, by equivocating between the two, arguing invalidly from the one to the other. Hence I concluded that he doesn't understand the physics meaning."</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Already answered. See above. Yes, "logical entropy" is not the same thing as "thermal entropy" but only in the sense that the heads-side of a coin is not the same thing as the tails-side. They are different, but nevertheless, different sides of the same coin. The configurations within an array of particles — water molecules, say — will not achieve a lowered state of logical entropy by increasing the thermal entropy; as the latter increases, so does the former.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">I'm not sure if Peter quite caught the equivocating, though he hints at it, but his language does some conflating also. Marcus caught it in posing the bomb example.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Peter Putz and Mucus-Brain Marcus are two of my favorite Randroid Belt know-nothings; highly amusing chaps, both of them. Peter Putz claimed that photons from sunlight are ultimately responsible for the housekeeper's directed energy toward organizing books alphabetically (in which case, of course, the housekeeper is merely a kind of passive conduit); this would mean that photons from sunlight were also ultimately responsible for the directed energy expended by Alisa Rosenbaum over a 10-year period when she sequenced lots of alphabetic characters into a meaningful chain that she titled "Atlas Shrugged." Obviously, the logic Peter Putz applies to the lowly housekeeper he should apply to the mighty Alisa Rosenbaum. That is . . . if he were consistent. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">And that great, literate, insightful, innovative talent, Mucus-Brain Marcus, claimed that by setting off a source of random energy in the apartment — a bomb, say — the resultant damage and chaos would represent an INCREASE in the "energy" of the apartment, because (if I understand his ramblings correctly) the various apartment furnishings, such as the tenant's aquarium, were now "at a higher level" than previously — in other words, the fish were now splattered on the ceiling along with shards of glass. Mucus-brain is probably mistakenly thinking of some abstraction of "potential energy": the higher an object is, the greater its potential energy. The point is to take into account AVAILABLE energy; energy that is available for use in the system. For example, are the bed-springs stuck into the ceiling and walls in a random manner useful in any way? No. To make them useful, the housekeeper (or someone) would first have to expend directed energy in setting up a ladder, climbing it, pulling out one spring after another, and then expending yet more directed energy in re-assembling the bed-springs into a configuration that could be used for sleeping on (assuming this could be done at all).</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The entropy in the apartment has <i>increased</i> tremendously by setting off a bomb; and this is so whether we think of the entropy in terms of heat distribution (classical thermodynamics) or in terms of the organization of the array of elements such as bed, books, furniture, suits and ties hanging in the closet, etc. (statistical mechanics). Thermal entropy and configurational entropy have both increased . . . because (once again) they are simply two slightly different ways of looking at the same thing.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Anyway, so much for Ellen Stuttle's stutter & stumble.</span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-1408413543609663912012-04-18T04:52:00.000-07:002012-04-18T04:55:45.787-07:00Understanding Objectivism in One Word<a href="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I've just ordered this new book through my local Objectivism study group.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I have to admit, though — I actually bought it for the clear and instructive pictures.</span><br />
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I am starting with <b>The Fountainhead</b> just because I am. <b>Atlas Shrugged</b> is even more so. Both these novels incised a <b>Foucauldian</b> "cut" through the best selling literary <b>Dominating Discourse</b> of their day. No neither were literary masterpieces of cultural eminence. No matter. - Neither were the Campbell Soup Cans of Warhol, but they cut into art history and ushered in POP art.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Warhol</span></b></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"cut" into Art History</span></b></span></td></tr>
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But that's not the point. Both were <span style="font-size: large;"><b>"cuts"</b></span> in the Dominating Discourse. What she wrote was not allowed. The DD determines who can say what, when it can be said, what can be said, how it can be said, who can say it and where it can be said. If this is all new to you then I refer you to the work of Michel <b>Foucault</b> and all his works, the first two being <b>The Order of Things</b> and <b>The Archeology of Knowledge.</b><br />
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Foucault seized upon <b>Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals</b>, saw genealogy as a tool to order knowledge into cuts.<br />
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<b><span style="background-color: cyan; color: blue;">"Knowledge is not for knowing; knowledge is for cutting." - Michael Foucault</span></b><br />
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Nowhere does anyone see that this is what Rand did. Only she did not universalize it as Foucault did and apply the Nietzchean tool to all knowledge. <b style="background-color: #eeeeee; color: red;">Instead Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals sank deep in her mind to change the way she thought</b>. Nietzsche puts an end to God by saying <i>God is dead</i>. <b>Baudrillard</b> comments on this way of phrasing it. Nietzsche challenged God to appear. He dared God. He did not say there was no God. He said <i>God is dead</i>, a much different meaning.<br />
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Rand was completely convinced by Nietzsche's reasoning to declare herself an atheist, and Objectivism held atheism as a tenet. Rand finally broke with her friend, supporter, teacher and much more, Isabel Patterson, over this issue. Patterson believed in a creator, Rand did not, and they argued for years over it, until Rand just distanced herself from Patterson.<br />
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It is Nietzsche's tight reasoning using genealogy that interfaced with Rand's mind and her thinking. It did the same with Foucault. It began French post modernism thinking, replacing <b><i>Levi-Strauss</i></b>'s structuralism theory.<br />
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This is how to read Rand through Nietzsche, not by media sound bites of what someone has picked up about Nietzsche. Rand backs away from Nietzsche in her journals, Foucault skims over him until the last years of his brilliant and powerful intellectual career, and finally says that he regretted not acknowledging Nietzsche's contribution to his work earlier in his career. The reason is obvious since no one wanted to stand beside Hitler's praise and misuse of Nietzsche, concerning the Holocaust, which Nietzsche would have disavowed if anyone had carefully read his <b><i>Genealogy of Morals</i></b>.<br />
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The philosophical, economic, psychological, social, aesthetic Dominating Discourses served to smother these novels as best they could. But when the Dominating Discourse changes, it is total. This is where Kuhn's Paradigm Change often gets confused with Foucault's cut, which is much more comprehensive. These novels cut, they cut through all the discourses of the above. This is its supreme importance. But only thinking genealogically will allow you to observe and see it.<br />
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<b style="color: blue;">An object does not exist until and unless it is observed</b>. -<b> William Burroughs</b><br />
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Nowhere on any page of these two biographies, or any reviewers, or Rand's disciples, is any of this seen. Foucault is not in the bibliographies nor the texts, nor the footnotes, nada anywhere. In fact neither <b>Burns</b> nor <b>Heller</b> seem aware that there is such a thing as post modern thinking. Burns's bibliography is so excessive it is obscene. It's scholarship is an embarrassment. I am not surprised that she was granted access to the ARI archives. She posed no threat at all. She did, however, provide endless tidbits of information. Information is <span style="color: red;"><b>NOT</b></span> knowing.<br />
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Nietzsche is in Burns's bibliography as <i><b>Thus Spake Zarathustra</b></i> but no <i><b>Genealogy of Morals</b></i>. In Heller Nietzsche is in her bibliography under <b><i>Beyond Good and Evil</i></b>. She does mention <b><i>Genealogy of Morals</i></b>, but does not include it in her bibliography.<br />
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Rand is primarily a post modern theorist, who presented her theory via fiction. When she turned to non-fiction it disappeared. So we have it and at the same time it is masked, camouflaged, revealed and concealed.<br />
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<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div>seymourbloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02843717286012748265noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-39022075354495149362012-04-12T04:50:00.003-07:002012-04-12T04:53:24.217-07:00My New AVI<a href="http://i.imgur.com/4mMpk.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/4mMpk.png" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I dunno.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Does that suit make me look fat?</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Warmest regards and sincerest thanks to curioushairedgal.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-51073283774552648972012-04-11T12:38:00.001-07:002012-04-11T12:52:12.631-07:00Leonid's Balls<div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">One of the smaller bits of space-junk whirling mindlessly around the Randroid Belt calls itself "Leonid", whose name means "Son of a Lion."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">This great leonine intellect recently roared the following on Sense Of Life Objectivists (SOLO):</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: inherit;">"Stochastic process is not contingent. Each and every stochastic state in every given time is determined by interaction between all entities involved <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b><i>and couldn't be other</i></b></span>. However the number of entities is so big that we unable to establish cause-effect connection. Mathematical procedures or telegraph process could be contingent but they are man-made, So is chess game, soccer game, a philosophy a symphony, a painting and many other products of man's mind."