Mr. Ruddy, who is working up an outline for a writer or writers yet to be named, sees his rendition as a love story, built squarely around its commanding female protagonist, Dagny Taggart. (Angelina Jolie was in line for an earlier, never-made version.)
The main thing, Mr. Ruddy said, is to honor Ms. Rand’s insistence on making a film for the future. That means redrawing its capitalists and creators, who go on strike against creeping collectivism, as figures more familiar than the railroad heiress and industrial titans who figured in a book that was first published in 1957.
“When you look at guys like Jeff Bezos, he’s not only doing Amazon, he wants to colonize Mars,” Mr. Ruddy said. He spoke by telephone last week of his plan for a mini-series in which an Internet blackout led by Bezos-like figures might shut down cellphones, banks and almost everything else.
As for concerns about faithful Rand fans objecting to any liberties he might take with the book, Mr. Ruddy said he had none.
“If you can reimagine the Old Testament and the New Testament,” he said, “why can’t I reimagine Ayn Rand?”
Yeah, that sounds really great–Jeff Bezos meets Angelina Jolie on Mars after the Internet goes down. Can’t wait.
It almost makes you wish that there was a discipline that helped us think about–integrate, make coherent sense of–such complex, far-flung claims.
I suppose we could ask the economists, but if we did, I think we’d still be left wondering why a Hayekian like Paul Ryan insists that centralized government planning works when it comes to vetting an influx of refugees, but not when it comes to anything else.
By the way, Marco Rubio thinks it’s important for the next generation of Americans to know how to connect one piece of metal to another, but not how to connect one piece of information to another.
I’d expatiate at further length on this topic, but I have to go teach Critical Thinking to a classroom full of students who persistently ask, out loud, why they have to take a course in a topic as obviously irrelevant to life as philosophy.
If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, aside from teaching and grading I’ve been immersed in a series of mandatory Title IX online training courses at my University. Each module–there are four* of them–consists of a couple of dozen questions plus explanatory gloss. You’re obliged to give an answer to each question in order to proceed to the next question; you’re obliged to reach the end of the training module in order to be remain employed at the University; and having done so, you’re explicitly obliged to indicate your assent to the contents of each module as well.
Here’s one of the questions, under the heading “Constant Consent.” It’s a yes/no question. This is the sum total of the question-prompt.
Allie was kissing her date at the end of their evening together. If Allie chose to make out with him, did his having sex with her count as rape?
Now, there’s a paradigm of a well-constructed test question.
The answer turns out to be: YES, i.e., he raped her. Here is the official explanation.
Consent can be revoked at any time, and when Allie told him to stop she was explicitly ending her consent. Having sex with someone when you do not have their consent is rape, and her rapist could be expelled from his school and convicted in a court of law.
She told him to stop? I didn’t catch that. Evidently, much of the drama here seems to be happening off-stage.
So let’s take this step by step: Allie was kissing her date. From kissing, they consensually went to “making out” (ex hypothesi, there’s a subtle distinction). Then, without further elaboration, we’re told that they ended up having sex. Nothing is said in the initial prompt about whether or not the sex was consensual. The omission is then construed in the answer (which is not visible until after you’ve answered the question) to mean that Allie explicitly told the date to stop, and that he didn’t stop. Evidently, “constant consent” not only means that Allie has to indicate consent at each step of the sexual encounter, but that questions about sexual encounters can be written in such a way that if consent isn’t mentioned one way or another, we’re to infer that consent was explicitly denied and flouted.
The question is whether I can revoke my consent to take this online training.
The answer is: NO. Here is the explanation.
Consent cannot be revoked at any time. Once you’re employed, you’ve consented to everything that your employer wants to impose on you, no matter how ridiculous. Failure to take the compulsory training module will result in termination of employment.
In other words, revocation of consent would be a kiss of death for my further employment prospects. Pretty sexy.
*Correction, November 15, 2015: I had originally written “three,” but there are four. [Correction, March 24, 2016: Felician admin recently scolded me for missing the fifth.]
Postscript, November 16, 2015: As promised, an item from the harassment module of my training:
Watch your language: Tolerance does not mean you need to compromise your ethics. You may disagree with choices others make, but express your opinion respectfully. Don’t post critical comments on social media sites, spread rumors or call people names.
