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Posted by on Jan 16, 2013 | 15 comments

Anyone here order some pain?

Because that is what is about to be dished out.  If any of the readers here are anywhere near Texas, this should be well worth the look.  D’Souza is going to be thoroughly trounced, I assure you.

  • Clayton Flesher

    Two people whose ideas I have no respect for arguing about who has the better faith-based system? No thanks.

    To be honest, it saddens me that with so many good philosophers congregating on here, you are still posting advocacy for the the laughingstock of 20th century philosophy without being called out on it by your fellow bloggers.

    I can’t decide if it is because Law, Blackford, etc. just don’t consider you worthy of noticing, or they don’t want to pick a fight.

    Blackford, for example, has a post from a few years ago going after D’Souza and Randians at the same time.

    http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2009/02/was-christianity-good-for-europe.html

    I can’t find an example of Stephen Law ever having mentioned her, which is probably the most appropriate response by a philosopher.

    Nicholas doesn’t think much of her.

    http://www.skepticink.com/humesapprentice/2012/09/08/ayn-rand-fail-why-strong-libertarianism-is-wrong/#respond

    http://www.skepticink.com/humesapprentice/2012/08/30/why-i-am-a-weak-libertarian/

    I’d actually like to see some of you guys have it out over what I consider to be terrible philosophy. Since you are the one most interested in spreading her gospel, maybe you should be the one to pick the fight.

    • ThePrussian

      If it saddens you, please feel free to go take a hike.

      Look, I know the drill. There is one surefire way to argue against Objectivism: never, ever, ever say honestly what Objectivism is. Lie, distort, hack sentences out of context, and you will build a grand case against Objectivism. Other than that…

      Case in point:
      http://www.skepticink.com/prussian/2012/10/13/about-that-atlas-study/

      But then, you’re the fool who seriously thinks he knows more about climate science than actual climate scientists, so I imagine erudition is wasted on you.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Clayton-Flesher/17103977 Clayton Flesher

        Do you really believe that someone can’t have read and understood Rand’s arguments, but ultimately found them to be poor philosophy?

        Is lying about it the only possible approach to criticism? Are you saying Hayek really didn’t understand her positions?

        I don’t agree with his approach either, but saying all criticism of Rand is based on lies is just silly.

        • ThePrussian

          Right, your comments do not even rise to the level of lies. You don’t even bother to make anything that approaches a claim of fact, so one cannot really accuse you of lying here.

          You do provide any substantial criticism of Rand, and it took about ninety seconds to dispose of the links you provide. As I said, please feel free to take your silly comments and take a hike.

          • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001520476469 Alex Norman

            I do apologize for the treatment you receive from some commenters. I happen to disagree with you on many issues (EG your criticism of Krugman), but there’s no reason to act like this. I enjoy your blog precisely because you have different views from mine and you express them in a way that makes me think.

          • ThePrussian

            Thank you, that is really a nice thing to say. I appreciate that a great deal.

            I know that I have a temper, but try as I might, I cannot take these snide little asides that regard proof as irrelevant.

            So, again, that’s terribly sweet of you.

      • Ronlawhouston

        I’m taking a hike with Clayton. You’re fortunate to be part of Skeptic Inc. Keep treating your readers like an obnoxious arsehole and you won’t have many. But hey, you will have a soap box designed for one.

        • ThePrussian

          Well, goodbye. Flesher has been consistently insulting, not just here but throughout. You get what you start.

          • Ronlawhouston

            Look, I consider myself an objective third party. I have no idea what your personal interactions are with people. My observations of you from your interactions with others are: 1.) You have serious anger issues; 2) You think everyone who disagrees with you is a fitting subject for your anger; and 3) This forum is nothing more than a fetish to deal with issues #1 and #2.

            Try growing up, responding to people in a rational manner and perhaps you’ll be taken as a serious person. Until that time you’ll be exactly like another object of your anger PeeZus. You’ll have your angry sycophants but no one else will even want to listen to a word you say.

          • ThePrussian

            You consider yourself “an objective third party”. That settles it, I suppose.

            P.Z. lied to my face and, as I documented, has a consistent habit of lying and defaming those far better than he. I take this seriously, which is why I get angry. Can you show me anything that I said about P.Z. that is wrong?