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">In other words, according to this bright light, there is no such thing — no real causal force in the physical universe — as chance or randomness. According to this bright light, "chance," "randomness," and "stochastic state" (these terms can presumably be used interchangeably) are simply "placeholders", or "markers," for <b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">strict, mechanistic, physically determined causes</span></i></b> that human minds simply happen not to know at the time they are thinking about the event or events in question. Thus, "chance," "randomness," and "stochastic states" are terms that mark our ignorance of the "real" causes involved, the word "real" being reserved by prior philosophical commitment to strictly mechanist, deterministic events.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">So, for Leonid (as for everyone else floating in the Randroid Belt) words like "chance," "randomness," "stochastic state," etc., point to a state of consciousness (a deficient state, i.e., a state of ignorance); not to some aspect of material, objective reality, comprising matter and energy. A knee-jerk Randroid would probably phrase what I've just written thus: "The concepts of 'chance,' 'randomness,' 'stochastic state,' etc., are epistemological concepts, not metaphysical ones. They relate to some condition or state of man's mind, and not some aspect of physical, material Existence."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Now, if "chance", "randomness", and "stochastic state" are placeholders for our lack of knowledge concerning real mechanistic deterministic causes, what, precisely, are "mechanistic determinist causes"?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Son-of-a-lion doesn't say. But there is a commonly accepted idea in the philosophy of science as to the criteria for strict determinism:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">An effect is said to have been "strictly determined" by a cause if we can predict with precision and accuracy the state of the system at time t=n by knowing nothing except (1) the initial state of the system at t=0, and (2) the overarching principle or law that governs the relevant aspect of the system.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I mention the "relevant aspect" of the system because there may be many irrelevant ones, too; e.g., if we are interested in how a billiard ball of mass X will vector away from a cue-stick after having been struck by it with force Y, we needn't take into consideration the color of the billiard ball, since the property of color is taken to be irrelevant to the properties we are interested in — changes in motion and position.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Indeed, in the case of the motion of the billiard ball at some arbitrarily chosen time t=n, we can predict with great precision and accuracy many things — the ball's acceleration, its direction, its deceleration, the angle it will strike the side of the billiard table, etc. — simply by knowing the initial conditions of the ball-stick-table system, and Newton's laws of motion.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">So when Son-of-a-lion avers that the concepts of "chance", "randomness", and "stochastic state" are useful only as placeholders, he means that in certain explanations of events — actually, in most explanations of events — human minds lack either the knowledge of the initial starting conditions of the system (including an accounting of which entities are relevant and ought to be included in the system), or they lack sufficient knowledge of the overarching general law or principle that governs the entities in the system, or both.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">All Randroids believe this. It's a requirement for membership around the Randroid Belt.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Additionally, they believe that, in cases of this kind, knowledge of the number and kinds of relevant components of the system, and knowledge of the general causal law governing the relevant components, are possible to achieve in principle. What prevents one from knowing these things is not any inherent "unknowability" about the system; rather, it is practical considerations, such as the state of technology and the precision of our measuring tools, as well as more obvious things, such as the amount of time and money available for directing into such investigations. Son-of-a-lion complains that it is the problem of "the number of entities" being "so big" which requires that we substitute the "approximate" knowledge of probability for the "exact" knowledge of determinism; but that which is claimed to be "so big" in 2012 might not be "so big" in 2062. Therefore, in principle at least, according to Randroids, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;"><i><b>all statements about events that are expressed as probabilities today are inherently expressible as statements of strict determinism</b></i>.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">This would mean that instead of accepting the idea of 3 fundamental types of causes in the universe — strict determinism, goal directedness, chance — Randroids accept only the first two. To repeat: "Chance" for a Randroid is simply a name for our lack of specific knowledge of the criteria pertaining to the first.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The great advantage to this belief is that it makes one feel good, safe, and "in control"; for even if a Randroid knows absolutely nothing about the state of a given system, he could always claim that the knowledge of deterministic causes and completely predictable effects is "there", "objective", and "in" the system; he just lacks the time, funding, and precision instruments with which to discover them.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The great disadvantage to this belief, alas, is that it happens not to be true. In other words, it is NOT true that all physical events can, in principle, be reduced to tight, neat, causal chains in which a clearly known specific cause produces one and only one specific effect under the guidance of a grand, overarching law or principle. That Randroids ardently hew to this belief marks them as not only naive, but as inherently anti-scientific. Their position is a reactionary throwback to a much older viewpoint, no different from "naive materialism" and "simple reductionism" of the 19th-century.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">To understand why this is so, we can consider the following hypothetical experiment by the great quantum physicist, Alfred Landé, known as <b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">"Landé's Blade."</span></i></b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">A heavy ivory billiard ball rolls down a hollow, inclined tube; immediately on exiting the tube, it encounters a thin metal blade. The straight-line motion of the ball is now interrupted by having to roll atop a very thin, sharp, piece of metal, causing it to wobble either to its left or to its right, and to fall into a waiting box positioned on either side of the blade. We see that the blade adds a "randomizing" cause to the billiard ball's otherwise strictly determined motion along a straight line (guaranteed by the constraint of the tube).</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Now, assuming the blade has been positioned precisely in the middle of the tube's exit opening, and the ivory billiard ball is a "fair" one (i.e., not biased in its mass in any particular direction), then our understanding of probability would lead us to conclude that there is a 50% chance of the ball falling in the left box or the right box. For the sake of brevity, we'll call the first event an l-ball and the second an r-ball.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">After rolling, let us say, 10,000 billiard balls down the tube, Landé's Blade would guarantee that about 5,000 of the balls would find their way into the right-most box, and 5,000 into the left-most one.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">A Randroid studying this experiment would probably say the following:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: inherit;">"If we had the time, money, and precision measuring instruments (such as very powerful microscopes that see down to the level of individual atoms), we could observe the individual forces inside the tube that affect the way in which the billiard ball is rolling, the way in which encounters the "lip" of the end of the tube, etc., and the way in which the sharp edge of the metal blade affect it, as well, thus permitting us to predict — in principle, at least — with 100% confidence, into which box the ball will drop on any given trial. Therefore, the idea that something called 'chance' governs which box the ball will drop is ultimately mistaken; 'chance' is simply a name covering our lack of specific knowledge of these atomic-sized and more fundamental causes."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The problem with such an explanation is this: the final effect is the same; i.e., 50% of the time the ball drops to the right, 50% of the time it drops to the left. What we need to explain is not why one particular ball, on one particular roll, falls to the left or to the right; we need to explain why there is statistical stability: why ON THE AVERAGE, about half of the rolls result in l-balls and why half in r-balls, and why THIS IS ALWAYS THE CASE.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Perhaps the best insights into the significance of Landé's Blade comes from Karl Popper, writing in his collection of essays on science titled <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: cyan;">"</span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Open-Universe-Indeterminism-Postscript/dp/0415078652/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334172644&sr=1-1" style="color: cyan;" target="_blank">The Open Universe: an Argument for Indeterminism</a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: cyan;">."</span> [Linked] In a chapter dealing with the problem of trying to erase probabilistic statements by looking for hidden deterministic laws that will give us a sense of certainty and stability, Popper writes the following:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: inherit;">"No physicist that I know of has seen this problem more clearly, or done more to show what is involved here, than Alfred Landé [NB: see his "Probability in Classical and Quantum Theory" (1953) and "Foundations of Quantum Theory" (1955)] His argument is designed to show that <u><b>we must accept probabilities of single events as fundamental, and as irreplaceable by any statement except by other probability statements</b></u>. Moreover, his argument shows that even if we combine a prima facie deterministic theory with statistical assumptions concerning initial conditions, we only get an infinite regress; and an interpretation which sticks to this assumption is bound to become untestable, metaphysical (or 'purely academic' in Landé's terminology)."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">[Emphasis added]</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Or we might say that an interpretation which sticks to this assumption becomes a rigidly held dogma around the Randroid Belt, whose members habitually substitute untestable metaphysical statements for scientific ones.