As we all know, critical comments are the equivalent of rumors or insults. For this reason, and with all due respect, no more critical comments will be allowed at Policy of Truth, especially if they are critical of me, Irfan “the Oppressed” Khawaja. Anyone who criticizes me will be asked to apologize, grovel, abase themselves, resign from any position they hold anywhere, and be reminded of the PTSD I suffer from my past-life Jungian experiences as a result of the Partition of India and Pakistan (in 1947, two decades before I was born). And then they’ll be asked to send me a check to cover my therapy co-pays for the rest of my life (ht: Jason Brennan at BHL).
We’re covering issues at the intersection of race and criminal justice in my Phil 250 class (“Making Moral Decisions”) via Michelle Alexander’s 2013 TED talk, “The Future of Race in America,” and Heather Mac Donald’s 2008 City Journal article, “Is the Criminal Justice System Racist?”
Two representative vignettes from class:
Section A: A black student tells the story of how he was accosted by the police this summer on Felician’s Rutherford campus. Why? He was walking down the street while looking intently at his phone; the officer who stopped him worried out loud that he was taking pictures of buildings on campus–a worry made salient (the officer said) by the possibility that he might be affiliated with ISIS. The officer then asked to see the student’s ID, and demanded his name, address, and phone number on the grounds that it would be beneficial for the Rutherford Police to have this information in case the student ever lost his wallet in town.
Section B: On watching the Alexander video–which asserts that the American criminal justice system has come to replicate a twenty-first century form of Jim Crow–a white student asks, in exasperated bewilderment: “What the fuck is ‘Jim Crow'”?
I’m reblogging this post I did last year, slightly modified.
Halloween has, for as long as I can remember, been the only holiday I’ve ever been able to take seriously or wholeheartedly to celebrate. As an ex-Muslim, I have a certain affection for Ramadan, but Ramadan isn’t really a holiday, and unfortunately, none of the Muslim holidays (the Eids) are seasonal, seasonality being an essential property of a real holiday. In fact, generally speaking, Muslims have trouble figuring out when exactly their holidays are supposed to take place–another liability of being a member of that faith.
Having spent a decade in a Jewish household, I have some affection for some of the Jewish holidays–Yom Kippur and Passover, though not Hannukah or Purim–but always with the mild alienation that accompanies the knowledge that a holiday is not one’s own: it’s hard to be inducted into a holiday tradition in your late 20s, as I was.
I like the general ambience of Christmastime, at least in the NY/NJ Metro Area, but unfortunately, once you take the Christ out of Christmas, you take much of the meaning out of it as well–Christmas without Midnight Mass being an anemic affair, and Midnight Mass without Christ being close to a contradiction in terms. Not being a Christian, I find it hard to put Christ back into Christmas, mostly because he’s not mine to put anywhere in the first place. (Same with Easter.)
The secular holidays are, I’m afraid, a sorry set of excuses for holidays. I’ve trashed Columbus Day on this blog (more than once), Independence Day on another, and I endorse Christopher Hitchens’s description of New Year’s Eve as the “worst night of the year” (and U2’s description of the Day as essentially unremarkable). Thanksgiving is too damn complicated, given its connection to family, and the political holidays (Presidents’ Day, MLK Day, Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day) are either too political, too contrived, and/or too somber to count as real holidays. Labor Day is a day off, not a holiday. It’s not the same thing.
So what’s left? The purest, most innocent, most seasonally appropriate, most nostalgic, and most celebratory of all holidays, Halloween.
I’ll concede this much: El dia de los muertos, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day are perfectly respectable cousin-holidays to Halloween and fit for post-Halloween celebrations, but their value supervenes on that of Halloween; in and of themselves, they don’t quite cut it, at least for me. (Scary thought: only a philosopher could manage to use the words “supervene” and “Halloween” in the same sentence.) What all four holidays have in common is a properly autumnal and properly macabre preoccupation with mortality, which is the only point of having a holiday in the first place. The point of a holiday is to celebrate life in the shadow of death, in the full knowledge that it’s there, lurking in the shadows and crevices of life–and in the full knowledge that though it’s there, it doesn’t matter.
