User talk:202.82.33.202

May 2007

Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. At least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to Talk:Sildenafil, was not constructive and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Selket ^Talk 09:16, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

August 2007

Please do not add commentary or your own personal analysis to Wikipedia articles, as you did to Troll (Internet). Doing so violates Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy and breaches the formal tone expected in an encyclopedia. If you would like to experiment, use the sandbox. Thank you. -- Satori Son 04:41, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

January 2008

Hi, the recent edit you made to Haiku has been reverted, as it appears to be unconstructive. Use the sandbox for testing; if you believe the edit was constructive, ensure that you provide an informative edit summary. You may also wish to read the introduction to editing. Thanks. Majorly (talk) 09:00, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Get consensus before removing chunks of material

You should get consensus of other editors before you remove large chunks of material from an article, as you tried to do with Troll (Internet) Igor Berger (talk) 07:18, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

You are being disruptive

Please to do be disruptive as you have been here. You will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. If that is your intent you are not helping anyone. Igor Berger (talk) 07:23, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Your behavior on the article talk page is bordering a block here Igor Berger (talk) 07:29, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Please reply on your talk page article not related talk when not talking about an article. Igor Berger (talk) 07:34, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

You can also come to my talk page and ask me for help if you need assistance. Thank you, Igor Berger (talk) 07:35, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Can you send me email with your concerns? I have admitted (1) it is wrong to remove chunks and (2) I did not prepare the ground properly for the strong and apparently disruptive claims made. While I have been for the most part wrongly labeled disruptive, and was blocked as spinoza1111, at other times I have made positive contributions, including correcting the article on Herb Schildt recently. I would prefer it if we could discuss the removal of the bogus etymology on email (I am spinoza1111@yahoo.com) as well as my proposed contribution re the misuse of "troll".

User:spinoza1111 looks like you have been blocked for a week from editing. I would recommend you wait that week and go back to your original account that has your history. If you will edit under the IP anon account it will be seen as a violation of the block and will get you blocked indef, which will be ashamed because I think you are a constractive editor. Please do not try to edit under anon or a sockpuppet account. Give it a rest and try to learn about Wikipedia policies and come back and try again. Being blocked is not the end of the world. I also have been blocked at one time. It does not feel good but there is nothing you can really do but to wait it out. Good luck, Igor Berger (talk) 07:50, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually you have been blocked indef but that was like a year and a half ago. You should try to contact the blocking admin by email and requesting to be forgiven. Igor Berger (talk) 07:58, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

That's never going to happen as long as Edward's behavior remains as bad as it was when he was indef blocked. The only reason he's still editing under this ip is because I have allowed it.--Atlan (talk) 18:56, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

If you think I am going to ask a bunch of half-educated convenience store clerks, crazed religious fundamentalists and half-competent computer technicians to be "forgiven", you are deluded. I don't seek to be reinstated as an unpaid contributor to, a virtual slave of, a wikipedia which had become a conspiracy of insiders to exclude the original contributors and thereby issue a print version, cashing in on the labor of people who, instead of even being thanked, have been deliberately targeted for abuse by a new Hitler Youth.

As in the case of pornography, Mr. Wales' former business, you have replaced freedom with libertarianism and libertinism, merely enabling bullies, thugs and in some cases people with criminal backgrounds to steal labor in the Amerikkkan, slave-driving and Randroidian style. In one brief year, in 2005, gentleness, collegiality and decency was replaced here by a horde of really strange self-appointed jagoff cops, sporting various neo-barbaric heraldic markers announcing that they were "vandal hunters", "troll hunters" or, perhaps a new *Malleus Maleficarum" who started to destroy any content that was above their grade-school reading level.

I shall restrict my efforts in future to removing egregious cases of personal destruction carried out (without any of the so-called "vandal hunters" saying a god-damned thing) using wikipedia as a medium. Most recently, I got the record corrected concerning computer authors Herb Schildt and Kathy Sierra. The article on Schildt was created to destroy his reputation. The article on Sierra was created to describe her documented harassment as "alleged" and to misrepresent her as the usual hysterical bitch. In Schildt's case I pointed out that the article was NNPOV and an offensive biography of a living person and it was changed by a non-anonymous editor of some intelligence and decency, increasingly a wikipedia rarity. In the case of Sierra, I fought the usual battle *royale* with one Seth Finkelstein and demonstrated that forensically, posts which Sierra and her attorney have constitute a deposition and not "alleged harassment".

Schildt's article now identifies him properly and with NPOV as a best-selling computer author. Sierra's article now identifies her properly as being harassed, something which no-one can deny whether or not she has any legal recourse. If I am unable to change wikipedia, I shall continue to go through proper channels to rescue people's reputations, having experienced first hand what it means to be targeted.

Wikipedia is of course a libertarian fun fair, isn't it? FYI, British historian E. J. Hobsbawm calls libertarianism the anarchy of the lower middle class, and that's what's happened to wikipedia. People who can't write a coherent sentence tell people who can about "verbosity". A common interpretation unknown in Amerikkka is called "opinion". Philosophy articles become unreadable because convenience store clerks and religious head cases don't even understand that you cannot write about philosophy without doing it.

And above all, attention is diverted from learning to personalities and a game of Survivor.

I can write and I have published and been paid since 1976. I don't need a vanity press, which is what Wikipedia is, for Jimbo on down. I warn my students away from it since it is a vile and monstrous thing, constructed as were the blood-stained monuments of old by slaves who are then destroyed, their life's blood in the mortar.

Edward G. Nilges

I didn't read beyond the first line, but I agree you shouldn't ask to be "forgiven". That's just stupid. Anyway, it's exactly these diatribes that got your account blocked. I really do wonder why you're still here though, if you think this place is so horrible.--Atlan (talk) 12:55, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

You do have some valid points but not everything is black and white there is gray. And if we do believe Wikipedia is an extreme of this or that what do you think the society is, because Wikipedia mirrors society. So do not give up! Igor Berger (talk) 13:06, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Rand Edits

If you wish to add the views of notable third party authors to this article, then by all means do so or bring those authors to our attention. However, please refrain from using the Talk page to make demands that are unsupported by either Wikipedia policies or credible research. Idag (talk) 08:12, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

My demand was that she be removed from the philosophy project and this has been done. It was based on more than "credible research". It was based on the fact that I know what philosophers do.

The issue is closed until I see some indication that she is part of a "philosophy" project.

You are not in any position to make demands. I'm sure you're smart enough to know that.--Atlan (talk) 19:14, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. If you can't type the tilde character, you should click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 08:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Signing comments on talk pages

Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You may also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --77.96.133.241 (talk) 11:42, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

April 2008

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, we would like to remind you not to attack other editors, as you did on Talk:Ayn Rand. Please comment on the contributions and not the contributors. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you.  Atyndall93 | talk  04:52, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

If this is a shared IP address, and you didn't make the edit, consider creating an account for yourself so you can avoid further irrelevant notices.

Please see Wikipedia's no personal attacks policy. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Note that continued personal attacks will lead to blocks for disruption. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you.

Please stop. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, as you did to Ayn Rand, you will be blocked from editing. Please just stop, thankyou

This is the last warning you will receive for your disruptive edits.
The next time you vandalize Wikipedia, as you did to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), you will be blocked from editing. Alexius08 is welcome to talk about his contributions. 08:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

If this is a shared IP address, and you didn't make any unconstructive edits, consider creating an account for yourself so you can avoid further irrelevant warnings.

I am bringing wikipedia's persecution of contributors to the attention of Prof. Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Freedom Foundation. I am forming a group, offline with respect to Wikipedia, for victims of this sort of treatment.

Your Comments

I wanted to make a few things clear

• I am not right wing, nor left wing for that matter.

• I am not a randroid, a randist, a store clerk, a teenager, or un-educated in philosophy.

• I do consider myself an objectivist

• The quote on my user page is from the band Rush, not Rush Limbaugh.

• I don't post anonymously. My account is in my very own name.

• I don't fill up pages with vitriolic insults against those who don't agree with me.

• I do not care if you've written 20 books, nor who you are complaining too. Your posts are rude, sophmoric, and you seem unable to deal with others opinions if they don't agree with yours.

If I were you I wouldn't want the embarasment of drawing others attention to what you have said in the course of your editing history here. It's you life and reputation however. Ethan a dawe (talk) 00:13, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

With regard to your comments on User:Ethan a dawe: Please see Wikipedia's no personal attacks policy. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Note that continued personal attacks will lead to blocks for disruption. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thank you. Use the talk page, and don't attack people.  Atyndall93 | talk  13:03, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

If this is a shared IP address, and you didn't make the edit, consider creating an account for yourself so you can avoid further irrelevant notices.

Please stop your disruptive editing. If your vandalism, such as the edit you made to Talk:Ayn Rand, continues, you will be blocked from editing. Regardless what another editor has said to you, do not attack them, this is a voilation of Wikipedia policy. Reply civilly.  Atyndall93 | talk  13:09, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

If this is a shared IP address, and you didn't make the edit, consider creating an account for yourself so you can avoid further irrelevant notices.

Issues with users

Hello, anon. If you have an issue with a specific editor, such as Ethan a dawe, it is best to take that up on the users talk page, or a third party such as WP:RFC/U or WP:WQA. Long comments to other users posted on article talk pages is disruptive. Concise suggestions regarding possible improvements the article at hand (i.e. Ayn Rand) are welcome, but please don't continue your current communication patterns as they are becoming less and less productive at achieving meaningful dialogue. Regards, Skomorokh 13:10, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Blocked from editing

Editing of Wikipedia from this IP address has been blocked for six months, since it represents evasion of the indefinite block of User:Spinoza1111. This matter has been discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. If you believe this block is unjustified, you may contest the block by adding the text {{unblock|your reason here}} below. EdJohnston (talk) 13:56, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

My email address is spinoza1111@yahoo.com.