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">"Landé's argument may also be used to criticize the doctrine that probability considerations enter into science only if our knowledge is insufficient to enable us to make predictions with certainty.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">In order to see the weakness and even the irrelevance of this doctrine, let us assume again that we are faced with an arrangement as described by Landé, with balls dropping onto a steel blade, and a 50:50 ratio of r [right] and l [left] balls."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">For the sake of clarification, note well what the steel blade in the experiment is really doing: it is <i>segregating</i> r-balls from l-balls, determining or deciding (and feel free to interpret those words either literally or metaphorically, as it makes no difference to the outcome) the path, or "fate", of each ball as it emerges from the end of the tube. So Popper uses the word "blade" in his argument to mean <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6;">anything in the arrangement that performs the action of segregating an l-ball from an r-ball,"</span></i> and which determines or decides the path, or "fate," of each ball as it rolls down the tube. The only difference is that each successive "blade" we might discover acts on the ball at an earlier stage of its trajectory down the tube, and can thus be seen as a more fundamental or determinative "blade" than the metal one which only segregates the balls "at the last moment," as it were. Keep this usage in mind, for Popper will soon speak of an "optical blade" that a hypothetical determinist — such as a Randroid — might assume to be acting on a ball at an earlier stage than the metal one, and thus being more of an ultimate "cause" for the ball becoming segregated to the left or to the right. Popper continues:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: inherit;">"Let us further assume that we have an optical blade with the help of which we can know with certainty of every oncoming ball whether it will be a right ball or a left ball. This undoubtedly makes it unnecessary to invoke probabilities so far as the prediction of each single ball is concerned. But it does not in any way affect our problem. The balls, we may assume, fall to the right or to the left of the steel blade exactly as before, with the same 50:50 ratio, and with the same statistical fluctuations; and the problem of explaining statistical results, and that of explaining our ability to predict that future sequences will lead to similar results (provided the conditions are unchanged), remain precisely the same as before, in spite of the fact that we now know every single result in advance.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">But does not our advance knowledge of the r and l balls enable us to change their ratios? We may assume that the balls come through Landé's tube sufficiently slowly, and sufficiently space from one another, to observe them with the optical blade and to remove each r-ball by hand (putting it in a box, say). As a result, we shall obtain only l-balls instead of a 50:50 ratio. Thus, on the basis of our precise knowledge, we can control our statistical results as we like.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">This argument is certainly correct. But we shall still find that the ratio of the l-balls to the balls now put away in the box [NB which were the early-detected r-balls that we removed before they had a chance to encounter the metal blade and fall into the r-box, and which Popper now calls box-balls] is 50:50, as before; and the problem of explaining this ratio, and the statistical fluctuations, remains unchanged: it has again been merely shifted.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #3d85c6; font-family: inherit;">The 50:50 ratio, it will be clear by now, depends upon the objective experimental conditions [NB: the physical arrangement we established when we decided to perform the experiment], and has nothing whatever to do with our knowledge, or lack of it. In so far as we changed the experimental conditions — replacing the r-balls by box-balls — there was a change in the results [NB: that is, we were able to get ONLY l-balls]; and in so far as we did not change the conditions, leaving the tube and the blade untouched, there was no change."</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"> the same chapter, Popper goes on to say that probabilities — which he renames "propensities" — should be viewed not as placeholders for our lack of exact knowledge of assumed deterministic causes, but rather as real, physical, objective causal traits or causal properties, not of any one individual element within an arrangement of elements, but of the entire arrangement itself. The 50:50 ratio of l-balls to r-balls is not some atomic or chemical property of ivory, but a property of the entire experimental set-up comprising: ball+inclined tube+metal blade, acting in concert.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I agree with Popper, and believe his approach to this problem is original and an important contribution to our whole way of conceiving of probability: i.e., probability, chance, randomness, stochastic state, or propensity, as an emergent property among aggregates of entities, and not some physical property inherent in the chemistry or atomic composition of any single one of them.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">We conclude, therefore, that the universe contains at least three distinguishable kinds of causes, each cause being unique and non-reducible to the other two:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">1. Strict determinism; </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">2. Goal-directedness; and </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">3. Chance.</span></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-63277254921172008632012-04-10T12:49:00.003-07:002012-04-11T16:42:19.479-07:00!FUCK Is A Word Is A Word Is A Word That Means EVERYTHING You Want It To Mean!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><b><span style="font-size: large;">From my short short stay at objectivist living in the Randroid Belt:</span></b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/26UA578yQ5g?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><a href="http://youtu.be/26UA578yQ5g">http://youtu.be/26UA578yQ5g</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11653&st=180&p=155727&#entry155727">http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11653&st=180&p=155727&#entry155727</a><br />
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<div class="citation" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(rgb(246, 246, 246)), to(rgb(229, 229, 229))); background-origin: initial; border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; border-bottom-right-radius: 0px; border-left-color: rgb(152, 152, 152); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-top-left-radius: 5px; border-top-right-radius: 5px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 2px; color: #282828; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 8px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><a class="snapback" href="http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&section=findpost&pid=155721" rel="citation" style="color: #225985; margin-right: 5px; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-left: 1px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 1px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="View Post" src="http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/public/style_images/master/snapback.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /></a>George H. Smith, on 12 February 2012 - 07:14 PM, said:</div><div class="blockquote" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-bottom-left-radius: 5px; border-bottom-right-radius: 5px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(152, 152, 152); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 0px; border-top-right-radius: 0px; color: #282828; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><div class="quote" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div class="citation" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: initial; background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(rgb(246, 246, 246)), to(rgb(229, 229, 229))); background-origin: initial; border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; border-bottom-right-radius: 0px; border-left-color: rgb(152, 152, 152); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 2px; border-top-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-top-left-radius: 5px; border-top-right-radius: 5px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 2px; font-weight: bold; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 6px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 8px;"><a class="snapback" href="http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?app=forums&module=forums&section=findpost&pid=155717" rel="citation" style="color: #225985; margin-right: 5px; padding-bottom: 1px; padding-left: 1px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 1px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="View Post" src="http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/public/style_images/master/snapback.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /></a>seymourblogger, on 12 February 2012 - 06:49 PM, said:</div><div class="blockquote" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #f7f7f7; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-bottom-left-radius: 5px; border-bottom-right-radius: 5px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-left-color: rgb(152, 152, 152); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 2px; border-right-color: rgb(229, 229, 229); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 0px; border-top-right-radius: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 10px;"><div class="quote" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">In fact there is no truth. It has become just a word. Like fuck. Meaningless.</div></div><br />
You think the word "fuck" is meaningless? Maybe you should try a different discourse.</div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: blue;">And then to my</span><span style="background-color: red; color: white;"> great good luck and fortune</span></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: blue;">ninthdoctor posted this</span><span style="background-color: yellow; color: red;"> youtube on fuck</span></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b>to prove me wrong!</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b>Ho ho ho and a kettle of rum!</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b><br />
</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: large;"><b>Baudrillard on Imp</b></span><b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;">losion</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;">Following Nietzsche of course</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;">Excess leads to annihilation</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;">Even Bill of </b> <b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;">AA says this: Touch bottom first!</b><br />
<b style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Hear that Michael Stuart Kelly!</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;"><br />
