caroljane

Yes, it is. And to be diagnosed with a disease and refuse to take medication for it,is a hell of a choice, one I have made myself.

The pun on "checking your premises" is another meme. I thought I read it in a NYT review of CUI. "When told to check your premisess, you run home in a panic, because Cousin Eugene's associates know where you live." - from Ten Reasons You will Probably not Become an Objectivist"

Wrong, it is definitely better than any.

Jts probably just forgot that he had already posted the video and had the same conversation as before. That is because he refuses to take his meds,

tThe Galtstone located in O'Gulchown, County Ulcer, is a popular tourist attraction. Kissing the Stone is believed to confer the Gift of the Two-Hour Monologue.=Wikipedia

It is worth noting that Al Quaeda, on all evidence, is much weaker than it was eleven years ago. Flags, yes. Propaganda, yes. Riots and hooliganism yes. Suicide attackers, yes, although more and more often they succeed only in killing themselves and fellow Muslims. But where is the American body count? Where is the rise of jihad on American soil, the sleeper cells of the Muslim Brotherhood scything the innocent? In Libya, the count was four, plus the ten Libyan security guards who died trying to save them. This is not much of an advance, for a worldwide campaign of such supposedly ubiquitous sinister power. In the Middle East, as they have been for centuries, Americans and other foreigners will always be at peril, although not nearly at such peril as the Middle Easterners themselves. Safe in North America, we can easily frighten ourselves that the past must necessarily be repeated, because nobody learns the correct lessons from history. But we should also comfort ourselves a little, because there are no correct lessons, there are only human beings living in history, and the past can never be either repeated or resuscitated.

I liked that jts! Especially the part where he keeps gurging on the grape to make sure it is really dead. Please post more Animals Behaving Naturally, fewer Parrots Raving Irrationally.

Coincidentally I am reading an early Orwell novel, it is a satire but I can tell from reading it, that Orwell knew depression intimately. (I don't know any of Orwell's life except a few bio details}. What a writer he was. Sometimes I think he knew everything.

Payday loans have saved my life more than once. If you can payback within 48 hours of borrowing there is no interest, you are just borrowing from yourself. Also my son's best friend and his girlfriend used to work there. I do love the TV Ad, "O give me a loan, where you don't leave your home/ where there's no line and no one to see' where the clerk in the store/don't see you no more/ and you don't need no photo ID"

Isn't he the anatomist who discovered the galt bladder?

Speaking of hate speech, I am absolutely outraged that Pamela Geller dares to name her Islamophobic site "Atlas Shrugs". And I'm not even an Objectivist. In this one case I wish Peikoff would sue her to hell and gone,

Abanob Basseley is credited as a costume designer for the movie. It is a woman's name, and this name is on facebook and Linkedin.

The plot thickens! Nakoula/Bacile only got out of prison in June 2011. Nasrulla Abdelmasih, head of Media for Christ, actually arranged the production. He has a lot of media experience, )unlike Nakoula who had none and was not even that good at check-kiting), as an associate of Robert Spencer in anti-Muslamist activities.

I don't know that at all. As I have said, it was a useful prop, a flame-fanner, part of the press kit. Somebody made it, promoted and circulated it. It is coming in handy for the Islamists. It has had its role in murders. But I'm sure that if the purveyors should ever be charged or sued for anything, they will say what you said.

I don't know that at all. As I have said, it was a useful prop, a flame-fanner, part of the press kit. Somebody made it, promoted and circulated it. It is coming in handy for the Islamists. It has had its role in murders.

The frontliners on the soundstage have been roughly identified, now it is time to speculate on the ultimate string-pullers who have hung them out to dry. A brief sample of Whose Conspiracy is it Anyway? from around the web: 1. The Islamists themselves, as per MSK's above suspicion, making the film as part of their press kit for the September attacks. 2. The CIA/Mossad 3. Russia (?) 4. Obama (of course) At this point I will believe anything. Let the craziness continue. Why does Nakoula evoke a Jack Ruby flashback?

Of course they don't. But whoever made and promoted the piece of crap and in Klein's words "knew this probably would happen" bear responsibility too.

A new name has entered the video story. Media for Christ, a Duarte, CA NFP that has produced upwards of 5,000 videos according to their website, has been mentioned as the possible producer.

Huh? He's gone after Dennis Hardin, not me. I haven't had much to say about DIM, since I haven't read it. http://forum.objecti...64 Sorry for the mixup, Dennis.

OK, I write it down twice. I don't know why this keeps happening when I only push Quote once.