It’s a near tragic fact that Halloween itself almost went extinct. I have nostalgic memories of Halloween from childhood, but sometime in the mid-80s, Halloween’s luster was dimmed by a series of candy poisonings, razor-bladed apples, and other scares (or so we were led to believe); I distinctly remember when Halloween was cancelled–abolished, outlawed–in my town in the mid-80s. It took a long time for the holiday to recover from its de jure abolition, and just as it seemed to have been doing so, it was cancelled two years in a row in the Metro Area for climatological reasons–for the freak snowstorm of 2011, and then for Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It made a comeback these past few years, and I’m hoping it makes a bigger one this year. All systems appear to be “go” for a comeback: Halloween falls on a Saturday this year; the weather is supposed to be perfect; and judging from the neighborhoods I’ve seen across north Jersey, everyone–infants, adults, and everyone in-between–is more than ready to celebrate.
Every holiday has an aesthetic, and needs artwork to match. In recent times, I’d nominate Tim Burton as the Master Artist of Halloween. Going further back in time, I might award that title to Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, or Washington Irving.
Anyway, over the years I’ve been surprised to discover how many people–or at least, how many Americans between the ages of 20 and 50–have childhood memories of listening to some version of Camille Saint-Saens’s little piece, “Danse Macabre,” around Halloween-time. I myself remember listening to a version of it playing over an animated “filmstrip” (remember those?) of dancing skeletons, care of my grade-school music teacher, Mrs. Davidson–to whom I’m eternally grateful. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a video version of the filmstrip anywhere. That said, there are lots of versions of “Danse Macabre” online; I couldn’t quite find the perfect one, but this one had the right quirkiness about it.
For a more musically satisfying version of “Danse Macabre,” check out Clara Cernat and Thierry Huillet’s version for violin and piano.
This year’s Halloween art exhibit comes from Melissa Macalpin’s “Getting Ready for Halloween.” (I can’t seem to insert the artwork directly into the post. According to Melissa (sort of), “copyright is old-fashioned,” so if I could, I would.)
This year’s metal soundtrack is King Diamond’s Abigail.
I don’t know what’s scarier–the music, or that I’m linking to it on what’s supposed to be a semi-serious, occasionally quasi-academic blog. Anyway, thanks to Vik Kapila for the suggestion.
By the way, don’t forget to vote in this crucial electoral race. Vote early and vote often, since the rules explicitly allow for it. Naturally, I cast several votes for AC/DC. I suggest you do the same. Or else.
Postscript, November 1, 2015: Well, another successful Halloween gone by. Conditions for it probably couldn’t have been better–Halloween on a bright October Saturday that turns gloomy as the day goes by, followed by an overcast All Saints’ Day falling on the Sunday when Daylight Savings Time ends.
My impressions of Halloween aren’t much changed from what they were last year: fairly large throngs of trick-or-treaters, but concentrated in very specific parts of town officially designated for the official purpose of Municipal Celebration of Halloween. Lots more adult involvement than when I was a kid; lots more adult supervision and regulation; more police involvement; strictly circumscribed hours. There’s a bit of anti-climax here: Halloween has now become six weeks of build-up toward a holiday that’s mandated to take place between the hours of 5 and 8 pm on a single evening.
Anyway, part of what makes Halloween an attractive holiday, at least in the suburbs, is the contrast it offers to the usual pathetic patterns of suburban life. Sad but true: Halloween is virtually the only night of the year when people leave the electronified comfort of their oversized homes to go out on the streets and interact with their neighbors for a few hours.
Watching the scene here in north Jersey, I couldn’t help thinking about the stark contrast with Abu Dis in Palestine, where I spent the summer: in suburban New Jersey, nightfall induces kids to retreat to the fortress-like compounds of their homes; in Palestinian towns and cities, by contrast, kids are up at all hours, playing in the streets. Both sets of kids are up, mind you; it’s just that suburban American kids are inside, in front of TV sets and video games, whereas the Palestinian kids are out and about. Meanwhile, suburban American parents treat their antiseptic neighborhoods as though they were chronically populated by witches, goblins, and werewolves. At the other extreme, Palestinian parents seem unfazed by permitting their children to play in streets riven by tear gas and gunfire.