</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;">How do you like this different Discourse, George H. Smith of the best selling atheist best seller!</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: blue; font-size: x-large;"><br />
</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="background-color: red; color: #eeeeee;">Beaucoup thanks to ninthdoctor for his youtube Discourse</span></b><br />
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<b style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="background-color: red; color: #eeeeee;">Here's a fuck you from curioushairedgal</span></b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;">http://youtube/EPCiW2xFKf4</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/EPCiW2xFKf4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;">A finger fuck you</span><br />
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</span></div></div>seymourbloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02843717286012748265noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-83576010694982683352012-04-10T04:17:00.000-07:002012-04-10T04:19:37.787-07:00Forget Darwin and Grow Up!<a href="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">A popular fly-by in synchronous orbit around the Randroid Belt calling itself XRAY recently posted the following on SOLO:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Oh really, Janet? Gee, then how do you explain that humans share over 95 % of their genes with the chimpanzees and bonobos?"</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Gee, I dunno, Xray, how do you explain it? Why does that automatically prove Darwinian evolution?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Air-conditioners and refrigerators also share over 95% of their parts. To your way of thinking, Xray, I guess the fact of "shared parts" between two things proves that one thing evolved from the other. But why?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Actually, it proves nothing of the kind, since that fact is also consistent with the scenario that shared technology, i.e., similarity or identity of functional elements between two devices, is simply an efficient way of constructing both entities. It doesn't necessarily prove evolution since it is also consistent with the idea of "commonality of conception."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Note: To prove Darwinism, you cannot merely point to some fact in nature that you believe is conistent with it. You must point to some fact of reality that is (1) <i><u><b>consistent</b></u></i> with your theory, but that is also (2) <i><u><b>inconsistent</b></u></i> with alternative theories.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">For example, the undeniable fact of large gaps in the fossil record conforms to (2) above: that undeniable fact is <i><u><b>inconsistent</b></u></i> with classical Darwinian notions of slow, constant, gradual, morphological change over long stretches of time. The absence of intermediate forms proves nothing about any alternative scenario, but it does throw doubt on the Darwinian one. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Of course, taken together with another </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">inconvenient fact inconsistent with Darwinism — that new species in many instances seem to have appeared more or less suddenly, with no evidence of precursors — an honest commitment to the facts of reality might very well demand that we abandon Darwinism to the trash heap of failed scientific theories.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">A recent paper in <i><a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/845x02v03g3t7002/" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: cyan;"><b>Biological Theory</b></span></a></i> [link] seems to agree:</span></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"The Fate of Darwinism: Evolution After the Modern Synthesis"</span></b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">By David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">(the phrase "Modern Synthesis" is the historically correct and formal name for what is often called "Neo-Darwinism")</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">The authors make the following resonant assertion:</span></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">"Darwinism in its current scientific incarnation has pretty much reached the end of its rope."</span></b></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">We think so, too. (Though we suspect the Randroid Belt will continue to clutch at this rope until it hangs itself.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">So wave "bye, bye" to Darwin, everyone. It's OK to do so. We're all grown up now.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-66116770806062055102012-04-09T04:00:00.001-07:002012-04-10T01:45:45.867-07:00Scoring with Michael Newberry<a href="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Painter, sculptor, and scientist, Leonardo da Vinci may have been a true "Renaissance Man," but he pales in comparison to painter, tennis-pro, and Objectivist, Michael Newberry — a true "Randroid Belt Man."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-62389474081052114372012-04-07T22:14:00.001-07:002012-04-07T22:14:15.393-07:00A Rosenbaum is a Rosenbaum is a Rosenbaum (or, What's in a Name?)<a href="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Recently around the Randroid Belt, a Randroid calling himself "Tom Burroughes" posted the following to SOLO in reply to "seymourblogger":</span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I would respect [your criticisms of a writer being "counterfeit"] a tad more if you did not hide behind a blogger ID, but posted using your real name.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Burroughes probably forgot that the person he idolizes and worships more than anyone in the world, and more than anyone in history — Ayn Rand — herself used a counterfeit ID. "Ayn Rand" was a <i>nom de plume</i>, a fictionalized novelist ID she invented for herself. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Her real name was Alisa Rosenbaum.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">If it's all right for someone born with one name to publish novels under the name "Ayn Rand", why would it not be all right for someone else born with one name to publish blogs under the name "seymourblogger"?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">It would be nice if Burroughes practiced a little consistency in his reasoning. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">But we won't save our breath.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-29454431870951352162012-04-07T01:58:00.000-07:002012-04-07T22:15:31.080-07:00Sightseeing on Planetoid Perigo<a href="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">Somewhere on the outer fringe of the Randroid Belt wafts a small, gnomish, chunky piece of rock — no bigger than brontosaurus excrement (even if twice as fetid and half as intelligent) — called "Planetoid Perigo." It is called this by its sole inhabitant, a slimy, semi-conscious creature of undecided phenotype (and unknown genotype), named Jabba-the-Linz.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">We have the rare opportunity of witnessing this fat, slothful creature in the middle of its favorite past-time: fantasizing the role of "Lucky Pierre."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><i><u>NOTE</u>: Please turn OFF the flash on your smart-phone cameras if you wish to take pictures, as we don't want to startle the creature out of its self-induced stupor.</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-17803381899727220152012-04-06T00:50:00.001-07:002012-04-06T01:56:56.295-07:00Women of the Randroid Belt<a href="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/A88Za.png" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I can't believe it!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I found this in a shop for used books and old magazines. It's an NBI publication written by, and for, women of the Randroid Belt. The authors may be gone and forgotten, but their high thoughts and well-honed arguments will live on.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I can't wait to read this!</span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-17996539581983580972012-04-04T06:11:00.001-07:002012-04-04T06:14:30.847-07:00No Business Like Show Business<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">We are <i>so</i> excited!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">We've just heard through the old gossip-vine around the Randroid Belt that Dr. David Kelley, Ph.D. — </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">brilliant intellect, original philosopher, author of a popular book on logic (whose title escapes me, for some reason), and trusted advisor to Hollywood producers and directors — paid a surprise call to the bustling movie set of <i style="color: cyan;"><b>Atlas Shrugged, Part II</b></i>! We loved Part I so much (despite the long lines on which we impatiently waited to buy scarce tickets during each of the 12 times we saw it), we can hardly endure the anxiety of waiting until fall 2012 for the sequel!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><i>Thank Randroid</i> this movie's in production and Kelley's in charge!</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">As you can see, everyone in the cast and crew was delighted to see Dr. Kelley, and was eager to confirm with him that they were making this masterpiece in strict conformity with the philosophical tenets of Objectivism.</span></span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-41472052402483659632012-03-26T03:35:00.000-07:002012-03-26T03:36:47.745-07:00Lucky Lindsay<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Congratulations to Maestro Lindsay Perigo of SOLO! We heard the gossip around the Randroid Belt. Best of luck in your new life, Linz! <i>Brava!</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: yellow; font-size: large;"><b style="background-color: red;">This is the video that got jeremiah banned from objectivist living AND got his linux computer hacked</b></span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/BKlqUwswvfs?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">At <b><span style="color: red;">objectivist living</span></b> the administrator <b>Michael Stuart Kelly</b> is an authoritarian watchdog that follows you around and replies to your every post and comment. Did you have a mom or dad that did that? I hope not. Perhaps a dog that followed you everywhere. Allowing you no freedom of expression. Or an icky boyfriend or girlfriend.</span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;">As soon as you disagree with <b>Michael Stuart Kelly</b> he gets nasty. He's just a soft little boy inside who throws stones and then gets all righteous when you toss them back at him. Ever run across these types online?</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Yeh. I know you have. The next thing he does when you answer him back is, he limits you to 5 posts a day. Then the brownshirts come after you in glee and since you have only 5 posts, if the software is not gaming you which it does most of the time, you are overwhelmed. You can combine a bunch of defenses in one post. Or you can be very Nietzschean and throw a bunch away. Comments that is, not a bunch of defenses.