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brainwaneSo the danger of your friend lending you a complete bound volume of The Objectivist Newsletter (1962-1965) is that you might fall down the Objectivist drama rabbit-hole.
There's a real tap-dancing answer to the question "What are the respective obligations of parents to children, and children to parents?" There's Ayn Rand playing ballet music all evening as therapy for an ennui-stricken dude. There's an intra-Nathaniel Branden Institute baseball game. There's Branden on sex, on calling yourself an Objectivist (no, he and Miss Rand are the only Objectivists, y'all can call yourselves students or supporters of Objectivist philosophy), on the "let's take over an island" crowd ("an unprecedented low in offensive absurdity"). I don't have time to write up and post the photos I took yet. But I can link a little to the tremendous and edifying schadenfreude of Objectivist infighting.
Ayn Rand's 1968 repudiation of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden where the undersigned "condemn and repudiate these two persons irrevocably" which at least is nice and clear compared to a lot of call-outs.
Nathaniel Branden's response (I cannot describe the sound that escaped my mouth when I read the sentence "Until the evening of August 25, 1968, Miss Rand and I used the same attorney.") and Barbara Branden's response (it's hard for the phrase "improper financial considerations" to sound right in an Objectivist essay).
The main place on the web hosting Rand's "To Whom It May Concern" notification is "CheckingPremises" whose FAQ asks and answers:
Oh good! .... wait, there's more to that answer. It continues:
Oh they have a strict set of conditions! That's all squared away then.
The FAQ also notes, "We all know 'that guy' who is constantly making pronouncements that show a total lack of understanding Objectivism or who is always ranting disrespectful invectives about Dr. Peikoff or The Ayn Rand Institute." You know, I actually don't know whether I know That Guy! Or maybe I just know him as a different That Guy.
CheckingPremises casts its flinty gaze upon a number of their neighbors, with the most effort so far concentrated on a writer and speaker named Diana Brickell (they refer to her by her old surname, Hsieh). Diana Brickell's Twitter feed is mostly her complaining at companies, e.g.,
"@lyft I had a ride yesterday with a driver who didn't wear his seatbelt. Apart from being a serious risk to him, the car dinged periodically for the whole ride. I wanted to write a review or report it, but I don't see any way to do that now. Too late?"
Call me a business-hating anti-life altruistic martyr-complex statist but I think maybe an Objectivist complaining to Lyft about a driver not wearing his seatbelt should reflect on where their philosophy intersects with their choices.
CheckingPremises also led me to "Quality Control in Movements" which suggests a taxonomy of available "tools for individuals who are trying to minimize the effect of counter-productive members of a movement". I'll reword it a little:
That last bit is actually a useful addition, for me, to the thinking I was collecting in this MetaFilter post about call-outs and activist communities.
I get so much reassurance from reading the minutes of these old fallings-out. Humans.
There's a real tap-dancing answer to the question "What are the respective obligations of parents to children, and children to parents?" There's Ayn Rand playing ballet music all evening as therapy for an ennui-stricken dude. There's an intra-Nathaniel Branden Institute baseball game. There's Branden on sex, on calling yourself an Objectivist (no, he and Miss Rand are the only Objectivists, y'all can call yourselves students or supporters of Objectivist philosophy), on the "let's take over an island" crowd ("an unprecedented low in offensive absurdity"). I don't have time to write up and post the photos I took yet. But I can link a little to the tremendous and edifying schadenfreude of Objectivist infighting.
Ayn Rand's 1968 repudiation of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden where the undersigned "condemn and repudiate these two persons irrevocably" which at least is nice and clear compared to a lot of call-outs.
Nathaniel Branden's response (I cannot describe the sound that escaped my mouth when I read the sentence "Until the evening of August 25, 1968, Miss Rand and I used the same attorney.") and Barbara Branden's response (it's hard for the phrase "improper financial considerations" to sound right in an Objectivist essay).
The main place on the web hosting Rand's "To Whom It May Concern" notification is "CheckingPremises" whose FAQ asks and answers:
“Will CheckingPremises.org seek to ‘blacklist’ everyone who its authors, principals, and associates dislike or with whom they disagree?”
Of course not! This is not The Spanish Inquisition, nor is it a “witch-hunt.”
Oh good! .... wait, there's more to that answer. It continues:
We have a strict set of conditions which a person would have to meet before we would consider adding them to our current controversies page. These will be discussed in further detail in our response to some of the other relevant questions in this FAQ.
Oh they have a strict set of conditions! That's all squared away then.
The FAQ also notes, "We all know 'that guy' who is constantly making pronouncements that show a total lack of understanding Objectivism or who is always ranting disrespectful invectives about Dr. Peikoff or The Ayn Rand Institute." You know, I actually don't know whether I know That Guy! Or maybe I just know him as a different That Guy.
CheckingPremises casts its flinty gaze upon a number of their neighbors, with the most effort so far concentrated on a writer and speaker named Diana Brickell (they refer to her by her old surname, Hsieh). Diana Brickell's Twitter feed is mostly her complaining at companies, e.g.,
"@lyft I had a ride yesterday with a driver who didn't wear his seatbelt. Apart from being a serious risk to him, the car dinged periodically for the whole ride. I wanted to write a review or report it, but I don't see any way to do that now. Too late?"
Call me a business-hating anti-life altruistic martyr-complex statist but I think maybe an Objectivist complaining to Lyft about a driver not wearing his seatbelt should reflect on where their philosophy intersects with their choices.
CheckingPremises also led me to "Quality Control in Movements" which suggests a taxonomy of available "tools for individuals who are trying to minimize the effect of counter-productive members of a movement". I'll reword it a little:
- Shunning, blacklisting, and/or boycotting the person
- Reporting bugs to the person (public and private) (with a reminder that you can't simultaneously shun and bug-report)
- Pre-emption: explicitly okaying diversity of perspectives on non-core issues; signal-boosting good information sources; signal-boosting warnings about the person
That last bit is actually a useful addition, for me, to the thinking I was collecting in this MetaFilter post about call-outs and activist communities.
I get so much reassurance from reading the minutes of these old fallings-out. Humans.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-02-25 09:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-12 02:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-01 06:09 pm (UTC)defending??? Nathaniel Branden
Date: 2018-07-12 02:55 pm (UTC)Miss Rand has given me the right to name that which I infinitely would have preferred to leave unnamed, out of respect for her privacy. I am obliged to report what was in that written paper of mine, in the name of justice and of self-defense.
I don't know what implication other people were probably reading from the description "irrational and so offensive to [Rand]" but I figure he's saying: you might think I was advocating stealing, or killing someone, or something like that, so I need to tell you what it was, so you don't think it's something like that. I feel some sympathy for that.
I still need to listen to a speech by Branden that siderea recommended. Maybe I'll cohere a point of view about Branden beyond "he was an Objectivist and he and Ayn Rand had a pretty eyebrow-raising schism".
Re: defending??? Nathaniel Branden
Date: 2018-07-12 03:15 pm (UTC)