This user is asking that their block be reviewed:

202.82.33.202 (block log • active blocks • global blocks • contribs • deleted contribs • filter log • creation log • change block settings • unblock • checkuser (log))

---

Request reason:

It is with "contempt of court" that I "appeal" this block. My contempt of this electronic kangaroo court is based on the fact that people who committ and enable electronic terrorism and deliberately use wikipedia to create falsehoods (Ayn Rand was a "philosopher": tobacco is "safe": the Ayn Rand article calls this writer a philosopher despite numerous complaints, and many of your tobacco articles fail to mention scientific fact) have no standing in my eyes, and are the intellectual equivalent of convenience store clerks.

This matter is not going away, people. The real issue is not my "behavior". When I joined wikipedia, I made a serious and sourced contribution to the Adorno article and a number of others. However, while I was editing the Kant article in 2005, and being so encouraged by a professor of philosophy who was at the time some sort of moderator, I discovered that unqualified members, most of them ill-informed and some of them actual convenience store clerks, were in their ignorance identifying the common stock of knowledge one would expect in an educated person as "original" research and calling anything but the most lifeless and clerkish prose "vandalism".

Of course, just as it got hard, at the time of the fall of the Roman empire, to tell the Vandals from the Romans, the real vandals are people with no education, anhedonic with respect to texts, who harm my reputation and waste my time, and then expect not to be "insulted" as if they were some sort of New Class one dared not sass.

These people are anhedonic with respect to texts and many of them seem to have dyslexia for instead of addressing objections (such as my sourced precis of Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Rand's "Notes for the New Intellectual"), they profess to be wearied by prolixity, even when this prolixity is made necessary by their lack of culture. The profession is made to renarrate themselves as "scholars" who have for years, nodded weak and weary over texts: but upon investigation as in the case of Ethan A Dawe, they are unfamiliar with texts other than the lyrics of rock and roll, and perforce these are their authorities.

It has become clear to me that Jimbo Wales is engaged in a crypto-Maoist "hundred flowers campaign" with capitalist characteristics. Just as Mao encouraged intellectuals in the late 1950s to speak out only to identify trouble-makers, in Wales' variant he encouraged people to edit in 2004 NOT because he supports "freedom". Just as it was quietly pointed out with respect to the libertarianism of pornography in the 1970s, that women being humiliated ain't "freedom", people being harassed commencing in 2005 by Hitler Youth for being able to write and having read widely ain't freedom.

Jimbo Wales, it seems, started out as a pornographer, hustling to make a buck. I don't believe he started wikipedia to create some sort of grand and glorious "free" resource. I now believe he did so to at first encourage well-read people who can write to post, and then unleash convenience store clerks and head cases on those people in order to steal their intellectual production and humiliate them in a crypto-Maoist campaign. This is being done to drive them away and publish a commercial wikipedia, including my 2005 intellectual labor.

I am going to do my best, should this Amerikkkan style Great Soviet Encylopaedia see the light of day, to register legal complaints. Sure, Amerikkkan law has too much respect for "property" as in "intellectual property" and none at all for working people, and even less for working people who work for free: a return to the barbarism of slavery is in fact implicit in the legal theorising of modern Americans such as Justice Scalia of the SC.

But what this only means is that it's time to rip Amerikkkan law a new conceptual asshole.

As an American southerner, Jimbo Wales has, I believe, not dealt with the legacy of a slavery from which his ancestors probably benefited and he, like many uneducated and uncultured Americans, uses "libertarianism" (with its flaccid and logically null claims about "freedom" which demand no thought and no culture) to create time-sliced and virtual slaves who add content and then are driven out by Trogdolytes like Ethan A Dawe.

As a pornographer, his "libertarianism" is the liberty of the man who exploits women and the schoolyard bully that becomes that man. It's Samuel Johnson's liberty: "cries for Liberty from the drivers of Negroes", and their children after them whose addiction to power and control is shown in the situation of modern American black people, still subordinated after all these years by the toxicity of null "liberty".

And as a follower of the nonphilosophy of Ayn Rand, a mere set of opinions as I have repeatedly shown on the Talk page of the Ayn Rand article, it is to be expected that Wales and his goons will show no understanding, no charity, no willingness to dialog and no "altruism". Instead, they will not only simply "block" a person, they will forever tag that person in this space as a troll despite the evidence of his texts and his standing as a published writer, teacher, and father.

You consistently assault the "little" people and you think they can't strike back. Wikipedia was used to assault a hard working computer programmer and author, Herbert Schildt. I went through channels as a brother author and I got the article changed. Wikipedia was used to assault another computer author, Kathy Sierra, calling her (very real) harassment, alleged, and I went through channels, endured the usual campaign of personal destruction, and I GOT THE ARTICLE CHANGED.

I'm going to get "philosopher" likewise removed from the Rand article because from the NPOV as in the views of the ordinary educated person, she's a mass market writer who got a hair up her butt. I'm going to do so because I know real philosophers, such as the chair of my undergraduate department of philosophy, E. D. Klemke, and they are collegial, courteous and altruistic people who don't, as Rand did, use retail ad hominem and mass conspiracy theory to "prove" assertions. E. D. Klemke collapsed while courteously, compassionately, altruistically teaching Philosophy 101 at the the state University of Iowa, and had been hounded out of Roosevelt University for insisting that, just as there are sciences, there are humanistic disciplines whose membership is defined, not by having a big mouth and access to a bully's pulpit based on sales of trashy books, but on learning and the willingness to pass it on, and I swear before this Kangaroo court, he will not in this respect have died in vain.

I shall do this not only a published writer, but also as a teacher whose students are being misled into doing reports on Ayn Rand, the famous American philosopher, and trying Copenhagen, because it must be safe: no warnings about NPOV scientific fact appear. I shall honor the father that this horde has slain.

I appeal with contempt of court which you may note. I appeal with a deep feeling of hatred in my heart for you people, who are Shakespeare's dogs in office. And if and when I attend a wikipedia conference, you may be quite assured that I shall register a strong, exclusively verbal protest against your stinking, rotten, and Fascistic "libertarianism" and your stinking rotten behavior. I fully expect that when and if I do so, you will be the first to physically assault me to shut me the fuck up, because that is what thugs do, and you are collectively, and in many instances singly, nothing but thugs.

This issue isn't going to go away, people. As a correspondent of Lawrence Lessig who served alongside Mike Godwin on a panel on the destruction of genuine freedom of speech by the creation of virtual Internet realities such as the Rand article, I am writing them both to alert them to your behavior. As a published author on philosophy, politics and computer science, I am using what access to the media I have and my writing ability to foreground your behavior and warn teachers world-wide to stay away from Wikipedia, and not buy the print edition, with stolen intellectual production (not "property", the production of working people made into virtual slaves).

I'm going to take wikipedia away from Amerikkkan slavedrivers because there's a lot of people world-wide that have been subjected to your bullying and now constitute people posting from IP address. You cannot block us. I am going to form or join a union of these people and we shall demand an end to your control.

As evidence of the arguments I presented at the Rand site, as evidence of the contrast between the whining of convenience store clerks and my production, I'll appendix the most recent post to be censored.

I "appeal" but note that your stinking, rotten authoritarian personality disorder always puts people in the position of recognizing a kangaroo court, therefore

I "APPEAL" WITH CONTEMPT AND HATRED OF YOUR ILLEGITIMATE AUTHORITY

FREE WIKIPEDIA

DOWN WITH "LIBERTY" AND UP WITH FREEDOM

STOP INTERNET BULLYING

APPENDIX

Ayn Rand's questionable status as a philosopher: discussion section: please don't censor

[The following is my definitive statement of the case for not considering, from the NPOV, Ayn Rand a philosopher, and "objectivism", from the NPOV, at least very different from a "philosophy" as understood by educated people. I will restore this article when it is deleted by the electronic terrorists here, checking this site on a regular basis. I ask that it be left alone except for discussion of the points raised, and in return, I shall edit no other section of this page, and endeavor a bit more to be civil, keeping in mind that much of my "incivility" is simply an ability to write, a knowledge of philosophy absent here, and the consequent tendency to carpet bomb. The rest of it is a shame that my interlocutors dare not admit for so soiling the good name of philosophy.]

[Correspondence may be sent to spinoza1111@yahoo.com]

AYN RAND NO PHILOSOPHER

(1) A philosopher enters into a dialogue defined by Habermas between equals, each dialog participant extending to each other mutual recognition and respect. This mutual recognition and respect means that a philosopher no longer is acting in a professional role when he uses retail "ad hominem" (as Rand did on followers who did not share her beliefs in the way she wanted) nor wholesale ad-hominem in the form of a conspiracy theory (as Rand, and her followers, do when rejected, as she was rejected in Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Notes for a New Intellectual), charging the person who disagrees with one with institutionally conspiring to exclude one, based on having a "closed liberal mind" or somesuch. That is, it is a precondition of entry to a philosophical dialog that one assumes good-faith conduct on the part of one's antagonist. When EITHER that conduct ceases, OR, the assumption of good faith conduct is suspended by one or more participants, then, as they say in the pub when the lads get rowdy, the philosophers need to "take it outside" the pub or corner tap, and have it out, no longer as philosophers, but as ordinary people.

(2) Of course, it can be objected that (1) doesn't resemble common educated usage on which we base the NPOV. However, common usage isn't static. The Rand phenomenon itself changed the meaning of philosophy to a lower, more general, more conceptually useless and more vague usage because it was her ambition, without having published on philosophy, to change it to include "successful novelist who wishes to be called a philosopher". To the extent she succeeded, the term became vaguer, and more inchoate. However, compare it to "physicist" or "mathematician". Probably because of science worship, the "chemist" is safe from having to be jostled by alchemists: the "physicists" by crazed would-be patenters of the *primum mobile*: the "mathematicians" by wantstabe squarers of the circle. However, everybody is, potentially a "philosopher" if Ayn Rand is a philosopher, just as Modernism appeared to license everybody to be an "artist", and as Gilbert and Sullivan knew, "if everybody's somebody then no-one's anybody".