</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b style="background-color: red;"><span style="color: blue;">If you continue then</span></b> </span><b><span style="background-color: black; color: red; font-size: large;">BEWARE!</span></b> <b><span style="background-color: blue; font-size: large;">Your computer may get hacked. Mine was. Starting at objectivist living through South America (MSK lived in Brazil you know for 32 years.) Maldives and finally resting on its laurels in London, the hacker basked in enjoyment.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">It's fun to watch that computer number screening down the screen, going to all those nifty places and home to London. Only fun if someone is taking care of your hacking problem. I was lucky. Jeremiah was not.</span></b></div>seymourbloggerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02843717286012748265noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-39451465164123304082012-03-21T03:03:00.001-07:002012-03-21T23:28:42.981-07:00The Big Bang Elicits the Big Yawn from Randroids<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The nice thing about the Randroid Belt — that ring of debris comprising Web sites and their regular contributors revolving around the central sun of Ayn Rand in a decaying orbit — is that it's mainly empty space with little or no gravity holding anything (such as an argument) together. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Bad for them. Good for us. We take a running-jump, spread our arms, and soar into the vacuum of inter-Randroid space until we land on a smallish, rockyish, uglyish piece of Randroid Real Estate calling itself "SOLO", an acronym for Sense Of Life Objectivists.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">We have been here before and know the terrain well.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A recent visitor to SOLO named Tom Burroughes left the following post (a response to a paper by Stephen Parrish from 2008 in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies available as a free PDF download <a href="http://www.aynrandstudies.com/jars/archives/jars9-2/jars9_2sparrish.pdf">here</a>), causing major out-gassings from the bowels of the Randroid interior:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"I have more thoughts on how Stephen Parrish, a US-based academic who holds religious views, has criticised Objectivism and its treatment of religion.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">[The following] paragraph struck me that when you are debating with someone who believes in a God …that it is a waste of time beyond a certain point. I suddenly realised that Parrish, though no doubt clever, . . . "</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">LOL! Dear readers, I have been around the Randroid Belt long enough to know that when a self-styled Randroid asserts that someone on the intellectual opposition is "clever," it means nothing more than (1) the Randroid did not grasp his opponent's arguments, or (2) the Randroid did grasp his opponent's arguments and was completely stymied by them. Judging by the overall excellence of Mr. Parrish's arguments in the above downloadable PDF, and the general floundering by Mr. Burroughes in his response, I would say that the latter simply <i>cannot answer the former</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It's as simple as that.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">(As an example of another typical psychological reaction on the part of Objectivists when debating or discussion something with them, consider this: within recent memory, I posted to SOLO a 1-question quiz on some very basic music notation challenging one of the Randroid regulars there to prove his musical knowledge by answering the single question correctly. After failing to do so, he asserted that the question itself must have had a "trick", i.e., he was apparently suggesting that I had <i>fooled</i> him into answering a question incorrectly by posing a question the answer to which he simply didn't know.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I'll point out that this sort of thing is typical of Objectivists and other sundry Randroids; i.e., if they don't grasp something, or if they are mistaken in their grasp, or if they grasp something and it's quite apparent to them that it conflicts with Objectivism, they claim they have been tricked — that is, their opponent had a dishonest intent and committed intellectual fraud — which is a defense mechanism ideally suited to <i>not</i> doing what their own philosophy commands them to do, which is to <i>check their premises</i>. It never occurs to a Randroid that the process of checking one's own premises might lead to having to abandon some article of faith regarding Objectivism itself.)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Mr. Burroughes continues:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">"[Parrish] is also making some bizarre points and surely reinforces my own jaundiced views of how some people frame arguments for religion:</span></span></blockquote>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">"Also, physical reality can in fact sometimes be caused to exist in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">a certain manner by consciousness. For example, I consciously chose </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">to be here typing on my computer rather than staying in bed, and this </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">makes the physical world a somewhat different place than it otherwise </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">would have been. The only way to deny this is to say that consciousness </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">has no effect on physical reality, and is thus epiphenomenal. I </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">don’t think this is what Objectivists really want to say; they agree that </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">man’s mind can affect the physical environment. Of course the way </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">that we cause things is quite different from God’s creating the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">universe; but again God is a quite different, and much greater, being </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">than we are." </span></span></i></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Huh? How is the world "a different place?" by Mr Parrish moving from his bedroom to his office other than that he has moved from A to B as a result of deciding to do so? </span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">That's exactly what Parrish means by "different"; no more, no less. He didn't say "better"; he didn't say "worse." The world becomes <i>different</i> when the arrangement of elements changes to some other arrangement . . . I believe that's what the 2nd law of thermodynamics is all about: the world constantly changes as its elements move from arrangements of <i>low</i> probability (order, structure) to arrangements of <u>high</u> probability (disorder, undifferentiated uniformity). </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Parrish is not trying to make a profound scientific point; just an obvious metaphysical one: one of the things consciousness can do in addition to merely observing reality is, by means of a property of consciousness called "will", it can move itself, and the physical entity that accompanies it, from Room A to Room B. That's a configurational change in the universe, if only a very small one.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Burroughes continues:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The point surely is that we apprehend the world, </span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Parrish doesn't deny that one of the things consciousness can do is "apprehend".</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">and our minds forms conclusions, </span></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Parrish doesn't deny that one of the things consciousness can do is "form conclusions."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">and we act to achieve a certain goal (go to the office, call a friend, launch an IPO, etc). </span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Parrish doesn't deny that we can act to achieve a certain goal. <b><i>Burroughes denies</i></b>, however, that we can act by means of our conscious will without having the desire or need to "achieve" any goal. We might simply be pacing our home aimlessly to kill time while we wait for a family member to undergo surgery. And while Burroughes might object that by claiming that, ergo, our goal is to kill time, the point is, no <i>goal</i> was set to "go to the office" or "go to the living room"; we simply walked, and our immediate goal was more likely "don't bump into a wall or a door", and we simply <i>found ourselves</i> in the living room at one moment and the office the next. The point here is that, even aimless following of one's conscious will leads to the arrangement of elements being different at one time from another.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A simple point that is apparently lost on Burroughes entirely.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And of course this changes physical reality in that sense. That is true, but also uncontroversial and as Parrish acknowledges, no-one would contest that.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But Parrish's point is that <i>even</i> such an uncontroversial and uncontested act flies in the face of the officially held view by Objectivism on consciousness, which is that (1) it observes <i>only</i>, and (2) it is therefore incapable of effecting change in physical reality.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">All the while, we hope to meet our goals by treating reality as it is, not as we would want it to be. That is the vital point. <b>For instance, if I decide to float a company on the stock exchange and ignore the prevailing state of the market or the rules governing it, disaster follows.</b></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Burroughes appears to be speaking of entrepreneurship here. Entrepreneurs need very little information, if any, about the "<i>prevailing</i> state of the market", because everything an entrepreneur does (or more precisely in Misesian terms: everything the <i>entrepreneurial function</i> does) is geared toward the <i>FUTURE STATE OF AFFAIRS, OR FUTURE STATE OF THE MARKET, NOT THE "PREVAILING STATE" OR THE PAST STATE</i>. The "prevailing" state of the market is the result of past value scales and exchanges. There's no profit — no potential <i>entrepreneurial profit</i> — in exploiting that because there's nothing to exploit.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Entrepreneurs have certain <i>expectations regarding the future</i> that others just don't see, or don't feel, or don't channel. However one wishes to put it. If it were only a matter of reading the "prevailing" state of the market, there would be lots and lots of highly successful entrepreneurs, since we're all privy to more or less the same amount and the same quality of information. That successful entrepreneurship requires a kind of <i>clairvoyance</i> regarding an <i>expected future state</i> of the market shows why there are so few really successful entrepreneurs; why the failure rate is so high for entrepreneurs; why the rewards are so great for the successful ones; and why it's a kind of talent, and cannot really be taught (despite many university courses claiming to do so).