            Flesher has been consistently rude and looked to pick a fight several times. Now he’s got one. And, no, this isn’t about ‘disagreement’; when Slate posted that article criticising Ayn Rand, I wrote a three thousand word essay that I don’t think any “objective third party” would say was particularly angry. But Flesher’s style is the classic internet twerp argument: a few supercilious snide comments without even the beginning of a rational case. There is no point even trying to argue with that.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Clayton-Flesher/17103977 Clayton Flesher

    Shit it is too early. I said Hayek when I meant Nozick.

    • ThePrussian

      Took me less than a minute to find Nozick saying the following: ” The followers of Rand, for example, treat “A is A” not just as “everything is identical to itself” but as a kind of statement about essences and the limits of things. “A is A, and it can’t be anything else, and once it’s A today, it can’t change its spots tomorrow.”"

      If this means anything, it means that Objectivists claim that nothing changes. They don’t. So much for Nozick.

      • http://www.facebook.com/gojaejin Jeremy J. Goard

        “If this means anything, it means that Objectivists claim that nothing changes.”

        No, it means that Rand regularly equivocated between the tautological meaning of “A is A” (which she falsely and ignorantly claimed to be under attack in mainstream philosophy) and many non-tautological claims that would only follow from “A is A” if it had (implicitly) something like Nozick’s offered meaning. Here, the second time Rand calls up “A is A” in Galt’s speech, she makes many false claims both about human psychology and about the worldviews of primitive peoples (unless “savage” is being used here definitionally as an Objectivist term of art, in which case I’d file it in the robust directory of Randian semantic slipperiness — if the headhunters of New Guinea don’t count as “savages”, then it’s a mighty deceptive term to use):

        “A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the state when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perception and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move-and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has-and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection-the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate-the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives-that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

        “We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.”

        You’re absolutely right that many critics of Rand have very little clue what they’re talking about, whether leftist or religious or kind of secular moderate. There are also, however, very many well-versed apostates such as myself and the main bloggers at aynrandcontrahumannature who know the argumentation intimately, know very well about Rand’s lazy intellectual habits, and also know on a personal level exactly what it’s like to abuse our minds constructing post-hoc rationalizations to rescue her logical leaps and absurd assumptions.

        • ThePrussian

          I have to give you full credit; you’re one of the very few I have come across who has actually seems to have read her work. I make it a rule to read all the arguments against my own position I can find, so I will be taking a shufty at this blog.

          That said, I would like to comment on two things – 1) in Rand’s views of savages not understanding that A is A, I was recently reading how Joseph Kony’s LRA has as an official doctrine that he can make them invulnerable to bullets and turn stones into grenades. 2) I found the following on the blog – I’m reading from the back onwards –

          “Islamic terror has created a world which is not compatible with the sort of individualism advocated by Rand”

          If that’s the case, why has so much stiff necked opposition to Islamic jihad comes from Objectivists? Why is it that it was The New Individualist that put the Muhammad cartoon on its cover, and the Ayn Rand Institute that went from college to college showing the cartoons? I really cannot think of any comparable shows of defiance – even the RDF didn’t reprint the cartoons at the time.

          And then there’s this “The people at ARI are not all that serious about spreading Rand’s ideas. ” That’s what’s called a petitio principii. Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but there’s no evidence advanced for it there, while I know what Yaron Brook, for example, has been doing a phenomenal job.

          I’ll read the whole thing, but so far I’m just not impressed.

        • ThePrussian

          The further I read this, the less impressed I get. Try this

          ”
          “I shall identify as ‘length’ that attribute of any existent possessing it which can be quantitatively related to a unit of length, without specifying the quantity.”Yes folks, according Ayn Rand ‘length’ is that ‘attribute’ which can be ‘quantitively related’ a ‘unit of’….wait for it…’length!’

          Phew! It’s just as well for Western Civilization that Rand was around to straighten out such challenging philosophical issues.”

          This stinks. As anyone who reads the section knows, Rand was not claiming to define length, nor is it anywhere claimed that she is important for defining length. The section is about how definitions and concepts are arrived in the first place, with the definition of length being used as an example. I’ll keep on going, but what I’ve read so far is singularly unimpressive.