(3) It is of course contradictory to Rand's notion that there was a "natural" elite to call anyone who wants to be called a "philosopher", a philosopher same as Hume: it is precisely the sort of intellectual permissiveness against which she, honestly enough, set her face. She apparently wanted, or her adepts want, her to get special treatment. But what is this special treatment based upon? She had opinions, but as they say in the Army, opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one. She produced no recognizable arguments for her views, freed of tautology ("A is A", alert the media) or ad-hominem/conspiracy theorizing, unlike philosophers universally produce in their professional capacity: if one actually troubles to read Nietzche one finds a completely different method closest in spirit to African philosophies, which unseats, through argument, "truth" and replaces it by a more general and an inclusive concept of life-force and successful flourishing, and which influenced the philosopher Adorno, who founded reason on human survival and found no meaning outside of survival.

(4) Consider Rand's opinion that "capitalist evils can be explained by government intervention". Contemporary with Rand, F. A. Hayek produced recognizably philosophical arguments that socialism has to micro-manage the economy and will of necessity transform the micro-managers into an incompetent *nomenklatura*. Hayek made this prediction and then confirmed it with evidence already available in the failures and lies of Stalin's Five Year Plans. He was then confirmed by the Chinese famine of 1961 which resulted from good-faith socialist planning, showing that the *nomenklatura* need not be corrupt. Whereas Rand made a stronger claim: that capitalist failures could *always* be explained by government interference, and did not seriously consider any one of a number of cases, from child labor in Britain before the first wage and hours acts, to the use of opium and nicotine in common household products by unregulated American drug companies in the 19th century...where the use of opium stopped after the "government interference" of the Pure Food and Drug Act and nicotine use continued because American tobacco companies got themselves exempted from the PFDA. Clearly, Rand and Hayek were quite different although on the same page, which means that before Rand is calld a philosopher, the page for Hayek needs to be changed.

(5) Nor did Rand measurably effect subsequent philosophy as practiced by the set of existing recognized philosophers inside and outside the academy. Actual libertarian philosophers, closest to her views, ignored her work.

(6) A philosopher is one, male or female, black or white or brown or piebald, who seriously and continuously reads books with which she may profoundly disagree, perhaps like Mark Twain, who said he was "looking for loopholes" when caught reading the bible: but Rand refused to read Kant and had a level of understanding of Aristotle (inferring the free market from his writings) that was apparently taken from an encyclopedia. A philosopher is hedonic with respect to the tradition: Michel Foucault visited the Bibliotheque National every day of his professional life, and Derrida read Plato, with whom he had profound issues, every year. Rand seemed to read in a permanent state of resentment, always alert for signs of liberal theorizing.

(7) It is TRUE that in certain Anglo-American philosophical circles, and in the general, Anglo-American culture, it has become a fashion statement to say one doesn't read X. Hilary Clinton had no "time" for the National Intelligence Estimate, and George Bush is of course famously ignorant. Within philosophy, the philosophy instructor or even full professor will cruelly bully the student who has read Kant when he Kant read Kant, and get away with this shit.

(8) But this goes against the world grain of "mutual respect and recognition", the courtesy extended to Socrates to Thrasymachus, and Confucius hospitallity. Anglo-American rudeness seems to have been a part of a cultura meme, merely a growing arrogance which has had grievous consequences, world-wide (and here: it is rudeness to terroristically censor people, and much more of a rude act than my at-times rude speech, an act which is wasting my time).

(9) Therefore, my test for calling someone a philosopher is only a refinement of NPOV common educated usage. It is one by one and "constructivist", as well as recursive. You simply ask already existing members of the set of philosophers whether candidate C is a philosopher.

(10) Ethan A Dawe produces his old college textbook, a grand total of one reference, and tells us the matter is closed. Of course, this fails the test, since there are a significant number of philosophers, probably a majority, who would not only say she was no philosopher, but would say so passionately. Taking a "philosphy" [sic] course doesn't qualify one to decide the issue, especially by means of electronic terrorism. Rand has a "Caesar's Wife" problem up the butt. She is not only not accepted as a philosopher, she repels real philosophers. On an intellectual level, she makes them sick.

(11) Intellectual disciplines, while not requiring university affiliation (my article on Martha Nussbaum's UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT was peer reviewed and accepted by a London journal, just before it went tits up, hope I'm not the kiss of death but you get my point) proceed by a civil-society process of grassroots mutual recognition and respect which is destroyed if one lone individual can get called a member of the club, not by outsiders, but by Hitler Youth, aliterate fatcats, and people who forgot to sell their philosophy 101 textbook. Interestingly, only in totalitarian dictatorships are loudmouths and thugs made by rigged acclamation into Academicians, Philosophers, Founts of Wisdom, and Dear Leaders. Among numerous other errors, Rand simply failed to foresee that Western hegemony would change the modal personality of the West, including wikipedians, into that of retail little Stalins in miniature, each of whom wants reality to conform to his whim...no matter how useless the definition of "philosopher" becomes.

(12) For if Rand is a philosopher, who's the next member of the set? Where does this shit lead? Before totalitarian dictators become Hitlers or Stalins, they are most assuredly psychopaths who want what they want, here, to call Rand a philsopher sorta like, kinda like, Wittgenstein or Spinoza or Martha Nussbaum. As Adorno's "gang leaders of the self" and like Hitler in Vienna, they just await the day when a sufficiently brutalized populace starts approving of their tactics, such as the use of electronic censorship and making the issue into "you've insulted me, how dare you" or "Nilges is a blocked user and a wandering Jew".

(12) You allow physicists to peer review. Philosophers deserve the same respect. They shouldn't be shit upon like you most assuredly shit upon them, with malice, because the agenda in calling Rand a philosopher is profoundly narcissistic: infantile. It is to declare that "because I have opinions so seemingly at variance with those of the common altruistic herd, I am special, almost like Rand a philosopher, and now that I have wikipedia I can MAKE her a 'real' philosopher." Or, as Robert Crumb's "Mister Sensitive" said in 1982, "I wuz meant to be culled out".

[That's it. As long as this section is left alone, I shall endeavor to be as civil as possible henceforth and I shall edit only this section. If this section is vandalized, then I shall simply restore it at my convenience. If that's edit warring, so be it.]

Edward G. Nilges

Edward, this is essentially Original Research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research . In any case, I have posted a valid third party cite in a philosphy textbook where a well known non objectivists philospher calls Rand a novelist and philosopher. This is a good source and, as such proves the point that Rand should be labelled as such. I think we can stop debating it now. Ethan a dawe (talk) 14:28, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for not removing this, Ethan. I trust I need now to adhere to my promise to endeavor to be civil and not post in any other section.

As to your new charge, that I am engaged in "original research". Certainly I have worked very hard, albeit using more sources than a single philosophy textbook, on refining common usage so that here it can be used as a NPOV test for calling Ayn Rand a "philosopher".

However, any originality is a result merely of an original, unfounded and POV claim: that Ayn Rand is a philosopher. I believe the claim to be wrong, and while two wrongs don't make a right, it showed, in my opinion, a bad faith that could only be redressed by adding new elements to the dialogue.

I trust you enough to ask at this point that you conduct an informal survey. Call your former philosophy professor on the phone and ask him if Ayn Rand. Let's see if my oh so original test works, whether or not you or I are confirmed by it.

