Politics According To Krauthammer
I just finished Charles Krauthammer's last book, "Things That Matter." It is so brillian that I literally found over 100 topics to discuss in this forum. But I won't. At the very start of the book he makes the point that no matter how much effort he puts into writing about science,medicine, art, poetry,architecture, chess, space, sports, numbers, in the end they must "bow to the sovereignty of politics."In trying to move the spectre of politics off the table he got into the Voyager probes and whose voice narrated but Kurt Waldheim, a former NAZI. It prompted me to ask the Gulch one simple but extremely profound question: What one thing would you send on Voyager 1 and/or 2? Krauthammer finally winds up saying what biologist and philosopher Lewis Thomas proposed as evidence of human achievement ;the Complete works of Bach.(Personally, I would have chosen Beethoven). So, am asking this forum, if you were allowed to send only one item on Voyager 1 or 2, what would it be? Remember you are representing all of earth from fauna to flora, from philosophy to nonsense, from math to quantum. Just one thing. Music? Science? words? go for it.
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I never saw anyone be unruly and demanding. I certainly would have stuck up for the speaker, who I had paid to hear
I can understand rands prohibition against recording if she was selling the recordings. I have to admit that she covered so much ground that I would have wanted to record it so I could listen to it sgain
It is disturbing to the audience (or used to be) any time a speaker becomes upset or there is a disruption in a serious public lecture with some kind of enforcement invoked.
That happened during one of Leonard Peikoff's lectures there in the 1990s. Some clown in the audience stood up and interrupted, angrily yelling his opposition incoherently. Everything ground to a halt while Leonard Peikoff expressed his justified displeasure, the clown refused to sit down and be quiet let alone wait for the question period, and the ushers eventually dragged him out. Some in the audience quietly complained that the 'protestor' had a right to speak, too, as if Leonard Peikoff had been in the wrong for not allowing the outburst interrupting his prepared lecture.
When it comes to serious negotiations I think trump is very serious and respectful so long as he gets respect in return
You can find out more of what went on from the use of her diary in Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics: The Case Against the Brandens, finally written, independently, in 2005 after years of diatribes from the Branden's.
But you are right that far more important is the content and application of the ideas. It only comes up now when one of a handful still harboring bitter resentment starts gratuitously pushing the personal attacks.
I can tell you it was a bit disturbing to see. Ayn rand could have just calmly reiterated her desire not to be photographed. Her reaction was excessive relative to whatever damage was done by a simple photograph, at least IMHO
1). Reversing the course of a nation of 300 million people is a massive task involving its citizens for the most part to change their whole philosophy if life
2). Such a reversal will take many many years, maybe if the order of several generations
3) The lives of most people alive today in the USA would be over before that happened
4) For people alive today who already embraced individualism to live in country that embraced individualism , it would need to be a new “gulch” that was self sufficient and very well defended indeed.
5) The main reason America made the successful split from England was geography and self sufficiency. Those elements are harder to come by today unless the gulch had a very low level of creature comforts
She did ask that people not take photos, saying that she was "too old for that".
Yes, she had had a hard life but was very determined. She also tended to appear 'formal' to some people. There is no doubt that some found her intimidating.
Almost no one was close to the Branden situation, and could not have been, but a minority of detractors of Ayn Rand with their own personal resentments and spurred on by the Brandens, circulated that kind of rhetoric, bitterly playing on false connotations, to spread it among people who did not know.
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