About
Content
Store
Forum

Rebirth of Reason
War
People
Archives
Objectivism

Post to this threadMark all messages in this thread as readMark all messages in this thread as unreadBack one pagePage 0Page 1


Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Post 20

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 5:36pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Ciro,

What a great experiment! I remember reading "The Psychology of Self Esteem" where NB said "The only laboratory for psychological experiment is our own minds" or words to that effect. You do the experiments. You are a scientist [And a brave one]. My hat is off to you!

Mike E.

Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Post 21

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 4:48pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Defending Ayn Rand is NOT idolatry, but WHO WAS AYN RAND? We are still finding out. I hope many people who have memories of her will record them in one form or another, for future generations to evaluate.

I have to point out that the Brandens must have hundreds of memories they haven't yet shared with us, if they ever will. It's kind of hard to get into the swing of that with all the bile that's been heaped on them, especially recently. I don't think, though, that we are at best doomed to Rashomonon (sic?). We can already get a strong sense of her character and personality from the available videos and audio tapes.

Rand appeared on Tonight Show three times in 1967. I saw one. It would be nice if her appearances might be retrieved, if possible; a lot of The Tonight Show was lost.

It isn't just her ideas. It was never just her ideas. A powerful intellectual and moral force vested in one person has always been inspirational to the comprenders of what is really going on in a world of collectivistic intellectual and social nonsense. Two forces destroyed the moral, intellectual force of socialism: it's bloody hands and Ayn Rand's Objectivism as explicated in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She bitch-slapped the left with the truth.

But more than that, she gave us the basic, needed philosophy for living on earth, so we better do just that.

--Brant



Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Post 22

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 4:56pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
William, Barbara Branden got the story from the doctor. And I cannot imagine her making it up.

--Brant


Post 23

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 7:07pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Brant,

Okay, so you trust Barbara Branden's word that a doctor violated patient confidentiality to give her this elaborate story, but that she never bothered to check with people who knew Ayn Rand after the break to find out that AR never actually gave up smoking?

If my friend and Barbara Branden's "doctor" are both telling the truth, then that would put AR in an even worse light, as someone who told her doctor that she would give up smoking, but then immediately backslid.

I think it is more likely that either Barbara Branden or my friend is lying. My money is on BB being the culprit in this regard.

-Bill

Sanction: 9, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 9, No Sanction: 0
Post 24

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 7:07pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
The doctor's name was Dworestsky and I have been informed that Barbara interviewed him at length.

(Sorry about making that info from an e-mail available, but it seemed important and not merely being a "conduit" - historical accuracy and such presumably being a value...)

Michael


Sanction: 20, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 20, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 20, No Sanction: 0
Post 25

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 7:54pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Brant Gaede wrote about Ayn Rand:
It isn't just her ideas. It was never just her ideas. A powerful intellectual and moral force vested in one person has always been inspirational to the comprenders of what is really going on in a world of collectivistic intellectual and social nonsense. Two forces destroyed the moral, intellectual force of socialism: it's bloody hands and Ayn Rand's Objectivism as explicated in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She bitch-slapped the left with the truth.
Indeed. But she gave the right a grand bonk on the head, too, with her electrifying essays during the 60s. In particular, I might not have become the person I am today, if I had not read her essay "Conservatism: An Obituary." Delivered as a lecture in 1960, it was published in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, which I read in the fall of 1967, just after helping to set up a campus conservative group (Iowa State Conservatives for Constitutional Action). Once I realized that conservatives were trying to justify capitalism by depravity, tradition, and faith, my brief stint as a Young American for Freedom ended abruptly. I became, at Rand's suggestion, a radical for capitalism, which in those days, to many of us, meant: Libertarian. (Not long after that, YAF split, largely over Vietnam and the draft, along traditionalist and libertarian lines, the latter splitting off to later form the Libertarian Party.)

