I was aimlessly surfing online when I happened on that now-famous clip of the New York City mayoral candidates being asked what foreign country they would visit first on being elected to office. It’s amusing to me that, put in that situation, I would truthfully have answered Israel. It’s even more amusing how uninformative that answer turns out to be. Funnier still is the number of people who, on hearing it, would confabulate their way to an explanation and get it wrong. But I would not have prefaced or explained what I said. Ask a stupid question? Get a cryptic answer. Under the circumstances, they should be grateful to get an answer at all.
You have to have spent time under hostile interrogation to appreciate the pleasures of mental reservation. No matter how terrible the circumstance, there’s always something amusing about the futility of your opponents’ demand: to know what you refuse to divulge by methods that induce the refusal. It’s too bad you have to be put under hostile interrogation to experience the pleasure. If it weren’t for that downside, I’d recommend it to everyone.
It’s sad that no one asked the truly salient question: what paid trip would you refuse?
Policy of Truth 
When one of them said “the Holy Land,” I was reminded that some Mormon “Holy Land” tours go to Mexico and Central America.
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The whole thing is abject and cringe-making, but Cuomo’s answer is the worst. If New York is really beset by anti-Semitic hostility, a foreign trip would be an escapist indulgence he couldn’t afford. What would a trip abroad do to solve problems here? His own preface requires Mamdani’s answer.
It’s not even clear Mamdani would be let into Israel, an obvious fact that’s gone unremarked.
It’s too bad no one gave a random answer, like Botswana or Tajikistan.
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Reminds me of this anecdote in Jerome Tuccille’s It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. Tuccille takes liberties with the truth, but I’m told that this incident more or less occurred, except that Rocco Fantozi was Leonard Liggio, and no one was purged (on that occasion).
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Oh, and I forgot to say: I believe the “young fellow” who named Liggio was Rothbard himself.
I suspect Tuccille changed the names because a) he wanted to write a version where the “young fellow” was purged for not naming Rand, but b) he also wanted to write about Rothbard’s actual purge later in the book.
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What’s with the social metaphysics? Why would Objectivists have been citing the second-hand influence of another person, rather than citing the influence of that god, that one word: Ego? Shouldn’t each person be their own most important influence? Uy.
Ironically, it was Rand who praised AA for its emphasis on self-responsibility. And here’s Tuccille likening abdications of responsibility to an AA meeting.
There’s a nearby possible world in which I never read Rand or got involved in the Objectivist movement, and I’ve often wondered if I have enough credit right now to buy a trip there. It turns out that I don’t. I guess the other problem is that if I went there, there’s a small handful of people who ended up in my life who might not have, including a bunch of wives and girlfriends, among others. The whole thing is enough to give one pause. It usually begins with Ayn Rand, but did it really have to? Would I have chosen it behind a veil of ignorance?
The questions run too deep for such a simple man.
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By the way, here’s an intro I wrote to Tuccille’s book:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112001309/https://lfb.org/in-praise-of-toleration/
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That’s great, and convinces me, at long last, to read the book. You should post your introduction here, or somewhere, so that you don’t have to go on the Wayback machine to retrieve it.
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