E-goism

Ayn RandARI’s online version of “The Objectivist Ethics,” about whose incompleteness I previously plained, now finally appears to be complete – except that most of the footnotes are missing, including an important one on teleology.

So why is it that ARI still can’t manage to post Rand’s most important article without screwing it up? I mean, they’ve got a decent-sized budget and staff, plus this stuff is holy writ to them – so you’d think they’d have both the means and the motivation to get it right.

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9 Responses to E-goism

  1. Bob Kaercher December 16, 2008 at 7:38 pm #

    “So why is it that ARI still can’t manage to post Rand’s most important article without screwing it up?”

    I suspect that on ARI’s list of priorities, that ranks way below their more immediate goals, like coming up with intellectual-sounding arguments for anti-Muslim genocide.

  2. Neil Parille December 16, 2008 at 8:05 pm #

    I don’t know if it’s money, but there is such a concern that people will get something for nothing. I mean, Objectivists are supposed to buy those high priced tapes and like it/

  3. Administrator December 16, 2008 at 9:52 pm #

    Neil — Yeah, I know, but that’s a reason not to post it at all, not a reason to post it with screwed-up footnotes.

  4. Administrator December 17, 2008 at 1:46 am #

    I emailed them, and now I see they’ve now added the teleology footnote — though they’ve also removed the one they had before. Who knows why?

  5. Administrator December 17, 2008 at 2:32 am #

    Also the one footnote link now goes to the wrong place.

  6. Bob Kaercher December 17, 2008 at 11:57 am #

    Jeez! Who’s running that place? Peter Keating???

  7. Nick Manley December 18, 2008 at 10:39 pm #

    “I suspect that on ARI’s list of priorities, that ranks way below their more immediate goals, like coming up with intellectual-sounding arguments for anti-Muslim genocide.”

    It’s not genocide. It’s liberation through nuclear slaughter.

    ( :

  8. Neil Parille December 19, 2008 at 12:16 pm #

    The ARI of late has made more stuff available on the web for free, which is good. Unfortunately most of the material produced by ARI-types is available only in lecture form on tapes and CDs, and generally high priced at that. Last I checked you can’t even download the stuff and play on your MP3 player (which would save shipping and other costs).

    It’s really incredible if you think about it. Rand claimed to have solved the “problem of universals,” but in all the years since her essays in ITOE have been availble, no ARIan has published a defense of her theory (with perhaps the exception of Gotthelf who has a draft of an article on the web). If you thought her theory was correct, wouldn’t you want to defend it in print?

    I sometimes wonder if the ARI believes that Rand’s theories are defensible.

  9. Bob Kaercher December 19, 2008 at 12:51 pm #

    Neil: It looks more and more to me as though a lot of people at ARI would much rather selectively use Rand’s rhetoric as a vehicle to promote their own views, regardless of whether or not those views are substantiated by what Rand actually wrote.

    There’s a website I sometimes follow, ARI Watch, that (in my opinion) has some good points along those lines:

    http://ariwatch.com/

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