Here is the passage that pushed me over the edge:
So long as the "conservatives" evade the issue of altruism, all of their pleas and arguments amount, ihn essence, to this: Why can't we just go back to the nineteenth century when capitalism and altruism seemed somehow to co-exist? Why do we have to go to extremes and think of surgery, when the early stages of the cancer were painless?
The answer is that the facts of reality--which includes history and philosophy--are not to be evaded. Capitalism was destroyed by the morality of altruism. Capitalism is based on individual rights--not on the sacrifice of the individual to the "public good" of the collective. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible. It's one or the other. It's too late for compromises, for platitudes, and for aspirin tablets. There is no way to save capitalism--or freedom, or civilization, or America--except by intellectual surgery, that is: by destroying the source of the destruction, by rejecting the morality of altruism...
Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future--if mankind is to have a future. Those who wish to fight for it, must discard the title of "conservatives."
...Those who reject all the basic premises of collectivism are radicals in the proper sense of the word: "radical" means "fundamental." Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt "conservatives," but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists. [pp. 200-201, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal]
There have certainly been other times when Rand took aim at conservatives, but this was the clincher for me. And now we have able spokesmen such as Yaron Brook, taking on the Neo-Conservatives. (His recent talk was really outstanding.) The battle for men's minds goes on...

REB



Post 26

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 7:54pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Well, William, my sturdy ego means I don't have to have the last word, so I have no further comment.:-)

--Brant


Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 6, No Sanction: 0
Post 27

Thursday, December 1, 2005 - 1:27amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Re the issue of AR's smoking, I think Bill Nevin has the chronology mixed up and that he's speaking of two different time periods, before and after AR was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Bill seems to think that the evidence was stronger than it in fact was in the early '70s. As it happens, I know some inside dope on that, since I worked as administrative assistant to the head of the Research Department of the American Cancer Society from fall '69 through early '71, and then filled in during the summer of '71 as secretary to E. Cuyler Hammond, the noted epidemiologist who worked at the ACS. There wasn't nearly the strength of evidence that was intimated to the public. Such evidence as was available then was mostly from the dog studies, in which (people in the epidemiology department knew this, though the world at large wasn't told) there had been some systematic misreading of the slides; plus beginning statistical studies -- the major statistical study wasn't completed then.

AR wouldn't have known the details of the insider politics at the American Cancer Society, but she did know that the statistics were the main base for the claim of health damage -- and AR cast a dim eye on statistics. You can find some stories about her attitude toward statistics told by Leonard Peikoff.

I can't remember off hand exactly which year it was when she was diagnosed with cancer, but that would have been later in the '70s -- although prior to Allan Blumenthal's breaking with her (which was in '77), since Allan told me that he tried, after she'd been diagnosed with cancer, to talk her into saying something to people about the dangers of smoking. However, she wouldn't, apparently because she was perplexed (to use the least loaded word I can find) at having cancer: She believed that cancer came from bad premises, not from carcinogens, and since she believed that she had no bad premises...

I believe it's true that she did stop smoking after the diagnosis. I don't recall seeing her smoke after that -- but I only saw her a few times, and those at public occasions, in the last few years of the decade.

Ellen S.

Sanction: 10, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 10, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 10, No Sanction: 0
Post 28

Thursday, December 1, 2005 - 5:48amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
I don't wish to start a debate on the amount of evidence for the harms of smoking, but will say the following.
     The Surgeon General's report "Smoking and Health" was released in 1964 and got a lot of press. It held cigarette smoking responsible for 70% higher mortality rates for smokers than nonsmokers. It said heavy smokers had at least 20 times the risk of lung cancer. It named smoking as the most important cause of chronic bronchitis and reported a significant positive correlation between smoking and both emphysema and heart disease.
    Ayn Rand may not been aware of the report or dismissed it due to it being a government report or her dim view of statistics. However, I believe the presence of the Surgeon General's report made the evidence against smoking stronger than Lysandra (Ellen S.) portrays it.
     Of course, the evidence was much stronger years later. One life insurance company, utilizing the Surgeon General's report, soon after began offering discounts for nonsmokers on some of its life insurance policies. A few more companies followed suit in the 1970s. The first company didn't report on its experience under such policies until nearly 15 years later when it thought it had sufficient data. When it did report, most of the industry took notice and began separate rates for smokers and nonsmokers. Also, I'm confident there were other studies published in those intervening years.
     Ayn Rand believed that cancer came from bad premises? I'm stunned. Well, of course, the bad premise is that smoking isn't harmful. :-)


Post 29

Thursday, December 1, 2005 - 1:07pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Merlin writes:

> Ayn Rand may not been aware of the [Surgeon General's] report
> [which was released in 1964] or dismissed it due to it being
> a government report or her dim view of statistics. However,
> I believe the presence of the Surgeon General's report made
> the evidence against smoking stronger than Lysandra (Ellen S.)
> portrays it.