Another unspoken but attractive secret of Halloween: In many neighborhoods, Halloween is one of the few nights on which the de facto (and implicitly de jure) racial segregation that rules suburban life is temporarily allowed to lapse. Where I live, black kids from surrounding urban areas migrate en masse to the safety and affluence of the white suburbs, in search of better candy prospects than might be possible back home. For one night, then, crowds of black people converge on white neighborhoods without anyone’s regarding it as a threat–i.e., as a prelude to rioting or looting. In other words, #BlackLivesMatter temporarily becomes #CandyMatters. Since the two messages are in principle logically compatible with each other, everyone agrees for a night to focus on the latter, and a great time is had by all. Maybe they should introduce Halloween to Jerusalem and Hebron?
Speaking of Jerusalem and Hebron, there’s a big “debate” out there about political correctness in costumes, and the (supposed) dangers of “cultural appropriation” in costume-wearing. I’m going to save that one for next year. On a related topic, however, I couldn’t help being amused at how Islam is slowly but surely finding its way into Halloween culture. I tagged behind a group of kids last night dressed as terrorists: instead of “trick or treat,” they went door to door shouting “Allahu akbar!” (Guilty confession: I found that pretty funny.) I also find it interesting that the newer film versions of Dracula–Bram Stoker’s Dracula(1992), Dracula Untold (2014)–now go out of their way to depict Dracula’s turn to vampirism as a response to Ottoman Islamism, an interesting inversion of the usual grievance-based explanations for Islamic terrorism.
The Dracula-as-anti-Islamist theme is a deliberate departure from, almost an inversion of, the depiction of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel. Though Dracula’s historical precursor Vlad the Impaler fought the Ottomans, anti-Islamism plays almost no role whatsoever in Stoker’s Dracula: Stoker’s Dracula equates the “Turk” with white invaders (Wallachian, Saxon, Austro-Hungarian); meanwhile Stoker “Orientalizes” Dracula himself despite his (Dracula’s) past life (lives?) as an anti-Ottoman freedom fighter. Transylvania, Dracula tells Jonathan Harper, “was the ground fought over for centuries by the Wallachian, the Saxon, and the Turk.”
Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders. In old days there were stirring times, when the Austrian and the Hungarian came up in hordes–men and women, the aged and children too–and waited their coming on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep destruction on them with their artificial avalanches. When the invader was triumphant he found but little, for whatever there was had been sheltered in the friendly soil. (Bram Stoker, Dracula, p. 22).
In other words, Dracula was a rock-throwing Transylvanian nationalist ready to fight any invader who dared set foot in his lands.
Which is why Stoker gives him the physiognomic treatment reserved for Oriental nationalists:
The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years (p. 18).
Interestingly, Stoker gives a much longer description of Dracula’s physical appearance but pointedly (so to speak) omits a description of the Evil One’s eyes. All in all, Stoker’s Dracula sounds like the spitting image of Yasir Arafat. Right?
Photo credits: Wikipedia
Right. Obviously, they’re not going to give the game away by opening their mouths.
Clearly, there are dissertations waiting to be written here: Dracula and the Ottoman Other, Stok(er)ing Orientalism, (Jonathan)Ha(n)k(er)ing After British Imperialism, and so on, and my only regret is that I can’t write any of them. But obviously, some have, and more power to them. Read them, the tenure-seekers of the night. What music they make!
All right, enough: off to really scary things. Like paying the rent.
I’m happy to announce that Policy of Truth is getting yet another blogger, Stephen Boydstun. I don’t exactly remember where Stephen and I met, but I think it was either at Marsha Enright’s justifiably famous New Intellectual Forum “salon” in Chicago in the early 1990s, or at one of the Institute for Objectivist Studies summer seminars around the same time. Anyway, we met a long time ago, and we’ve been talking philosophy ever since. The last time we did that (in person, anyway) was 2013, at the epistemology seminar that Carrie-Ann and I did in Glen Ridge.
Here’s a bio of Stephen I found online:
My academic backgrounds are in physics, philosophy, and engineering. My engineering work was building locomotives, then I switched to nuclear power electrical generation. Engineering rounded out the understanding of the physical world I had from physics. Now all those backgrounds, and long study of philosophy, too, are put into my project of writing my own philosophy.