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{{Unblock on hold |1=blocking administrator |2=It is with "contempt of court" that I "appeal" this block. My contempt of this electronic kangaroo court is based on the fact that people who committ and enable electronic terrorism and deliberately use wikipedia to create falsehoods (Ayn Rand was a "philosopher": tobacco is "safe": the Ayn Rand article calls this writer a philosopher despite numerous complaints, and many of your tobacco articles fail to mention scientific fact) have no standing in my eyes, and are the intellectual equivalent of convenience store clerks. :This matter is not going away, people. The real issue is not my "behavior". When I joined wikipedia, I made a serious and sourced contribution to the Adorno article and a number of others. However, while I was editing the Kant article in 2005, and being so encouraged by a professor of philosophy who was at the time some sort of moderator, I discovered that unqualified members, most of them ill-informed and some of them actual convenience store clerks, were in their ignorance identifying the common stock of knowledge one would expect in an educated person as "original" research and calling anything but the most lifeless and clerkish prose "vandalism". Of course, just as it got hard, at the time of the fall of the Roman empire, to tell the Vandals from the Romans, the real vandals are people with no education, anhedonic with respect to texts, who harm my reputation and waste my time, and then expect not to be "insulted" as if they were some sort of New Class one dared not sass. These people are anhedonic with respect to texts and many of them seem to have dyslexia for instead of addressing objections (such as my sourced precis of Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Rand's "Notes for the New Intellectual"), they profess to be wearied by prolixity, even when this prolixity is made necessary by their lack of culture. The profession is made to renarrate themselves as "scholars" who have for years, nodded weak and weary over texts: but upon investigation as in the case of Ethan A Dawe, they are unfamiliar with texts other than the lyrics of rock and roll, and perforce these are their authorities. It has become clear to me that Jimbo Wales is engaged in a crypto-Maoist "hundred flowers campaign" with capitalist characteristics. Just as Mao encouraged intellectuals in the late 1950s to speak out only to identify trouble-makers, in Wales' variant he encouraged people to edit in 2004 NOT because he supports "freedom". Just as it was quietly pointed out with respect to the libertarianism of pornography in the 1970s, that women being humiliated ain't "freedom", people being harassed commencing in 2005 by Hitler Youth for being able to write and having read widely ain't freedom. Jimbo Wales, it seems, started out as a pornographer, hustling to make a buck. I don't believe he started wikipedia to create some sort of grand and glorious "free" resource. I now believe he did so to at first encourage well-read people who can write to post, and then unleash convenience store clerks and head cases on those people in order to steal their intellectual production and humiliate them in a crypto-Maoist campaign. This is being done to drive them away and publish a commercial wikipedia, including my 2005 intellectual labor. I am going to do my best, should this Amerikkkan style Great Soviet Encylopaedia see the light of day, to register legal complaints. Sure, Amerikkkan law has too much respect for "property" as in "intellectual property" and none at all for working people, and even less for working people who work for free: a return to the barbarism of slavery is in fact implicit in the legal theorising of modern Americans such as Justice Scalia of the SC. But what this only means is that it's time to rip Amerikkkan law a new conceptual asshole. As an American southerner, Jimbo Wales has, I believe, not dealt with the legacy of a slavery from which his ancestors probably benefited and he, like many uneducated and uncultured Americans, uses "libertarianism" (with its flaccid and logically null claims about "freedom" which demand no thought and no culture) to create time-sliced and virtual slaves who add content and then are driven out by Trogdolytes like Ethan A Dawe. As a pornographer, his "libertarianism" is the liberty of the man who exploits women and the schoolyard bully that becomes that man. It's Samuel Johnson's liberty: "cries for Liberty from the drivers of Negroes", and their children after them whose addiction to power and control is shown in the situation of modern American black people, still subordinated after all these years by the toxicity of null "liberty". And as a follower of the nonphilosophy of Ayn Rand, a mere set of opinions as I have repeatedly shown on the Talk page of the Ayn Rand article, it is to be expected that Wales and his goons will show no understanding, no charity, no willingness to dialog and no "altruism". Instead, they will not only simply "block" a person, they will forever tag that person in this space as a troll despite the evidence of his texts and his standing as a published writer, teacher, and father. You consistently assault the "little" people and you think they can't strike back. Wikipedia was used to assault a hard working computer programmer and author, Herbert Schildt. I went through channels as a brother author and I got the article changed. Wikipedia was used to assault another computer author, Kathy Sierra, calling her (very real) harassment, alleged, and I went through channels, endured the usual campaign of personal destruction, and I GOT THE ARTICLE CHANGED. I'm going to get "philosopher" likewise removed from the Rand article because from the NPOV as in the views of the ordinary educated person, she's a mass market writer who got a hair up her butt. I'm going to do so because I know real philosophers, such as the chair of my undergraduate department of philosophy, E. D. Klemke, and they are collegial, courteous and altruistic people who don't, as Rand did, use retail ad hominem and mass conspiracy theory to "prove" assertions. E. D. Klemke collapsed while courteously, compassionately, altruistically teaching Philosophy 101 at the the state University of Iowa, and had been hounded out of Roosevelt University for insisting that, just as there are sciences, there are humanistic disciplines whose membership is defined, not by having a big mouth and access to a bully's pulpit based on sales of trashy books, but on learning and the willingness to pass it on, and I swear before this Kangaroo court, he will not in this respect have died in vain. I shall do this not only a published writer, but also as a teacher whose students are being misled into doing reports on Ayn Rand, the famous American philosopher, and trying Copenhagen, because it must be safe: no warnings about NPOV scientific fact appear. I shall honor the father that this horde has slain. I appeal with contempt of court which you may note. I appeal with a deep feeling of hatred in my heart for you people, who are Shakespeare's dogs in office. And if and when I attend a wikipedia conference, you may be quite assured that I shall register a strong, exclusively verbal protest against your stinking, rotten, and Fascistic "libertarianism" and your stinking rotten behavior. I fully expect that when and if I do so, you will be the first to physically assault me to shut me the fuck up, because that is what thugs do, and you are collectively, and in many instances singly, nothing but thugs. This issue isn't going to go away, people. As a correspondent of Lawrence Lessig who served alongside Mike Godwin on a panel on the destruction of genuine freedom of speech by the creation of virtual Internet realities such as the Rand article, I am writing them both to alert them to your behavior. As a published author on philosophy, politics and computer science, I am using what access to the media I have and my writing ability to foreground your behavior and warn teachers world-wide to stay away from Wikipedia, and not buy the print edition, with stolen intellectual production (not "property", the production of working people made into virtual slaves). I'm going to take wikipedia away from Amerikkkan slavedrivers because there's a lot of people world-wide that have been subjected to your bullying and now constitute people posting from IP address. You cannot block us. I am going to form or join a union of these people and we shall demand an end to your control. As evidence of the arguments I presented at the Rand site, as evidence of the contrast between the whining of convenience store clerks and my production, I'll appendix the most recent post to be censored. I "appeal" but note that your stinking, rotten authoritarian personality disorder always puts people in the position of recognizing a kangaroo court, therefore I "APPEAL" WITH CONTEMPT AND HATRED OF YOUR ILLEGITIMATE AUTHORITY FREE WIKIPEDIA DOWN WITH "LIBERTY" AND UP WITH FREEDOM STOP INTERNET BULLYING APPENDIX ==Ayn Rand's questionable status as a philosopher: discussion section: please don't censor== [The following is my definitive statement of the case for not considering, from the NPOV, Ayn Rand a philosopher, and "objectivism", from the NPOV, at least very different from a "philosophy" as understood by educated people. I will restore this article when it is deleted by the electronic terrorists here, checking this site on a regular basis. I ask that it be left alone except for discussion of the points raised, and in return, I shall edit no other section of this page, and endeavor a bit more to be civil, keeping in mind that much of my "incivility" is simply an ability to write, a knowledge of philosophy absent here, and the consequent tendency to carpet bomb. The rest of it is a shame that my interlocutors dare not admit for so soiling the good name of philosophy.] [Correspondence may be sent to spinoza1111@yahoo.com] AYN RAND NO PHILOSOPHER (1) A philosopher enters into a dialogue defined by Habermas between equals, each dialog participant extending to each other mutual recognition and respect. This mutual recognition and respect means that a philosopher no longer is acting in a professional role when he uses retail "ad hominem" (as Rand did on followers who did not share her beliefs in the way she wanted) nor wholesale ad-hominem in the form of a conspiracy theory (as Rand, and her followers, do when rejected, as she was rejected in Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Notes for a New Intellectual), charging the person who disagrees with one with institutionally conspiring to exclude one, based on having a "closed liberal mind" or somesuch. That is, it is a precondition of entry to a philosophical dialog that one assumes good-faith conduct on the part of one's antagonist. When EITHER that conduct ceases, OR, the assumption of good faith conduct is suspended by one or more participants, then, as they say in the pub when the lads get rowdy, the philosophers need to "take it outside" the pub or corner tap, and have it out, no longer as philosophers, but as ordinary people. (2) Of course, it can be objected that (1) doesn't resemble common educated usage on which we base the NPOV. However, common usage isn't static. The Rand phenomenon itself changed the meaning of philosophy to a lower, more general, more conceptually useless and more vague usage because it was her ambition, without having published on philosophy, to change it to include "successful novelist who wishes to be called a philosopher". To the extent she succeeded, the term became vaguer, and more inchoate. However, compare it to "physicist" or "mathematician". Probably because of science worship, the "chemist" is safe from having to be jostled by alchemists: the "physicists" by crazed would-be patenters of the *primum mobile*: the "mathematicians" by wantstabe squarers of the circle. However, everybody is, potentially a "philosopher" if Ayn Rand is a philosopher, just as Modernism appeared to license everybody to be an "artist", and as Gilbert and Sullivan knew, "if everybody's somebody then no-one's anybody". (3) It is of course contradictory to Rand's notion that there was a "natural" elite to call anyone who wants to be called a "philosopher", a philosopher same as Hume: it is precisely the sort of intellectual permissiveness against which she, honestly enough, set her face. She apparently wanted, or her adepts want, her to get special treatment. But what is this special treatment based upon? She had opinions, but as they say in the Army, opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one. She produced no recognizable arguments for her views, freed of tautology ("A is A", alert the media) or ad-hominem/conspiracy theorizing, unlike philosophers universally produce in their professional capacity: if one actually troubles to read Nietzche one finds a completely different method closest in spirit to African philosophies, which unseats, through argument, "truth" and replaces it by a more general and an inclusive concept of life-force and successful flourishing, and which influenced the philosopher Adorno, who founded reason on human survival and found no meaning outside of survival. (4) Consider Rand's opinion that "capitalist evils can be explained by government intervention". Contemporary with Rand, F. A. Hayek produced recognizably philosophical arguments that socialism has to micro-manage the economy and will of necessity transform the micro-managers into an incompetent *nomenklatura*. Hayek made this prediction and then confirmed it with evidence already available in the failures and lies of Stalin's Five Year Plans. He was then confirmed by the Chinese famine of 1961 which resulted from good-faith socialist planning, showing that the *nomenklatura* need not be corrupt. Whereas Rand made a stronger claim: that capitalist failures could *always* be explained by government interference, and did not seriously consider any one of a number of cases, from child labor in Britain before the first wage and hours acts, to the use of opium and nicotine in common household products by unregulated American drug companies in the 19th century...where the use of opium stopped after the "government interference" of the Pure Food and Drug Act and nicotine use continued because American tobacco companies got themselves exempted from the PFDA. Clearly, Rand and Hayek were quite different although on the same page, which means that before Rand is calld a philosopher, the page for Hayek needs to be changed. (5) Nor did Rand measurably effect subsequent philosophy as practiced by the set of existing recognized philosophers inside and outside the academy. Actual libertarian philosophers, closest to her views, ignored her work. (6) A philosopher is one, male or female, black or white or brown or piebald, who seriously and continuously reads books with which she may profoundly disagree, perhaps like Mark Twain, who said he was "looking for loopholes" when caught reading the bible: but Rand refused to read Kant and had a level of understanding of Aristotle (inferring the free market from his writings) that was apparently taken from an encyclopedia. A philosopher is hedonic with respect to the tradition: Michel Foucault visited the Bibliotheque National every day of his professional life, and Derrida read Plato, with whom he had profound issues, every year. Rand seemed to read in a permanent state of resentment, always alert for signs of liberal theorizing. (7) It is TRUE that in certain Anglo-American philosophical circles, and in the general, Anglo-American culture, it has become a fashion statement to say one doesn't read X. Hilary Clinton had no "time" for the National Intelligence Estimate, and George Bush is of course famously ignorant. Within philosophy, the philosophy instructor or even full professor will cruelly bully the student who has read Kant when he Kant read Kant, and get away with this shit. (8) But this goes against the world grain of "mutual respect and recognition", the courtesy extended to Socrates to Thrasymachus, and Confucius hospitallity. Anglo-American rudeness seems to have been a part of a cultura meme, merely a growing arrogance which has had grievous consequences, world-wide (and here: it is rudeness to terroristically censor people, and much more of a rude act than my at-times rude speech, an act which is wasting my time). (9) Therefore, my test for calling someone a philosopher is only a refinement of NPOV common educated usage. It is one by one and "constructivist", as well as recursive. You simply ask already existing members of the set of philosophers whether candidate C is a philosopher. (10) Ethan A Dawe produces his old college textbook, a grand total of one reference, and tells us the matter is closed. Of course, this fails the test, since there are a significant number of philosophers, probably a majority, who would not only say she was no philosopher, but would say so passionately. Taking a "philosphy" [sic] course doesn't qualify one to decide the issue, especially by means of electronic terrorism. Rand has a "Caesar's Wife" problem up the butt. She is not only not accepted as a philosopher, she repels real philosophers. On an intellectual level, she makes them sick. (11) Intellectual disciplines, while not requiring university affiliation (my article on Martha Nussbaum's UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT was peer reviewed and accepted by a London journal, just before it went tits up, hope I'm not the kiss of death but you get my point) proceed by a civil-society process of grassroots mutual recognition and respect which is destroyed if one lone individual can get called a member of the club, not by outsiders, but by Hitler Youth, aliterate fatcats, and people who forgot to sell their philosophy 101 textbook. Interestingly, only in totalitarian dictatorships are loudmouths and thugs made by rigged acclamation into Academicians, Philosophers, Founts of Wisdom, and Dear Leaders. Among numerous other errors, Rand simply failed to foresee that Western hegemony would change the modal personality of the West, including wikipedians, into that of retail little Stalins in miniature, each of whom wants reality to conform to his whim...no matter how useless the definition of "philosopher" becomes. (12) For if Rand is a philosopher, who's the next member of the set? Where does this shit lead? Before totalitarian dictators become Hitlers or Stalins, they are most assuredly psychopaths who want what they want, here, to call Rand a philsopher sorta like, kinda like, Wittgenstein or Spinoza or Martha Nussbaum. As Adorno's "gang leaders of the self" and like Hitler in Vienna, they just await the day when a sufficiently brutalized populace starts approving of their tactics, such as the use of electronic censorship and making the issue into "you've insulted me, how dare you" or "Nilges is a blocked user and a wandering Jew". (12) You allow physicists to peer review. Philosophers deserve the same respect. They shouldn't be shit upon like you most assuredly shit upon them, with malice, because the agenda in calling Rand a philosopher is profoundly narcissistic: infantile. It is to declare that "because I have opinions so seemingly at variance with those of the common altruistic herd, I am special, almost like Rand a philosopher, and now that I have wikipedia I can MAKE her a 'real' philosopher." Or, as Robert Crumb's "Mister Sensitive" said in 1982, "I wuz meant to be culled out". [That's it. As long as this section is left alone, I shall endeavor to be as civil as possible henceforth and I shall edit only this section. If this section is vandalized, then I shall simply restore it at my convenience. If that's edit warring, so be it.] Edward G. Nilges ::Edward, this is essentially Original Research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research . In any case, I have posted a valid third party cite in a philosphy textbook where a well known non objectivists philospher calls Rand a novelist and philosopher. This is a good source and, as such proves the point that Rand should be labelled as such. I think we can stop debating it now. [[User:Ethan a dawe|Ethan a dawe]] ([[User talk:Ethan a dawe|talk]]) 14:28, 29 April 2008 (UTC) ::: Thank you for not removing this, Ethan. I trust I need now to adhere to my promise to endeavor to be civil and not post in any other section. ::: As to your new charge, that I am engaged in "original research". Certainly I have worked very hard, albeit using more sources than a single philosophy textbook, on refining common usage so that here it can be used as a NPOV test for calling Ayn Rand a "philosopher". :::However, any originality is a result merely of an original, unfounded and POV claim: that Ayn Rand is a philosopher. I believe the claim to be wrong, and while two wrongs don't make a right, it showed, in my opinion, a bad faith that could only be redressed by adding new elements to the dialogue. :::I trust you enough to ask at this point that you conduct an informal survey. Call your former philosophy professor on the phone and ask him if Ayn Rand. Let's see if my oh so original test works, whether or not you or I are confirmed by it.  |3 = ~~~~}}