Ellen S. ("Lysandra") believes that the Surgeon General's report made the evidence
*look* stronger than what the Surgeon General actually had available to go on at the time. However, neither do I wish to have a debate about what properly was known by researchers at that time and what wasn't. The issue of relevance to AR's smoking is her view on the subject; her view was dismissive based on her opinion of the epistemological *non*-merit of statistical studies.

Ellen S.

PS: I looked to see if there's a way I can change the screen name to my real name, but I couldn't find one. If anyone knows of a way to do this, please send me a note. Or...as I said on another thread, Dean would be welcome to make the change. (I surmise from his having changed "Titan" to the real name that he can make such a change.)

Post 30

Saturday, December 3, 2005 - 12:11amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Ellen,

You wrote:

"Re the issue of AR's smoking, I think Bill Nevin has the chronology mixed up and that he's speaking of two different time periods, before and after AR was diagnosed with lung cancer.

"Bill seems to think that the evidence was stronger than it in fact was in the early '70s."


The evidence I was really concerned about in my posts above was evidence of whether Barbara Branden made up her elaborate story about Rand handing over her cigarette holder to her doctor and giving up smoking in his office. Michael Kelly seems to think BB had a source in the office to give her the straight dope on what Rand did. My source, otoh, claims Rand kept on smoking after her diagnosis. If this latter claim is true, then the conclusion of BB's story is false even in the (unlikely, imo) event that the putative episode in the doctor's office actually happened.

By the late 70s at any rate, there was objective evidence (based on microphotographs of cilia lining the air passages and so forth) that, in conjunction with the epidemiological statistics, was at least highly suggestive of causation. But most of the arguments in the popular press focused on just the epidemiology, which of course can never prove causation. I don't know when the direct evidence was first published. It is tragic that Rand may never have encountered an argument based on direct, nonstatistical data that smoking was harmful. But this in not what I was getting at in my posts above.

-Bill

Post 31

Saturday, December 3, 2005 - 10:54amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Bill,

I do not "seem to think" anything of the sort. I based that comment on a correspondence.

As I stated, I received an e-mail from Barbara giving this information and stating that she had a tape recording of the interview with Dr. Dworestsky (who apparently, also, was her and Nathaniel's doctor for years). I was reluctant to post this because of the possible accusation of "conduit," but I presumed that historical accuracy was a value. Is it? Or is just calling her a liar preferable because it "feels good"?

It is a lot easier to call Barbara a liar, for instance, if there is no name of any doctor given, isn't it? But facts are facts. With the evidence of tape, it "seems" now that if anyone is a liar, it would have to be the good doctor or your friend.

Anyway, all this implies that she has tape recordings of all the 200+ people she interviewed for the bio who personally knew Rand.

Now wouldn't it be interesting if those tapes were released someday?

Michael


Post 32

Saturday, December 3, 2005 - 11:29amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Michael,

If she actually has such a tape, that would clinch the matter. But I haven't heard the tape myself, and have no idea what Rand's doctor's voice sounds like, so I'm not saying one way or the other.

Even if the doctor recounted the story accurately, it would still not prove that my friend was a liar. His claim was just that she kept smoking after the diagnosis, which the doctor might not have known.

-Bill

Post 33

Saturday, December 3, 2005 - 11:48amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Bill (N.), something got lost in translation about the mix-up in
the chronology to which I was referring. What I was getting
at (although I digressed into the "state of the art" in cancer
research in the early '70s) was that I think your source who
reported that Rand kept on smoking after her being diagnosed
with cancer was mixing up the before- and after- time periods.

