In recent Leonard Peikoff podcasts, we learn:
- Peikoff forbids the Kindle version of Atlas Shrugged from using the text-to-speech option because he knows Ayn Rand would not have wanted this. I guess there are no blind Objectivists! (Episode 132, at 13:52-)
- The proper use of profanity in sex;
- It’s okay to use porn for masturbation but … maybe not (you might be enabling an immoral career choice);
- If your neighbor has a yappy dog buy an “air” gun to shut him up and when that doesn’t work sue the neighbor;
- It’s okay for the state to ban a political party during wartime, but not in peacetime;
- Why the Tea Party might be somewhat beneficial, but not too much (okay this is a decent commentary);
- What kind of sex life is appropriate for Eddie Willers;
- Is it an Objectivist sin to look at Munch’s The Scream?
I’m tempted to download, right now, the version of Atlas Shrugged already read by (I believe) Edward Herrmann, among others — via BitTorrent, that is — just to piss off this addled man.
Of course, I’ve been pissed off for over 30 years now at what he’s done to traduce Rand’s legacy … so what else is new?
Solzhenitsyn describes (in The Gulag Archipelago) the reaction at the camps the days Stalin’s death was announced.
I expect to hear a very similar noise from organized Objectivism when Peikoff kicks the bucket.
The big difference, of course, being that nobody held guns to the Objectivists’ heads and made them toe the Peikoff line. They did it to themselves.