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{{unblock reviewed |1=It is with "contempt of court" that I "appeal" this block. My contempt of this electronic kangaroo court is based on the fact that people who committ and enable electronic terrorism and deliberately use wikipedia to create falsehoods (Ayn Rand was a "philosopher": tobacco is "safe": the Ayn Rand article calls this writer a philosopher despite numerous complaints, and many of your tobacco articles fail to mention scientific fact) have no standing in my eyes, and are the intellectual equivalent of convenience store clerks. :This matter is not going away, people. The real issue is not my "behavior". When I joined wikipedia, I made a serious and sourced contribution to the Adorno article and a number of others. However, while I was editing the Kant article in 2005, and being so encouraged by a professor of philosophy who was at the time some sort of moderator, I discovered that unqualified members, most of them ill-informed and some of them actual convenience store clerks, were in their ignorance identifying the common stock of knowledge one would expect in an educated person as "original" research and calling anything but the most lifeless and clerkish prose "vandalism". Of course, just as it got hard, at the time of the fall of the Roman empire, to tell the Vandals from the Romans, the real vandals are people with no education, anhedonic with respect to texts, who harm my reputation and waste my time, and then expect not to be "insulted" as if they were some sort of New Class one dared not sass. These people are anhedonic with respect to texts and many of them seem to have dyslexia for instead of addressing objections (such as my sourced precis of Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Rand's "Notes for the New Intellectual"), they profess to be wearied by prolixity, even when this prolixity is made necessary by their lack of culture. The profession is made to renarrate themselves as "scholars" who have for years, nodded weak and weary over texts: but upon investigation as in the case of Ethan A Dawe, they are unfamiliar with texts other than the lyrics of rock and roll, and perforce these are their authorities. It has become clear to me that Jimbo Wales is engaged in a crypto-Maoist "hundred flowers campaign" with capitalist characteristics. Just as Mao encouraged intellectuals in the late 1950s to speak out only to identify trouble-makers, in Wales' variant he encouraged people to edit in 2004 NOT because he supports "freedom". Just as it was quietly pointed out with respect to the libertarianism of pornography in the 1970s, that women being humiliated ain't "freedom", people being harassed commencing in 2005 by Hitler Youth for being able to write and having read widely ain't freedom. Jimbo Wales, it seems, started out as a pornographer, hustling to make a buck. I don't believe he started wikipedia to create some sort of grand and glorious "free" resource. I now believe he did so to at first encourage well-read people who can write to post, and then unleash convenience store clerks and head cases on those people in order to steal their intellectual production and humiliate them in a crypto-Maoist campaign. This is being done to drive them away and publish a commercial wikipedia, including my 2005 intellectual labor. I am going to do my best, should this Amerikkkan style Great Soviet Encylopaedia see the light of day, to register legal complaints. Sure, Amerikkkan law has too much respect for "property" as in "intellectual property" and none at all for working people, and even less for working people who work for free: a return to the barbarism of slavery is in fact implicit in the legal theorising of modern Americans such as Justice Scalia of the SC. But what this only means is that it's time to rip Amerikkkan law a new conceptual asshole. As an American southerner, Jimbo Wales has, I believe, not dealt with the legacy of a slavery from which his ancestors probably benefited and he, like many uneducated and uncultured Americans, uses "libertarianism" (with its flaccid and logically null claims about "freedom" which demand no thought and no culture) to create time-sliced and virtual slaves who add content and then are driven out by Trogdolytes like Ethan A Dawe. As a pornographer, his "libertarianism" is the liberty of the man who exploits women and the schoolyard bully that becomes that man. It's Samuel Johnson's liberty: "cries for Liberty from the drivers of Negroes", and their children after them whose addiction to power and control is shown in the situation of modern American black people, still subordinated after all these years by the toxicity of null "liberty". And as a follower of the nonphilosophy of Ayn Rand, a mere set of opinions as I have repeatedly shown on the Talk page of the Ayn Rand article, it is to be expected that Wales and his goons will show no understanding, no charity, no willingness to dialog and no "altruism". Instead, they will not only simply "block" a person, they will forever tag that person in this space as a troll despite the evidence of his texts and his standing as a published writer, teacher, and father. You consistently assault the "little" people and you think they can't strike back. Wikipedia was used to assault a hard working computer programmer and author, Herbert Schildt. I went through channels as a brother author and I got the article changed. Wikipedia was used to assault another computer author, Kathy Sierra, calling her (very real) harassment, alleged, and I went through channels, endured the usual campaign of personal destruction, and I GOT THE ARTICLE CHANGED. I'm going to get "philosopher" likewise removed from the Rand article because from the NPOV as in the views of the ordinary educated person, she's a mass market writer who got a hair up her butt. I'm going to do so because I know real philosophers, such as the chair of my undergraduate department of philosophy, E. D. Klemke, and they are collegial, courteous and altruistic people who don't, as Rand did, use retail ad hominem and mass conspiracy theory to "prove" assertions. E. D. Klemke collapsed while courteously, compassionately, altruistically teaching Philosophy 101 at the the state University of Iowa, and had been hounded out of Roosevelt University for insisting that, just as there are sciences, there are humanistic disciplines whose membership is defined, not by having a big mouth and access to a bully's pulpit based on sales of trashy books, but on learning and the willingness to pass it on, and I swear before this Kangaroo court, he will not in this respect have died in vain. I shall do this not only a published writer, but also as a teacher whose students are being misled into doing reports on Ayn Rand, the famous American philosopher, and trying Copenhagen, because it must be safe: no warnings about NPOV scientific fact appear. I shall honor the father that this horde has slain. I appeal with contempt of court which you may note. I appeal with a deep feeling of hatred in my heart for you people, who are Shakespeare's dogs in office. And if and when I attend a wikipedia conference, you may be quite assured that I shall register a strong, exclusively verbal protest against your stinking, rotten, and Fascistic "libertarianism" and your stinking rotten behavior. I fully expect that when and if I do so, you will be the first to physically assault me to shut me the fuck up, because that is what thugs do, and you are collectively, and in many instances singly, nothing but thugs. This issue isn't going to go away, people. As a correspondent of Lawrence Lessig who served alongside Mike Godwin on a panel on the destruction of genuine freedom of speech by the creation of virtual Internet realities such as the Rand article, I am writing them both to alert them to your behavior. As a published author on philosophy, politics and computer science, I am using what access to the media I have and my writing ability to foreground your behavior and warn teachers world-wide to stay away from Wikipedia, and not buy the print edition, with stolen intellectual production (not "property", the production of working people made into virtual slaves). I'm going to take wikipedia away from Amerikkkan slavedrivers because there's a lot of people world-wide that have been subjected to your bullying and now constitute people posting from IP address. You cannot block us. I am going to form or join a union of these people and we shall demand an end to your control. As evidence of the arguments I presented at the Rand site, as evidence of the contrast between the whining of convenience store clerks and my production, I'll appendix the most recent post to be censored. I "appeal" but note that your stinking, rotten authoritarian personality disorder always puts people in the position of recognizing a kangaroo court, therefore I "APPEAL" WITH CONTEMPT AND HATRED OF YOUR ILLEGITIMATE AUTHORITY FREE WIKIPEDIA DOWN WITH "LIBERTY" AND UP WITH FREEDOM STOP INTERNET BULLYING APPENDIX ==Ayn Rand's questionable status as a philosopher: discussion section: please don't censor== [The following is my definitive statement of the case for not considering, from the NPOV, Ayn Rand a philosopher, and "objectivism", from the NPOV, at least very different from a "philosophy" as understood by educated people. I will restore this article when it is deleted by the electronic terrorists here, checking this site on a regular basis. I ask that it be left alone except for discussion of the points raised, and in return, I shall edit no other section of this page, and endeavor a bit more to be civil, keeping in mind that much of my "incivility" is simply an ability to write, a knowledge of philosophy absent here, and the consequent tendency to carpet bomb. The rest of it is a shame that my interlocutors dare not admit for so soiling the good name of philosophy.] [Correspondence may be sent to spinoza1111@yahoo.com] AYN RAND NO PHILOSOPHER (1) A philosopher enters into a dialogue defined by Habermas between equals, each dialog participant extending to each other mutual recognition and respect. This mutual recognition and respect means that a philosopher no longer is acting in a professional role when he uses retail "ad hominem" (as Rand did on followers who did not share her beliefs in the way she wanted) nor wholesale ad-hominem in the form of a conspiracy theory (as Rand, and her followers, do when rejected, as she was rejected in Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Notes for a New Intellectual), charging the person who disagrees with one with institutionally conspiring to exclude