</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">If Mr. Five-by-Five, Porky Perigo — a sort of Jabba-the-Hut of Objectivism — left my blog up on SOLO, Burroughes will see a link to an old lecture by economist Israel Kirzner on entrepreneurship that he gave at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) sometime in the 1980s. It's worth watching.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Burroughes stumbles on:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Of course, as he acknowledges, Rand and others glory in how people change the world by re-arranging the stuff of nature to suit their purposes, by constructing buildings or machines, farming the Earth, writing computer software, sequencing the human genome, or whatever. But in order to do this successfully to meet human aims, people must observe the old adage that "nature, to be mastered, must also be obeyed". If a blacksmith, say, wants to create a metal part by the use of fire, then he has to understand that fire is going to burn his hand off unless he takes precautions regardless of whether might subjectively prefer that it does not. That is what Rand means when she says "existence exits". If we ignore the real world because it does not fit our desires, our desires will lead us eventually to existential disaster. That is what Rand and others mean when they assert the primacy of existence. She is not denying that humans can effect change in the world when they use their minds.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It is one thing to say that we can use our minds to help us change the stuff of nature in a certain way, but it would be quite another to suggest that we can do so by changing, say, the physical laws that govern the world. </span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">According to Mr Parrish, gods are able to do this (indeed, this is a definition of a miracle, like Christ being able to walk on water or convert water into wine).</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">According to Mr. Parrish, there is no <u>logical necessity</u> to the laws of physics because to think them different from what they are entails no logical contradiction. He's right. That immediately suggests the question of why, then, the laws of physics happen to be what they are when there's no restriction on them being something else. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Here's just one example:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Carbon is formed from the nuclear reactions inside of stars — carbon-based life IS composed of "star-stuff" — but to get from helium to carbon requires many unstable steps, so it's unlikely that the same sort of synthesis that formed, e.g., helium out of hydrogen would just keep on going until an element like carbon appeared. Astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle realized that the only way, realistically, for carbon to form inside a star would be if 3 helium nuclei simultaneously fused together. That, however, would be an extremely unlikely collision, yet we know that stars, in fact, do produce carbon. If Hoyle was right about the triple fusion, how could such an unlikely event happen inside of stars <i>routinely</i>? Building on work by earlier scientists, Hoyle discovered that the natural vibration rate of atoms — <u><i>nuclear resonance</i></u>, similar to the acoustic resonance of vibrating string instruments — greatly lowers the improbability of this occurrence.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Basically, the process is like this:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Two helium nuclei undergo fusion. This occurs because of a "sympathetic vibration" or nuclear resonance between the two helium nuclei.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The element that is formed from 2 helium nuclei is called "beryllium", which is an element that also exists here on Earth, but with an important difference: terrestrial beryllium has an extra neutron that makes it stable. Stellar beryllium does not have this additional neutron and is so highly unstable that it self-destructs in <span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Tahoma;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">0.000000000000001 (one-<i>quadrillionth</i>) of a second. In order for carbon to form, a 3rd helium nucleus would have to fuse with beryllium within that 1-quadrillionth of a second.</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The way this occurs is by means of a <i>second</i> resonance, this time between the unstable beryllium and a 3rd helium atom. The resonance between unstable beryllium and free helium is of just the right frequency to allow the 3rd helium atom to fuse with the beryllium, forming carbon . . . the basis of life.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A few years later, it was discovered that another important element for life was also created by means of an unlikely resonance among nuclei: oxygen.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Sir Fred Hoyle had always considered himself an atheist and a materialist. Nevertheless, he was so impressed by this discovery of two different harmonic resonances among 3 atoms that just happen to allow the creation of an essential element of life (i.e., carbon) that he wrote the following:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are actually found to be… A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a <b>super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature</b>. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><b>I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars</b>.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One of those consequences, by the way, is life.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The cause of nuclear resonance, by the way, is something called the "Strong Force," the fundamental forces holding protons and neutrons together, and one of the 4 fundamental forces in the universe.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">If the Strong Force were just a bit stronger, or just a bit weaker, the necessary resonance between helium-helium and beryllium-helium would not exist and therefore neither would carbon. If carbon didn't exist, life would not exist.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Randroids remain stolidly phlegmatic on hearing things like this, and their usual response is to yawn and say "So? Existence exists. And if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to ask questions about it."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The mystery of physical constants being what they are — yet not by any any sort of necessity — might be illustrated this way:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A violin has 4 strings, tuned in perfect 5ths to E, A, D, G. The wooden pegs used for stretching, or tuning, the strings, do not have "stops", "catches," or ratchets on them; the pegs stay in their holes simply by friction, so they can be turned any amount, more taut or less taut. The traditional tuning for playing western classical music — E, A, D, G — is a highly improbable arrangement of the tuning pegs. If you came across a violin in some uninhabited woods, and after carbon-dating it, concluded that it was many, many hundreds of years old, if the strings were, astonishingly, tuned to perfect 5ths of E, A, D, G, would you really conclude that such tuning "Is what it is" and was simply the product of chance? True, a tuning of E, A, D, G, is mathematically as unlikely as any other tuning; but no other tuning allows the same ease of playing everything from Bach to Prokofiev, so wouldn't the intervals of perfect fifths not only be improbable mathematically speaking, but <i><u>surprising</u></i>, given that they allow so many other things to occur? And wouldn't such surprise entail a <i>prima facie</i> argument <i><u>against</u></i> the idea that such perfectly tuned intervals were products of chance, or the inherent physical properties of strings and wood?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I think so. And what is true of the surprise we would experience at finding such a tuning on a violin is the same sort of surprise we would — and <i>should</i> — experience at finding a similar kind of tuning among helium and beryllium nuclei.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-49767227107797694172012-03-20T23:46:00.000-07:002012-03-21T23:21:58.892-07:00Pot-Kettle-Black<a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" /></a><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Circular reasoning is a fairly frequent fallacy in discussions with ideologists and those holding onto cherished beliefs (both non-secular and secular).</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Quite so. Circular reasoning lies at the very foundation of the Darwinian paradigm; a fact criticized numerous times by skeptics of the hypothesis, as well as cited approvingly by its advocates. The difference is that the former believe it undercuts the rest of the hypothesis while the latter believe it's simply "repeating the obvious." As the saying goes, "It's not a bug; it's a feature!"</span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">If for example you ask a devout believer "What can you provide as evidence that your "holy scripture" is the word of God?" , and the believer replies: "In the first chapter of the holy scripture, it says verbatim: "All that is written here is the word of God", it is circular reasoning because that which the questioner wanted to subject to critical examination (the alleged "truths" in the scripture) is fallaciously presented by the believer as the truth.</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Another example would be if we ask a devout Darwinist "Why did some species survive" and the believer replies "Because they were fit!" And if we further inquire, "Fit? What do you mean by 'fit'? What is the criterion of 'fitness' and by what means can you discern whether or not a given species is, indeed, 'fit'?" If the Faithful Darwinist replies "I know a given species is 'fit' because it survived," then that would be another example of circular reasoning: "survival" is explained by reference to "fitness" and "fitness" is explained by reference to "survival."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i>Its not a bug, it's a feature!</i> The Darwinian Faithful believe their circular reasoning is justified; their circular reasoning is better than someone else's circular reasoning. But, of course, A is A; circular reasoning is circular reasoning. If such reasoning renders vacuous a claim made on behalf of religion, it renders vacuous a claim made on behalf of Darwinism.</span></div>