You got me beat. --Brant You got me beat. --Brant lol. Surely you don't share my attitude to most of my own posts --"What? You don't expect me to think about this stuff do you? I just write it down!"

I'm going to leave a detailed critique of your article to Stephen who has the time, knowledge and ability for it. I would like to make a few ad hoc comments of my own, however. I don't know what you capitalize "Liberty." I know why you don't capitalize "freedom." The two words aren't quite interchangeable and "liberty" has more of a French cultural-intellectual feel to it than "freedom." Or, liberty has a cultural bias and freedom an intellectual one. As for "absolute political freedom"--you can't get there from here and if you could there'd be no way it could last very long. Your article is Randian or Objectivist re-enforcement. The basic problem is neither you nor Rand knows enough about egoism to support a proposition of "absolute political freedom." Neither do I, but I know it. What you are actually supporting is "the rule of the airmen" or intellectual elite. These "Witch Doctors" always get pushed aside by the guys with the most guns--the most effective guns--usually by being killed. Not all of them. Stalin can embrace a Lysenko, not the one who got axed in the head in Mexico. These Atilas can be quite happy to call their totalitarianism "absolute political freedom," a la semantical distortions as found in 1984. Absolutism is the cultural heritage of Rand's Objectivism. Objectivists liked to go about in the 1960s and 1970s saying "Absolutely," seemingly about absolutely everything they could. This is not a call for rationality, it is a statement of answers found and imposed and lets talk about something else. The "something else" logically leads to more declamations, sooner of later, of "Absolutely!" This brings us to the central fallacy of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand: the implicit, contradictory disowning of actual rationality. This means the creation of an intellectual edifice, fortifying it, and pulling up the drawbridges. Your article is more of this fortification. It is only inside this anti-intellectual fort of Orthodox Objectivism that talk of "absolute political freedom" can seem to make any sense. The same thing happened with the Rand-Branden affair. It only made sense in the context of intense rationalizations generated by her and imposed and self-imposed on him. In a real sense both you and Rand make the same mistake of libertarians. Many libertarians seem stuck in politics with their NIOF and Objectivists in ethics with their egoism, grossly and incompletely rendered. Both groups give lip service to "reason" with the Objectivists throwing in "rational" or "rationality" with which libertarians generally don't bother, being more anti-intellectual, again, generally speaking. If Objectivism were done right--and it never has been--it would advocate critical thinking, not absolutism--the anti-thesis. This is the true source of individualism out of the biology of it all. There's no such thing as group-think. Instead it gets mired in this un-ending complexity of "egoism" and relative ironic, insular collectivism. It's relative because it relates to itself, not reality and reason the way, say, good science does. There are seven billion people in this world all willing to be as egoistical-egotistical in their own ways as you are yours. Some of these "egoists" are even willing to fly airplanes into skyscrapers. Real Objectivism (objectivism) is the metaphysics and epistemology--shared with science and all truth seekers--and rational self-interest as the foundation of its ethics and freedom as its political target. The complexity is in the myraid details of actual human beings human being and they can only begin to be addressed out of a generous liberal arts education, not the artificiality of Randian characters in action in her novels or pretend-to-be Randian characters in real life. The basic principle of Objectivism is according to Rand rationality. What it needs is modesty and critical thinking. What is "rational" can be, like anyone's idea of "absolute political freedom," all over the map. Bet? --Brant Good post, Brant. I think I understood 83% of it.

ND, you must be crushed since Prof. Knucky has set you straight on the DIM Hypothesis, We don't need to wait for Robert's review now. The Knuck's insightful commentary tells us pore folk who doesn't think as good as Dr. Peikoff, like anybody could, everything we need to know. DIM for Dummies as it were.

Bacile/Basseley now being known as a convicted American fraudster and Coptic Christian, it is now about his "investors" and following the money. A couple theories: - He was simply working a scam, collecting cash to make a movie, keeping most of it and creating the thing we saw. - He was recruited and financed by persons unknown to produce a piece of propaganda - He is an unrecognized film auteur who believes he faithfully depicted the real Mohammed with great artistry. Sorry, that's three.

Where was I casting stones and crowing any sort of victory? This is a news story , a very dramatic one, There is, as you said, no good side to the ugly mess of the events, no possible victory for anyone when or if the actual makers and distributors of the film are identified. But it is a puzzle and if I were a Buddhist nun in Bhutan I would still be interested in it. I was briefly a news reporter and I still enjoy evaluating evidence and following stories, despite my crippling progressive bias I actually care more about the actual facts than chalking up "one for our side", thus I enjoy conversationally speculating on threads like this. I forget that "debate mode" is often a default setting here for any story with political overtones.