The surgery was at some point in 1974, after her West Point speech,
which was in March of that year. I surmise it was after July 1,
since *The Ayn Rand Letter* was on schedule up through the July 1
issue. I'm missing the July 15 issue, so I don't know if that
issue was late; but the July 29 issue was very late -- not
published until some point after late January, 1975. In a
note to the subscribers dated January 21, 1975, Leonard Peikoff
writes, "I must tell you that Miss Rand has recently undergone
surgery, and is now convalescing." He doesn't specify how
"recently" the "recently" was.

Rand became quite reclusive in the last years of her life,
didn't often go out. Except for Ford Hall Forum speeches,
she wasn't in circumstances where she'd be seen much by
any but the small group of "Second Inner Circle" folks
(Harry Binswanger, Peter Schwartz, David Kelley, maybe a
few others), and of course Leonard. So I wonder what
the circumstances are of which your friend was speaking.
Do you have any specifics as to dates and occasions
(and whether the report is from first-hand observation
of second-hand via one of her close associates)?

Ellen S.


Sanction: 8, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 8, No Sanction: 0
Post 34

Saturday, December 3, 2005 - 11:48amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Bill,

You just touched on the crux of this whole matter. Why go from the presumption that anyone is a liar? Why not just look at the facts?

The outright liar approach that has been advanced (not just by you, but by many) is a mean-spirited approach in my humble view.

It fogs the view.

Michael


Post 35

Saturday, December 3, 2005 - 12:28pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
MSK wonders why it always has to be the $#% Spanish Inquisition:

You just touched on the crux of this whole matter. Why go from the presumption that anyone is a liar? Why not just look at the facts?
 
You want to really get into this, I'm thinking the SO., er, ROR Psychology club...

rde
Know whut ah meen? :)
 
 


Sanction: 10, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 10, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 10, No Sanction: 0
Post 36

Sunday, December 4, 2005 - 3:26pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Michael,

The reason 'lying' comes into it is that we are trying to establish whether Barbara Branden was lying when she classified her book _The Passion of Ayn Rand_ as a work of biography rather than as a bizarre type of novel in which all of the characters happen to have the same names as actual people.

Look, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Barbara Branden's position. As will be clear from reading my recent posts on this topic in various threads, I think Rand and N. Branden may have been very unfair to ask her to agree to the affair. I think most of the people reading PAR will write off a lot of the sly digs that BB takes at Rand when they realize that Rand was sleeping with her husband. I was involved in a campus club when PAR came out, and was heavily involved in several campus and off-campus clubs by the time of the Kelley split. From that experience, I can say that the attitude and actions of Peikoff and his minions were far more damaging to Objectivism as a movement than anything in PAR. And without Peikoff's unprincipled, idiotic attacks, his cousin's book would have flown under the radar of many people who, in the event, were motivated to read it primarily by the controversy he generated.

But ultimately what I want to see preserved with regard to Rand's life is historical accuracy. And PAR isn't doing it for me in that department, for reasons that don't take James Valliant to figure out.

-Bill

Sanction: 5, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 5, No Sanction: 0
Post 37

Thursday, December 15, 2005 - 9:09pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
In Post 28, on December 1st, Merlin Jetton wrote, "Ayn Rand believed that cancer came from bad premises? I'm stunned. Well, of course, the bad premise is that smoking isn't harmful. :-)"

Merlin, that's priceless! It belongs in The Objectivist Archives of Quotable Quotes. Actually, the idea that cancer can have psychosomatic origins is one that I've heard voiced by others as well. The claim being made is that people who are meek and unassertive are more prone to it than people who are feisty and assertive. But that certainly wasn't Rand's problem! Today, the bulk of the evidence suggests that cancer is a lifestyle disease, which can be largely prevented by proper diet and nutrition, regular exercise and good health habits. Unfortunately, I've met far too many Objectivists and libertarians for whom physical health is at the very bottom of their scale of values.

- Bill

Post to this threadBack one pagePage 0Page 1


User ID Password or create a free account.