one, based on having a "closed liberal mind" or somesuch. That is, it is a precondition of entry to a philosophical dialog that one assumes good-faith conduct on the part of one's antagonist. When EITHER that conduct ceases, OR, the assumption of good faith conduct is suspended by one or more participants, then, as they say in the pub when the lads get rowdy, the philosophers need to "take it outside" the pub or corner tap, and have it out, no longer as philosophers, but as ordinary people. (2) Of course, it can be objected that (1) doesn't resemble common educated usage on which we base the NPOV. However, common usage isn't static. The Rand phenomenon itself changed the meaning of philosophy to a lower, more general, more conceptually useless and more vague usage because it was her ambition, without having published on philosophy, to change it to include "successful novelist who wishes to be called a philosopher". To the extent she succeeded, the term became vaguer, and more inchoate. However, compare it to "physicist" or "mathematician". Probably because of science worship, the "chemist" is safe from having to be jostled by alchemists: the "physicists" by crazed would-be patenters of the *primum mobile*: the "mathematicians" by wantstabe squarers of the circle. However, everybody is, potentially a "philosopher" if Ayn Rand is a philosopher, just as Modernism appeared to license everybody to be an "artist", and as Gilbert and Sullivan knew, "if everybody's somebody then no-one's anybody". (3) It is of course contradictory to Rand's notion that there was a "natural" elite to call anyone who wants to be called a "philosopher", a philosopher same as Hume: it is precisely the sort of intellectual permissiveness against which she, honestly enough, set her face. She apparently wanted, or her adepts want, her to get special treatment. But what is this special treatment based upon? She had opinions, but as they say in the Army, opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one. She produced no recognizable arguments for her views, freed of tautology ("A is A", alert the media) or ad-hominem/conspiracy theorizing, unlike philosophers universally produce in their professional capacity: if one actually troubles to read Nietzche one finds a completely different method closest in spirit to African philosophies, which unseats, through argument, "truth" and replaces it by a more general and an inclusive concept of life-force and successful flourishing, and which influenced the philosopher Adorno, who founded reason on human survival and found no meaning outside of survival. (4) Consider Rand's opinion that "capitalist evils can be explained by government intervention". Contemporary with Rand, F. A. Hayek produced recognizably philosophical arguments that socialism has to micro-manage the economy and will of necessity transform the micro-managers into an incompetent *nomenklatura*. Hayek made this prediction and then confirmed it with evidence already available in the failures and lies of Stalin's Five Year Plans. He was then confirmed by the Chinese famine of 1961 which resulted from good-faith socialist planning, showing that the *nomenklatura* need not be corrupt. Whereas Rand made a stronger claim: that capitalist failures could *always* be explained by government interference, and did not seriously consider any one of a number of cases, from child labor in Britain before the first wage and hours acts, to the use of opium and nicotine in common household products by unregulated American drug companies in the 19th century...where the use of opium stopped after the "government interference" of the Pure Food and Drug Act and nicotine use continued because American tobacco companies got themselves exempted from the PFDA. Clearly, Rand and Hayek were quite different although on the same page, which means that before Rand is calld a philosopher, the page for Hayek needs to be changed. (5) Nor did Rand measurably effect subsequent philosophy as practiced by the set of existing recognized philosophers inside and outside the academy. Actual libertarian philosophers, closest to her views, ignored her work. (6) A philosopher is one, male or female, black or white or brown or piebald, who seriously and continuously reads books with which she may profoundly disagree, perhaps like Mark Twain, who said he was "looking for loopholes" when caught reading the bible: but Rand refused to read Kant and had a level of understanding of Aristotle (inferring the free market from his writings) that was apparently taken from an encyclopedia. A philosopher is hedonic with respect to the tradition: Michel Foucault visited the Bibliotheque National every day of his professional life, and Derrida read Plato, with whom he had profound issues, every year. Rand seemed to read in a permanent state of resentment, always alert for signs of liberal theorizing. (7) It is TRUE that in certain Anglo-American philosophical circles, and in the general, Anglo-American culture, it has become a fashion statement to say one doesn't read X. Hilary Clinton had no "time" for the National Intelligence Estimate, and George Bush is of course famously ignorant. Within philosophy, the philosophy instructor or even full professor will cruelly bully the student who has read Kant when he Kant read Kant, and get away with this shit. (8) But this goes against the world grain of "mutual respect and recognition", the courtesy extended to Socrates to Thrasymachus, and Confucius hospitallity. Anglo-American rudeness seems to have been a part of a cultura meme, merely a growing arrogance which has had grievous consequences, world-wide (and here: it is rudeness to terroristically censor people, and much more of a rude act than my at-times rude speech, an act which is wasting my time). (9) Therefore, my test for calling someone a philosopher is only a refinement of NPOV common educated usage. It is one by one and "constructivist", as well as recursive. You simply ask already existing members of the set of philosophers whether candidate C is a philosopher. (10) Ethan A Dawe produces his old college textbook, a grand total of one reference, and tells us the matter is closed. Of course, this fails the test, since there are a significant number of philosophers, probably a majority, who would not only say she was no philosopher, but would say so passionately. Taking a "philosphy" [sic] course doesn't qualify one to decide the issue, especially by means of electronic terrorism. Rand has a "Caesar's Wife" problem up the butt. She is not only not accepted as a philosopher, she repels real philosophers. On an intellectual level, she makes them sick. (11) Intellectual disciplines, while not requiring university affiliation (my article on Martha Nussbaum's UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT was peer reviewed and accepted by a London journal, just before it went tits up, hope I'm not the kiss of death but you get my point) proceed by a civil-society process of grassroots mutual recognition and respect which is destroyed if one lone individual can get called a member of the club, not by outsiders, but by Hitler Youth, aliterate fatcats, and people who forgot to sell their philosophy 101 textbook. Interestingly, only in totalitarian dictatorships are loudmouths and thugs made by rigged acclamation into Academicians, Philosophers, Founts of Wisdom, and Dear Leaders. Among numerous other errors, Rand simply failed to foresee that Western hegemony would change the modal personality of the West, including wikipedians, into that of retail little Stalins in miniature, each of whom wants reality to conform to his whim...no matter how useless the definition of "philosopher" becomes. (12) For if Rand is a philosopher, who's the next member of the set? Where does this shit lead? Before totalitarian dictators become Hitlers or Stalins, they are most assuredly psychopaths who want what they want, here, to call Rand a philsopher sorta like, kinda like, Wittgenstein or Spinoza or Martha Nussbaum. As Adorno's "gang leaders of the self" and like Hitler in Vienna, they just await the day when a sufficiently brutalized populace starts approving of their tactics, such as the use of electronic censorship and making the issue into "you've insulted me, how dare you" or "Nilges is a blocked user and a wandering Jew". (12) You allow physicists to peer review. Philosophers deserve the same respect. They shouldn't be shit upon like you most assuredly shit upon them, with malice, because the agenda in calling Rand a philosopher is profoundly narcissistic: infantile. It is to declare that "because I have opinions so seemingly at variance with those of the common altruistic herd, I am special, almost like Rand a philosopher, and now that I have wikipedia I can MAKE her a 'real' philosopher." Or, as Robert Crumb's "Mister Sensitive" said in 1982, "I wuz meant to be culled out". [That's it. As long as this section is left alone, I shall endeavor to be as civil as possible henceforth and I shall edit only this section. If this section is vandalized, then I shall simply restore it at my convenience. If that's edit warring, so be it.] Edward G. Nilges ::Edward, this is essentially Original Research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research . In any case, I have posted a valid third party cite in a philosphy textbook where a well known non objectivists philospher calls Rand a novelist and philosopher. This is a good source and, as such proves the point that Rand should be labelled as such. I think we can stop debating it now. [[User:Ethan a dawe|Ethan a dawe]] ([[User talk:Ethan a dawe|talk]]) 14:28, 29 April 2008 (UTC) ::: Thank you for not removing this, Ethan. I trust I need now to adhere to my promise to endeavor to be civil and not post in any other section. ::: As to your new charge, that I am engaged in "original research". Certainly I have worked very hard, albeit using more sources than a single philosophy textbook, on refining common usage so that here it can be used as a NPOV test for calling Ayn Rand a "philosopher". :::However, any originality is a result merely of an original, unfounded and POV claim: that Ayn Rand is a philosopher. I believe the claim to be wrong, and while two wrongs don't make a right, it showed, in my opinion, a bad faith that could only be redressed by adding new elements to the dialogue. :::I trust you enough to ask at this point that you conduct an informal survey. Call your former philosophy professor on the phone and ask him if Ayn Rand. Let's see if my oh so original test works, whether or not you or I are confirmed by it.  |decline = {{subst:Decline reason here}} ~~~~}}