I created, financed, and edited Objectivity, a hardcopy “journal of metaphysics, epistemology, and theory of value informed by modern science” (1990-98). All issues of Objectivity are now freely available online for readers and researchers.
On the romantic side, my partner’s name is Walter. We have been together nineteen years. He has two sons and one grandson, now age fourteen. It is wonderful to have a family.
The last sentence of the first paragraph refers to a book that Stephen is currently working on, parts of which I believe he’ll be trying out on us. (Here’s another bio of Stephen I found, by the way.)
I have been writing a book of philosophy since last January [2014]. It is my first. Throughout the preceding thirty years, I had written essays. Writing essays had to be stopped while I write this book. Into my book, as into all my previous essays, there goes a lot of study. My writings in philosophy are informed by the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy and informed by mathematics and by modern physical science, engineering, biology, neuroscience, and psychology. …
I cannot share the title of my book at this time. It deals with metaphysics, epistemology, and theory of moral value. I shall not be treating esthetics. Theory of individual rights will be entered, but beyond that, I shall not undertake political philosophy.
So it looks like some of us are actually going to have to learn some science if we’re to understand what Stephen is talking about–something I haven’t bothered to do since the introductory Geology/Biology course I took in my sophomore year of college (roughly: “Rocks and Cells for Idiots 101”).
Like all PoT bloggers Stephen will be blogging whenever he wants. I have no idea when that will be, but until then, a warm welcome from the rest of the PoT crew….
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming of bad jokes and overheated polemics from yours truly.
Postscript, November 5, 2015: Stephen will be blogging under the online moniker “guyau.”
I’ve been too busy lately to write any new blog posts, but not so busy that I haven’t been able to spend some of the little free time at my disposal reflecting on that overridingly important issue du jour, robot sex. Stephen Hicks’s discussion is one of the more enlightening ones I’ve read so far–exemplary for getting past the “ew factor” (in which I was mired before I read it) and clarifying the relevant issues.
The next step would be to come up with a way of distinguishing between those for whom robot sex was an all-things-considered best option considering the circumstances, and those for whom robot sex was a problematic form of acquiescence in the less-than-best, i.e., the moral equivalent of “settling” or satisficing. For whatever it’s worth, my own view is that robot sex can be a “best option considering the circumstances” in the first five of the bulleted cases Hicks mentions, but is an acquiescence in the less-than-the-best in the latter two.
Unfortunately, I can’t elaborate on that right now, because I’m soon due at a talk on…Gaza. There’s something surreal and disorienting about a world in which one spends part of the day doing real work, part of it reflecting on robot sex, and part of it attending a lecture on Gaza–something problematically reminiscent of Marx’s explication/defense in The German Ideology of the dilettantism of communist society:
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
I realize that I’m digressing here, but mutatis mutandis, doesn’t Marx’s aspiration describe middle- to upper-middle class capitalist society?
I think it does, but I don’t have time to elaborate on that, either. Off to Gaza-in-Clifton, then. With luck I’ll manage to summarize the water symposium and Gaza talk later in the week.
I’m in the throes of preparations for tomorrow’s Fall Symposium on water–and then midterm grades are due and I start a new online class Monday–so I may be a little slow on comments and approvals until sometime next week. I’ll try to summarize the water symposium as well as the Gaza talk si c’est possible, but pas de promesses.
By coincidence, last month I spent a weekend “conferencing” with Izzeldine Abouelaish, founder of Daughters for Life and author of I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey. Izzeldine, whose daughters and niece were killed in 2009 by Israeli rocket fire in Gaza, is one of those supposedly mythical Palestinians committed to peace despite having endured trauma at Israeli hands. More on Izzeldine’s book once I finish it; for now, I just couldn’t resist mentioning the coincidence of “two-doctors-from-Gaza-with-messages-of-hope-amidst-trauma.”
Mention Gaza to the average American news junkie, and the immediate association is “Hamas” and “Islamist fanaticism.” Not that those things don’t exist, but there are more things in Palestine than are dreamt up by such stereotypes, and I’d like to think that events like the PACC talk and like Izzeldine’s book and foundation will eventually break the reflexive associations of “Palestinian” with “wild-eyed religious psychopath” and replace them with something more respectful of reality. The audacity of hope, to borrow a phrase.