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-10208514083134936102012-03-20T23:42:00.001-07:002012-03-21T23:21:20.545-07:00Study Objectivism and You'll Speak English Gooder<a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Objectivism-Guide-Learning-Philosophy/dp/0451236297/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1331776784&sr=8-3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Objectivism-Guide-Learning-Philosophy/dp/0451236297/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1331776784&sr=8-3</span></a></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Go to: "Read First Chapter Free" at the right of the page. Navigate to the 6th page, last paragraph:</span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"<b>Does</b> any of them have a trace of momentary plausibility to you?"</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">An excerpt from: <i>Understanding Objectivism: A Guide to Learning Ayn Rand's Philosophy</i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">transcribed from audio tape and edited by Michael Berliner</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Objectivist grammar, anyone? Leonard Peikoff bragged about Michael Berliner's editing talents (and, in turn, Berliner bragged that he edited only for style and grammar, not philosophical content), yet Berliner has a bit of a problem making a verb and its nominative (the pronominal adjective "any") agree in number.</span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"<b>Do</b> any of them have a trace of momentary plausibility to you?"</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Much better. Berliner could have written "Does any <i>one</i> of them have a trace of momentary plausibility to you?", which construction would make "any" into an adjective modifying the nominative "one", the sense being "Any one of them <i>does have</i> momentary plausibility." Without "one," however, the sense is "Any of them <i>do have</i> momentary plausibility."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Then, again, we learned English grammar on Earth. Maybe Berliner learned his on Uranus.</span></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-17200522398468961572012-03-20T23:33:00.000-07:002012-03-21T23:20:33.433-07:00You Could Die Laughing at This (or Get a Doctor to Help You)<a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Over the past few days on SOLO (http://www.solopassion.com/), there has been a debate raging reminiscent of the sort of badly written screenplays for which I used to write "coverage" when I briefly worked as a reader for various producers in Hollywood; i.e., the narrative starts nowhere, goes nowhere, and ends nowhere. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A minor randroid on SOLO referring to itself as "Leonid" waxes enthusiastic about suicide, <u>provided</u> <u>that</u> it be <i>moral</i>. And how, pray tell, does this Leonid distinguish a <i>moral</i> suicide from an <i>immoral</i> one? It writes:</span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I think [suicide's] justified if and only if life becomes its own opposite . . . an agony.</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Um, but, isn't that what <u>anyone</u> committed to killing himself would claim; i.e., that his life had become the opposite of life, and that he was in agony? Yes, I think so. Does the Leonid believe that, therefore, an <i>immoral</i> suicide would be one committed frivolously, just for shits-and-giggles? As in <i>"La, la, la, la, la, la, la! What a fine, sunny day it is today! Instead of tandem-biking with my best friend and having a picnic in the park, I think I'll go into the closet and hang myself. Yes, I've always meant to give that a try, and I'm feeling so positive and expansive, I think it's time to do it. Heigh, ho! What fun!"</i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Would that be an "immoral" suicide? Has the Leonid thought this through? Does the Leonid even know what he's talking about? We suspect not.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Another randroid at SOLO calling itself, for some reason, "Mark Hubbard," suggests that having the actual freedom to walk into his own closet any time he feels inclined to do so, and hang himself with the straps of his straitjacket is insufficient. He requires the state to support his efforts by passing legislation in which this freedom is "protected"; something like, e.g., <i>"We, the State, do hereby declare that Mark Hubbard (as well as anyone else in our glorious dominion) has the explicit <u>right</u> to enter his own closet, on his own decision, and hang himself with his own belt until dead."</i> </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Which hypothetical immediately brings up this question: Is there anything standing in the way of his doing this right now, even without such legislation? Has he tried? Is his closet guarded by the state? Has the state installed "security" cameras in his closet to ensure that Hubbard not enter it for the sake of hanging himself?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Um, we think not. In fact, we think that suicide is not the issue at all in this debate. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But before continuing, let me say this: having known many Objectivists for many years, first InLife and later, OnLine, I can testify to the fact that they are big talkers, i.e., bullshitters. It's usually harmless because they are mainly occupied bullshitting themselves and other Objectivists, the cause probably being that their psyches generate a rich fantasy life, in which they imagine themselves as one of Ayn Rand's characters . . . perhaps some young, promising writer, or actor, or composer, or inventor, happily doing Midas Mulligan's laundry in Galt's Gulch in order to participate in The Great Strike against the Looters and Moochers. How exciting! "Yes, I am one of them!" they cry. But my own experience tells me they are, in fact, abject cowards. They blow lots of hot air regarding their supposed <i>right</i> to kill themselves in order to prove their "integrity" toward life because they imagine John Galt and Howard Roark saying the same thing; however, the entire thing is an act. It's actually a form of play.<br /><br />No. Objectivists who argue how it is a <i>right</i> to commit suicide would never have the courage of their rhetoric and actually hang themselves, or defenestrate themselves. They already have the <u>freedom</u> to do so, ergo, they don't require the state to declare that they also have the <u>right</u>.<br /><br />No, no. What these randroids actually want is something quite different.<br /><br />They want the state to grant the right of <i>someone else</i> — for example, a doctor — to <i>kill them upon their request</i>. That's a different issue entirely.<br /><br />If a randroid were terminally ill (God forbid!), and if the physical agony were so great that he concluded it made day-to-day life unbearable, I can tell you right now that he would never shoot himself, or hang himself, or hurl himself off the roof of a tall building. They already have the freedom to do so, but they haven't the courage. What they actually want is to be able to go to some nearby "clinic" and request a service from a doctor, or some other medically trained technician, such as, e.g., "<i>I'm terminally ill and in great pain. Here's a check for $250.00. Please put me to sleep and inject me with poison. Oh, you don't take checks? Put it on my credit card.</i>"<br /><br />That's what they want. Objectivists hide behind the rhetoric of "suicide" and the supposed "right to die with dignity", but what they really want is the right for <i>someone else</i> to commit murder if requested and compensated by the intended victim.<br /><br />There are many problems with such a system. Just one of them is that, given the fact of interventionism, i.e., that there has, for many years, been a close relationship between the State and Medicine, and especially given the fact that the State licenses doctors, the question naturally arises as to whether the State should approve one of its own licensees whose practice includes killing patients on their request. Especially, since the licensing and approval process, being (both traditionally and currently) a State function, is financed by taxes. Does this not implicate taxpayers, at least indirectly, in the state-sanctioned killing of those who want others to end their lives for them? Yes, I think it does. And I think taxpayers would (and should) object to the State's use of their money being spent on a bureaucratic process that results in approving and licensing a medical expert's use of technically sophisticated means to kill someone simply because he requests it. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">That's only one problem with the system (there are others), but it's one that randroids and other "right to die" advocates constantly evade.<br /><br />So when the Mark Hubbard on SOLO complains that Ken Orr vehemently disapproves of state-sanctioned murder-upon-request-by-victim, we neither agree nor sympathize with the Hubbard. We know nothing about Mr. Orr except that, on this particular issue, he is right: the function of the state is to protect rights, and since life is the source of rights, the primary function of the state is to protect life. The protection of <i>life</i>, not the protection of <i>dignity</i>.<br /><br />Got news for the Hubbard, who drones on about the difference between "rights" and "responsibilities": Yo! The State is not responsible for your dignity! <u>You</u> are responsible for your dignity. If you feel the need or desire to off yourself because of some anguish, physical or mental, that is crushing your <i>dignitas</i>, you already have the freedom to do so. Just have the courage of your convictions and do it. <b><i>But don't ask someone else, such as a doctor, to do it for you.</i></b></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2799870134608261891.post-51110749649665159872012-03-20T23:24:00.001-07:002012-03-21T23:19:41.036-07:00Did Diana Hsieh Shumthin'?<a href="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/ZaHDX.jpg" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />Here are some examples of meteoric out-gassings on the Randroid Belt site known as Noodle Food, authored and administered by Diana Hsieh (http://blog.dianahsieh.com/):<br /><br />A questioner admits to reading Atlas Shrugged; then admits that, though enjoying the novel, he finds the characters "flat". He does not say "boring" or "uninteresting"; he says "flat." He wishes to know why these characters are constructed the way they are (e.g., could it be because they represent abstract ideas?). </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A "flat" character does not mean a "boring" character. It's a technical term in literary theory popularized by the novelist E. M. Forster in his monograph on writing titled "Aspects of the Novel." According to Forster, a "flat" character is a kind of token: his or her psychology and values do not grow, change, evolve, or come to any kind of crisis during the course of the narrative because characters — like plot points — have <i>functions</i> within the story; it is simply not the function of a flat character to steal attention away from the main character(s) — the protagonist(s) and the antagonist(s) — by growing, changing, evolving, or reaching any sort of "crisis" within the story in which they must exercise his or her will, and come to a decision — or initiate an action — that would be surprising, i.e., a new pattern of behavior inconsistent with their previous pattern. "Flat" characters remain who they were throughout the entire course of the story, because they are there simply to provide a particular kind of obstacle (or point of affinity) for the main characters. They are part of the stock-in-trade of every playwright, screenwriter, short-story writer, and novelist. They are a particular kind of <i>narrative tool</i>.