If you accept the unblock request, replace this template with the following, substituting Accept reason here with your rationale:

{{unblock reviewed |1=It is with "contempt of court" that I "appeal" this block. My contempt of this electronic kangaroo court is based on the fact that people who committ and enable electronic terrorism and deliberately use wikipedia to create falsehoods (Ayn Rand was a "philosopher": tobacco is "safe": the Ayn Rand article calls this writer a philosopher despite numerous complaints, and many of your tobacco articles fail to mention scientific fact) have no standing in my eyes, and are the intellectual equivalent of convenience store clerks. :This matter is not going away, people. The real issue is not my "behavior". When I joined wikipedia, I made a serious and sourced contribution to the Adorno article and a number of others. However, while I was editing the Kant article in 2005, and being so encouraged by a professor of philosophy who was at the time some sort of moderator, I discovered that unqualified members, most of them ill-informed and some of them actual convenience store clerks, were in their ignorance identifying the common stock of knowledge one would expect in an educated person as "original" research and calling anything but the most lifeless and clerkish prose "vandalism". Of course, just as it got hard, at the time of the fall of the Roman empire, to tell the Vandals from the Romans, the real vandals are people with no education, anhedonic with respect to texts, who harm my reputation and waste my time, and then expect not to be "insulted" as if they were some sort of New Class one dared not sass. These people are anhedonic with respect to texts and many of them seem to have dyslexia for instead of addressing objections (such as my sourced precis of Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Rand's "Notes for the New Intellectual"), they profess to be wearied by prolixity, even when this prolixity is made necessary by their lack of culture. The profession is made to renarrate themselves as "scholars" who have for years, nodded weak and weary over texts: but upon investigation as in the case of Ethan A Dawe, they are unfamiliar with texts other than the lyrics of rock and roll, and perforce these are their authorities. It has become clear to me that Jimbo Wales is engaged in a crypto-Maoist "hundred flowers campaign" with capitalist characteristics. Just as Mao encouraged intellectuals in the late 1950s to speak out only to identify trouble-makers, in Wales' variant he encouraged people to edit in 2004 NOT because he supports "freedom". Just as it was quietly pointed out with respect to the libertarianism of pornography in the 1970s, that women being humiliated ain't "freedom", people being harassed commencing in 2005 by Hitler Youth for being able to write and having read widely ain't freedom. Jimbo Wales, it seems, started out as a pornographer, hustling to make a buck. I don't believe he started wikipedia to create some sort of grand and glorious "free" resource. I now believe he did so to at first encourage well-read people who can write to post, and then unleash convenience store clerks and head cases on those people in order to steal their intellectual production and humiliate them in a crypto-Maoist campaign. This is being done to drive them away and publish a commercial wikipedia, including my 2005 intellectual labor. I am going to do my best, should this Amerikkkan style Great Soviet Encylopaedia see the light of day, to register legal complaints. Sure, Amerikkkan law has too much respect for "property" as in "intellectual property" and none at all for working people, and even less for working people who work for free: a return to the barbarism of slavery is in fact implicit in the legal theorising of modern Americans such as Justice Scalia of the SC. But what this only means is that it's time to rip Amerikkkan law a new conceptual asshole. As an American southerner, Jimbo Wales has, I believe, not dealt with the legacy of a slavery from which his ancestors probably benefited and he, like many uneducated and uncultured Americans, uses "libertarianism" (with its flaccid and logically null claims about "freedom" which demand no thought and no culture) to create time-sliced and virtual slaves who add content and then are driven out by Trogdolytes like Ethan A Dawe. As a pornographer, his "libertarianism" is the liberty of the man who exploits women and the schoolyard bully that becomes that man. It's Samuel Johnson's liberty: "cries for Liberty from the drivers of Negroes", and their children after them whose addiction to power and control is shown in the situation of modern American black people, still subordinated after all these years by the toxicity of null "liberty". And as a follower of the nonphilosophy of Ayn Rand, a mere set of opinions as I have repeatedly shown on the Talk page of the Ayn Rand article, it is to be expected that Wales and his goons will show no understanding, no charity, no willingness to dialog and no "altruism". Instead, they will not only simply "block" a person, they will forever tag that person in this space as a troll despite the evidence of his texts and his standing as a published writer, teacher, and father. You consistently assault the "little" people and you think they can't strike back. Wikipedia was used to assault a hard working computer programmer and author, Herbert Schildt. I went through channels as a brother author and I got the article changed. Wikipedia was used to assault another computer author, Kathy Sierra, calling her (very real) harassment, alleged, and I went through channels, endured the usual campaign of personal destruction, and I GOT THE ARTICLE CHANGED. I'm going to get "philosopher" likewise removed from the Rand article because from the NPOV as in the views of the ordinary educated person, she's a mass market writer who got a hair up her butt. I'm going to do so because I know real philosophers, such as the chair of my undergraduate department of philosophy, E. D. Klemke, and they are collegial, courteous and altruistic people who don't, as Rand did, use retail ad hominem and mass conspiracy theory to "prove" assertions. E. D. Klemke collapsed while courteously, compassionately, altruistically teaching Philosophy 101 at the the state University of Iowa, and had been hounded out of Roosevelt University for insisting that, just as there are sciences, there are humanistic disciplines whose membership is defined, not by having a big mouth and access to a bully's pulpit based on sales of trashy books, but on learning and the willingness to pass it on, and I swear before this Kangaroo court, he will not in this respect have died in vain. I shall do this not only a published writer, but also as a teacher whose students are being misled into doing reports on Ayn Rand, the famous American philosopher, and trying Copenhagen, because it must be safe: no warnings about NPOV scientific fact appear. I shall honor the father that this horde has slain. I appeal with contempt of court which you may note. I appeal with a deep feeling of hatred in my heart for you people, who are Shakespeare's dogs in office. And if and when I attend a wikipedia conference, you may be quite assured that I shall register a strong, exclusively verbal protest against your stinking, rotten, and Fascistic "libertarianism" and your stinking rotten behavior. I fully expect that when and if I do so, you will be the first to physically assault me to shut me the fuck up, because that is what thugs do, and you are collectively, and in many instances singly, nothing but thugs. This issue isn't going to go away, people. As a correspondent of Lawrence Lessig who served alongside Mike Godwin on a panel on the destruction of genuine freedom of speech by the creation of virtual Internet realities such as the Rand article, I am writing them both to alert them to your behavior. As a published author on philosophy, politics and computer science, I am using what access to the media I have and my writing ability to foreground your behavior and warn teachers world-wide to stay away from Wikipedia, and not buy the print edition, with stolen intellectual production (not "property", the production of working people made into virtual slaves). I'm going to take wikipedia away from Amerikkkan slavedrivers because there's a lot of people world-wide that have been subjected to your bullying and now constitute people posting from IP address. You cannot block us. I am going to form or join a union of these people and we shall demand an end to your control. As evidence of the arguments I presented at the Rand site, as evidence of the contrast between the whining of convenience store clerks and my production, I'll appendix the most recent post to be censored. I "appeal" but note that your stinking, rotten authoritarian personality disorder always puts people in the position of recognizing a kangaroo court, therefore I "APPEAL" WITH CONTEMPT AND HATRED OF YOUR ILLEGITIMATE AUTHORITY FREE WIKIPEDIA DOWN WITH "LIBERTY" AND UP WITH FREEDOM STOP INTERNET BULLYING APPENDIX ==Ayn Rand's questionable status as a philosopher: discussion section: please don't censor== [The following is my definitive statement of the case for not considering, from the NPOV, Ayn Rand a philosopher, and "objectivism", from the NPOV, at least very different from a "philosophy" as understood by educated people. I will restore this article when it is deleted by the electronic terrorists here, checking this site on a regular basis. I ask that it be left alone except for discussion of the points raised, and in return, I shall edit no other section of this page, and endeavor a bit more to be civil, keeping in mind that much of my "incivility" is simply an ability to write, a knowledge of philosophy absent here, and the consequent tendency to carpet bomb. The rest of it is a shame that my interlocutors dare not admit for so soiling the good name of philosophy.] [Correspondence may be sent to spinoza1111@yahoo.com] AYN RAND NO PHILOSOPHER (1) A philosopher enters into a dialogue defined by Habermas between equals, each dialog participant extending to each other mutual recognition and respect. This mutual recognition and respect means that a philosopher no longer is acting in a professional role when he uses retail "ad hominem" (as Rand did on followers who did not share her beliefs in the way she wanted) nor wholesale ad-hominem in the form of a conspiracy theory (as Rand, and her followers, do when rejected, as she was rejected in Sydney Hook's 1961 review of Notes for a New Intellectual), charging the person who disagrees with one with institutionally conspiring to exclude one, based on having a "closed liberal mind" or somesuch. That is, it is a precondition of entry to a philosophical dialog that one assumes good-faith conduct on the part of one's antagonist. When EITHER that conduct ceases, OR, the assumption of good faith conduct is suspended by one or more participants, then, as they say in the pub when the lads get rowdy, the philosophers need to "take it outside" the pub or corner tap, and have it out, no longer as philosophers, but as ordinary people. (2) Of course, it can be objected that (1) doesn't resemble common educated usage on which we base the NPOV. However, common usage isn't static. The Rand phenomenon itself changed the meaning of philosophy to a lower, more general, more conceptually useless and more vague usage because it was her ambition, without having published on philosophy, to change it to include "successful novelist who wishes to be called a philosopher". To the extent she succeeded, the term became vaguer, and more inchoate. However, compare it to "physicist" or "mathematician". Probably because of science worship, the "chemist" is safe from having to be jostled by alchemists: the "physicists" by crazed would-be patenters of the *primum mobile*: the "mathematicians" by wantstabe squarers of the circle. However, everybody is, potentially a "philosopher" if Ayn Rand is a philosopher, just as Modernism appeared to license everybody to be an "artist", and as Gilbert and Sullivan knew, "if everybody's somebody then no-one's anybody". (3) It is of course contradictory to Rand's notion that there was a "natural" elite to call anyone who wants to be called a "philosopher", a philosopher same as Hume: it is precisely the sort of intellectual permissiveness against which she, honestly enough, set her face. She apparently wanted, or her adepts want, her to get special treatment. But what is this special treatment based upon? She had opinions, but as they say in the Army, opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one. She produced no recognizable arguments for her views, freed of tautology ("A is A", alert the media) or ad-hominem/conspiracy theorizing, unlike philosophers universally produce in their professional capacity: if one actually troubles to read Nietzche one finds a completely different method closest in spirit to African philosophies, which unseats, through argument, "truth" and replaces it by a more general and an inclusive concept of life-force and successful flourishing, and which influenced the philosopher Adorno, who founded reason on human survival and found no meaning outside of survival. (4) Consider Rand's opinion that "capitalist evils can be explained by government intervention". Contemporary with Rand, F. A. Hayek produced recognizably philosophical arguments that socialism has to micro-manage the economy and will of necessity transform the micro-managers into an incompetent *nomenklatura*. Hayek made this prediction and then confirmed it with evidence already available in the failures and lies of Stalin's Five Year Plans. He was then confirmed by the Chinese famine of 1961 which resulted from good-faith socialist planning, showing that the *nomenklatura* need not be corrupt. Whereas Rand made a stronger claim: that capitalist failures could *always* be explained by government interference, and did not seriously consider any one of a number of cases, from child labor in Britain before the first wage and hours acts, to the use of opium and nicotine in common household products by unregulated American drug companies in the 19th century...where the use of opium stopped after the "government interference" of the Pure Food and Drug Act and nicotine use continued because American tobacco companies got themselves exempted from the PFDA. Clearly, Rand and Hayek were quite different although on the same page, which means that before Rand is calld a philosopher, the page for Hayek needs to be changed. (5) Nor did Rand measurably effect subsequent philosophy as practiced by the set of existing recognized philosophers inside and outside the academy. Actual libertarian philosophers, closest to her views, ignored her work. (6) A philosopher is one, male or female, black or white or brown or piebald, who seriously and continuously reads books with which she may profoundly disagree, perhaps like Mark Twain, who said he was "looking for loopholes" when caught reading the bible: but Rand refused to read Kant and had a level of understanding of Aristotle (inferring the free market from his writings) that was apparently taken from an encyclopedia. A philosopher is hedonic with respect to the tradition: Michel Foucault visited the Bibliotheque National every day of his professional life, and Derrida read Plato, with whom he had profound issues, every year. Rand seemed to read in a permanent state of resentment, always alert for signs of liberal theorizing. (7) It is TRUE that in certain Anglo-American philosophical circles, and in the general, Anglo-American culture, it has become a fashion statement to say one doesn't read X. Hilary Clinton had no "time" for the National Intelligence Estimate, and George Bush is of course famously ignorant. Within philosophy, the philosophy instructor or even full professor will cruelly bully the student who has read Kant when he Kant read Kant, and get away with this shit. (8) But this goes against the world grain of "mutual respect and recognition", the courtesy extended to Socrates to Thrasymachus, and Confucius hospitallity. Anglo-American rudeness seems to have been a part of a cultura meme, merely a growing arrogance which has had grievous consequences, world-wide (and here: it is rudeness to terroristically censor people, and much more of a rude act than my at-times rude speech, an act which is wasting my time). (9) Therefore, my test for calling someone a philosopher is only a refinement of NPOV common educated usage. It is one by one and "constructivist", as well as recursive. You simply ask already existing members of the set of philosophers whether candidate C is a philosopher. (10) Ethan A Dawe produces his old college textbook, a grand total of one reference, and tells us the matter is closed. Of course, this fails the test, since there are a significant number of philosophers, probably a majority, who would not only say she was no philosopher, but would say so passionately. Taking a "philosphy" [sic] course doesn't qualify one to decide the issue, especially by means of electronic terrorism. Rand has a "Caesar's Wife" problem up the butt. She is not only not accepted as a philosopher, she repels real philosophers. On an intellectual level, she makes them sick. (11) Intellectual disciplines, while not requiring university affiliation (my article on Martha Nussbaum's UPHEAVALS OF THOUGHT was peer reviewed and accepted by a London journal, just before it went tits up, hope I'm not the kiss of death but you get my point) proceed by a civil-society process of grassroots mutual recognition and respect which is destroyed if one lone individual can get called a member of the club, not by outsiders, but by Hitler Youth, aliterate fatcats, and people who forgot to sell their philosophy 101 textbook. Interestingly, only in totalitarian dictatorships are loudmouths and thugs made by rigged acclamation into Academicians, Philosophers, Founts of Wisdom, and Dear Leaders. Among numerous other errors, Rand simply failed to foresee that Western hegemony would change the modal personality of the West, including wikipedians, into that of retail little Stalins in miniature, each of whom wants reality to conform to his whim...no matter how useless the definition of "philosopher" becomes. (12) For if Rand is a philosopher, who's the next member of the set? Where does this shit lead? Before totalitarian dictators become Hitlers or Stalins, they are most assuredly psychopaths who want what they want, here, to call Rand a philsopher sorta like, kinda like, Wittgenstein or Spinoza or Martha Nussbaum. As Adorno's "gang leaders of the self" and like Hitler in Vienna, they just await the day when a sufficiently brutalized populace starts approving of their tactics, such as the use of electronic censorship and making the issue into "you've insulted me, how dare you" or "Nilges is a blocked user and a wandering Jew". (12) You allow physicists to peer review. Philosophers deserve the same respect. They shouldn't be shit upon like you most assuredly shit upon them, with malice, because the agenda in calling Rand a philosopher is profoundly narcissistic: infantile. It is to declare that "because I have opinions so seemingly at variance with those of the common altruistic herd, I am special, almost like Rand a philosopher, and now that I have wikipedia I can MAKE her a 'real' philosopher." Or, as Robert Crumb's "Mister Sensitive" said in 1982, "I wuz meant to be culled out". [That's it. As long as this section is left alone, I shall endeavor to be as civil as possible henceforth and I shall edit only this section. If this section is vandalized, then I shall simply restore it at my convenience. If that's edit warring, so be it.] Edward G. Nilges ::Edward, this is essentially Original Research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research . In any case, I have posted a valid third party cite in a philosphy textbook where a well known non objectivists philospher calls Rand a novelist and philosopher. This is a good source and, as such proves the point that Rand should be labelled as such. I think we can stop debating it now. [[User:Ethan a dawe|Ethan a dawe]] ([[User talk:Ethan a dawe|talk]]) 14:28, 29 April 2008 (UTC) ::: Thank you for not removing this, Ethan. I trust I need now to adhere to my promise to endeavor to be civil and not post in any other section. ::: As to your new charge, that I am engaged in "original research". Certainly I have worked very hard, albeit using more sources than a single philosophy textbook, on refining common usage so that here it can be used as a NPOV test for calling Ayn Rand a "philosopher". :::However, any originality is a result merely of an original, unfounded and POV claim: that Ayn Rand is a philosopher. I believe the claim to be wrong, and while two wrongs don't make a right, it showed, in my opinion, a bad faith that could only be redressed by adding new elements to the dialogue. :::I trust you enough to ask at this point that you conduct an informal survey. Call your former philosophy professor on the phone and ask him if Ayn Rand. Let's see if my oh so original test works, whether or not you or I are confirmed by it.  |accept = accept reason here ~~~~}}