<br /><br />All of this is utterly lost to Hsieh, who mistakenly thinks that to call a character "flat" is an insult. It might be technically incorrect to call a character "flat" from the standpoint of craft in a given context; but it's not a put-down. If a music student incorrectly identifies a chord as a diminished 7th when, in fact, it is a Neapolitan 6th, the identification is simply mistaken as a matter of musical craft; it's not an insult. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">As an offscreen sidekick named Greg Perkins reads the question aloud to Hsieh, they both begin to laugh, roll their eyes, and snort with embarrassment, as if to to say "Really!! How COULD anyone be so stupid as to think THAT!" As someone who earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Hsieh surely must have been tasked with teaching graduates or undergraduates. Remember those rare teachers who began their Q&A sessions after a lecture by saying "Don't be afraid to ask questions. There's no such thing as a stupid question in this class. Ask anything you wish." <i>Well Hsieh ain't one of those kinds of teachers</i>! Apparently, there <u>are</u> stupid questions in her class, and she will let the questioner and everyone else know it by laughing, snorting, and rolling her eyes.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">As if that weren't enough, she then asserts a vicious <i>ad hominem</i> argument by impugning the honesty of anyone who could possibly think such a thing as what the questioner is asking. In this instance, she claims that those who think the characters in Atlas Shrugged are "flat" are simply dishonest; they dislike Ayn Rand; ergo, they're not giving the novel "an honest reading." See for yourself, O Noble Randroid Belt Watchers. It's on her video at 1:24, and again at 2:18, at which time she asserts that to claim the characters in Atlas Shrugged are "flat" is nothing but the reader giving voice to his prejudices. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Then she moves from insulting the questioner (who, just in case you were wondering, was not I), to being completely irrelevant by replying to a question that wasn't asked: she waxes enthusiastic about all the "good but ordinary people" in Rand's major novels, such as the character of Mike in The Fountainhead, or Cherryl in Atlas Shrugged, in order to dispel any nasty rumors that Rand writes only about mega-wealthy industrialists. Good. But that has nothing to do with whether or not the characters are "flat" or "round". </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So far, she's managed not to reply to what the questioner actually asked, having opted instead for dismissive chortles and insulting ad hominems.<br /><br />A bit later, in response to a follow-up question read offscreen by Greg Perkins regarding the idea that the story-line in Atlas Shrugged is simply propaganda for the sake of "getting across an idea," she repeats her ad hominem argument, asserting that whoever thinks such a thing is simply "dishonest." </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The truth is this:<br /><br /><u>All</u> stories, by their very nature, are propaganda; either explicitly or implicitly.<br /><br />When the film version of "The Grapes of Wrath" was released, the censors in the Soviet Union refused to permit the movie to be exhibited in the USSR. That's rather strange, given that the story of the suffering of the Joad family at the hands of greedy bankers and insensitive capitalists should resonate very well with the Marxist worldview. It turns out, however, that the reason the film was banned in the USSR is that there are a number of scenes in which the Joads load up their car — (ahem!) their <i>personal</i>, <i>private-property</i> car — and move to a different location of the United States, without need of any sort of internal passport, or without asking any bureaucrat's permission. Is this not propagandistic on the part of the American filmmakers, given that no one in the Soviet Union at the time owned a personal car (except party elites); no one could move about freely without obtaining the proper permission from some bureaucracy, and without official papers permitting relocation; and the masses had generally been indoctrinated into believing that capitalism would make it impossible for a poor family like the Joads to obtain such luxuries as a <i>personal</i> automobile for their own <i>private</i> use? </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In other words, even "The Grapes of Wrath" <i>implicitly propagandized on behalf of a certain political viewpoint</i> (and probably not the one the American filmmakers intended, either). </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A Russian film student once told me that when he lived in the former Soviet Union, occasional American movies would be permitted to be exhibited, and Russian audiences would gape in wonderment at certain things in the movie, concluding that the whole thing must be a simple exercise in American propaganda for capitalism. For example, there might be a perfectly innocuous scene in which a "typical American family" has dinner together at their dining room table. Then the phone rings. The son runs up from the table to answer the phone located in the foyer. It's his friend. He runs upstairs to chat privately with his friend on another phone in his bedroom. The mother, suspicious of this new friend's unexpected phone call, runs downstairs, into the basement, and secretly listens to the son's conversation on another phone. Good grief, Comrades! How many phones does a "typical" American family have? Are we, a typical Russian audience watching this movie, expected to believe that even a typical American family nonchalantly owns <i>three</i> telephones? Many Russians don't even own one!"</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">You see? Even a B movie about suburban family life in the USA has implicit, unintended propaganda in it that will easily be noticed by a Russian audience bringing a very different set of life experiences to their viewing of it. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Clearly, none of this has anything to do with impugning anyone's honesty.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Enough about Noodle Food. Its authoress is merely one among many know-nothings in that vast chasm called the Randroid Belt. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Whoever asked the question on Diana Hsieh's blog deserves a much better, much fuller, and more relevant reply. Here to provide one is none other than E. M. Forster himself, quoted at length, from his monograph on literary technique entitled "Aspects of the Novel" (1927): </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"We may divide characters into flat and round. Flat characters were called 'humorous' in the 17th century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as 'I never will desert Mr. Micawber.' There is Mrs. Micawber—she says she won't desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn't, and there she is. Or: 'I must conceal, even by subterfuges, the poverty of my master's house.' There is Caleb Balderstone in The Bride of Lammamoor [by Sir Walter Scott]. He does not use the actual phrase, but it completely describes him; he has no existence outside of it, no pleasures, none of the private lusts and aches that must complicate the most consistent of servitors. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, whatever lies he tells or plates he breaks, it is to conceal the poverty of his master's house . . . Or take Proust. There are numerous flat characters in Proust, such as the Princess of Parma, or Legrandin. Each can be expressed in a single sentence, the Princess's sentence being 'I must be particularly careful to be kind.' She does nothing except to be particularly careful, and those of the other characters who are more complex than herself easily see through the kindness, since it is only a by-product of the carefulness."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in— recognized by the reader's emotional eye, not by the visual eye, which merely notes the recurrence of a proper name. In Russian novels, where they so seldom occur, they would be a decided help. It is a convenience for an author when he can strike with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere — little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There follows an extended and brilliant analysis of several Jane Austen novels. Forster then wraps up the discussion of characterization with a brief summary of "<u>round</u> characters": </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">"The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">If it <i>never surprises</i>, it is <u>flat</u>. Now ask yourself: does James Taggart ever surprise? What about Lillian Rearden? Wesley Mouch? Orrin Boyle? John Galt? I think not. I think all of these characters — and many more in Atlas Shrugged — are truly <i>flat characters</i>; something Rand fully intended, in order to set in high relief the roundness of Dagny and Hank Rearden. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Whoever posed that question to Diana Hsieh: I hope the above was a more satisfactory reply.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One of the mighty randroids flitting about that gaping maw in the vacuum of space known as the Randroid Belt is the atheist-at-large, supernova-sized intellect behind that subtle bestseller amongst randroids entitled, "Atheism: The Case Against God."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Rumors flying around the Randroid Belt suggest that he now suffers the simultaneous wrath of his landlady and the IRS. We don't know whose wrath is worse (though we can guess), and we don't know why this should be. However, we would like to help. It's the altruist in us.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I therefore urge those sympathetic to such admittedly embarrassing predicaments to read the following advertisement for a new book — destined, I think, to be a bestseller, at least in the Randroid Belt — and consider purchasing it after its impending publication (date to be announced later). I understand that all proceeds accrue to a special charity established by the Atheist Alliance Association for precisely these sorts of situations.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter floats a yawning chasm of space debris; broken bits of useless rock orbiting our sun <i>en masse</i>. Astronomers call this chasm an <b>asteroid</b> <b>belt</b>.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Floating around the World Wide Web and orbiting their own sun <i>en masse</i> are broken bits of useless intellectual junk we call a <b>Randroid Belt</b>. This flotsam has various names, depending on its origin; names like "Objectivist Living," "SOLO," and "NoodleFood," to name just a few.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">From time to time, we'll tool around this void and comment on bits of Objectivist net-junk as they hurtle past us on a collision course with their central star — just for laughs. There's so <i>much</i> to choose from, even though the Randroid Belt itself is mainly empty space.</span></span></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0