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Comments Posted on Tuesday, February 9, 2010
	Multi-Track A Capella Lady Gaga
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 11:01:05 mst Name: Scottological E-mail: scottbergstrom(at)comcast.net What a delight. Thanks for sharing that. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 10:59:09 mst Name: Alfred Centauri E-mail: alfredcentauri(at)bellsouth.net Mike, as I see it, the question of whether the Oreos exist in superposition state until you return the room keys is, while interesting, not cogent. Your replacing the Oreos without telling the hotel staff or owner has the result that the owner believes, after you've returned the keys, that you did not use the mini-bar service when, in reality, you *did*. And, it seems clear to me that, while replacing the Oreos, you would *know* that this act will result in the owner believing a fiction. I don't see how one can evade the simple fact that such an act is dishonest, period. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	One Generic News Report, Coming Up!
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 10:46:12 mst Name: Scottological E-mail: scottbergstrom(at)comcast.net Sadly, American news reports don't feature enough lighthouse keepers being beheaded by laser beams. Britain has us beat there. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 10:22:38 mst Name: Mike E-mail: michaelbahr(at)cox.net "Replacing the oreos is attempting to fake reality." Ah, but at what point, vis-a-vis the hotel, have you actually TAKEN the Oreos? Again, let me reiterate that I think in practice this is a non-starter; you can't buy a "foodservice" package of Oreos at 7-11, so you can't replace with the fungible item. But supposing you could, as in the lamp example and K'POM's car example. Essentially, until you return your room keys, the Oreos are always and simultaneously both eaten and not-eaten, from the hotel's point of view. They're Schrodinger's Oreos. How would they not be? I'm open to being convinced otherwise here but I think this argument is cogent. I think "attempting to fake reality" would be an attempt to pass off a facsimile as a genuine replacement, an act that would be clearly crossing the moral event horizon here. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	One Generic News Report, Coming Up!
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 10:22:06 mst Name: Richard I love Charlie Brooker. He's a bit of a leftist and pushes the idea of the media machine too much, but all-in-all he's a riot. And as a Britain you often get the impression even he gets sick of the state and social justice issues. He'll often aim his wit at things like the government and media constantly telling you what's best for your health. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hsieh OpEd in Boulder Daily Camera: Polis and Public Option
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 10:08:52 mst Name: Mike E-mail: michaelbahr(at)cox.net kit, Of course you want a public option, because you expect to receive health care at others' expense. I am against it because others will receive health care at my expense. It's very simple really: You want to rob me, and I don't want to be robbed. If only there were some political or moral statement of individual rights that were relevant for seeming impasses like this. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 9:57:08 mst Name: Alfred Centauri E-mail: alfredcentauri(at)bellsouth.net "The only ethical actions in this context would be to either pay the money, or ask the owner if you may replace the property and avoid paying the charge." I agree, and this dovetails nicely with my earlier post on practicing the virtue of honesty. Replacing the Oreos without informing the owner is to deliberately mislead the owner and *that* is nothing other than initiating force against the owner. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 9:53:39 mst Name: Diana Hsieh E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog Publius in Idaho -- Could I post your essay as a regular NoodleFood post? It's too good to just be posted in the comments! Feel free to e-mail me about it: diana@dianahsieh.com. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 8:54:00 mst Name: brian0918 I like David Odden's simple response from OO.net on this issue: "The concept 'property' means that the owner has the exclusive right to dispose of the thing. Therefore, you may take his property only if you have permission. It is known that you have permission to take the property in exchange for money. It is not the case that there is a general 'permission to borrow as long as you replenish the stock with a functionally equivalent object'. "The only ethical actions in this context would be to either pay the money, or ask the owner if you may replace the property and avoid paying the charge." View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 8:32:17 mst Name: brian0918 Sajid: "I think everyone on here agrees that being moral on more meaningful issues" How do you determine what are the "more meaningful issues"? Intuition? Gut feeling? You clearly have two standards by which you judge what action to take - not simply the standard espoused by Objectivism, but also your own personal standard, which allows you to justify immoral actions which you believe have little consequence. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 8:31:13 mst Name: Alfred Centauri E-mail: alfredcentauri(at)bellsouth.net "I have enough trouble with the moral issue of using a McDonald's restroom when I REALLY really can't bare to eat/drink anything" justin, your thinking too hard here. Have you considered that you don't have to eat/drink what you buy there? Something from the dollar menu ought to do it. Throw it in the trash can as you leave or the woods for the wild life etc. Your bladder and your conscious will be, ahem, relieved. ;^) View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 8:08:24 mst Name: Alfred Centauri E-mail: alfredcentauri(at)bellsouth.net As I see it, not paying for the oreos is not practicing the Objectivist virtue of honesty. Replacing the oreos is attempting to fake reality. The reality is that he took the oreos from the mini-bar and consumed them thus partaking of not only the oreos but of the service the mini-bar provides. By replacing the oreos, he is choosing to deceive the hotel staff; to lead them to believe that he did not use the mini-bar. And, as he almost certainly believed that he would most likely be asked to pay for the oreos were his little switcheroo discovered, this doesn't seem to be merely a case of an 'honest' error. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Photos Du Jour: Oliver
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 6:40:45 mst Name: Don Kenner E-mail: dbkenner(at)gmail.com "All cats are weird." Weird, but adorable. Most of them, anyway. And they are wonderfully selfish. It's nice to see someone who has both cats and dogs. Too many people these days feel they must choose, and having chosen develop this irrational hatred of the other, usually the cat. I can't help but think that cat-haters are incredibly insecure. When I see one of my cats sitting statue-still, with a contented look on her face, I'm certain that if a stranger asked, "What do you think of me?" my cat would reply, "I don't." View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 5:39:45 mst Name: O'newbie "Audi could have scored major points with rational, even common-sense, people..." This is a question I ask myself on my darker days: are there enough of those kinds of people left? Could Audi make money marketing to a pro-liberty audience? I think the very real, and very tragic, answer might be no. The sands of the hourglass may be running out. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 1:53:06 mst Name: Ryan O. E-mail: ryanmoshea(at)gmail.com Whether the Audi ad intended to mock the notion of Green Police, it still dramatized an intrusive police force trampling the rights of ordinary people to enforce Green Laws-an idea not out of the realm of possibility-and was therefore appalling to watch. It was not presented as cheeky or serious, but rather lighthearted, which makes it worse-such a scenario is the logical implication of policies currently in the works. Audi could have scored major points with rational, even common-sense, people by having a vehicle NOT touted for its Green compatibility, say, perhaps, a W12 A8L or R8, go blowing past the clowns at the vehicle check-point. Capitulating to the Green rhetoric by designing and marketing a TDI as a Green vehicle, while making the enforcement of such laws to appear more hilarious than evil, will move the world in the wrong direction, at the speed of a Turbocharged Green Audi. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 0:15:25 mst Name: Freddy Ben-Zeev E-mail: benzeev(at)comcast(dot)net Sajid, I don't agree that this is "moral penny pinching". Morality deals with principles and there is no such thing as violating a principle "only a little". I would not judge negatively someone who did something like that because he didn't think it through. People do make mistakes even on bigger issues. But, as I can even see from some of the posters here, too many people just rationalize such actions because it feels convenient (usually blaming the hotel for its "unfair" pricing). I won't give a free pass to such people - at best they are unprincipled. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
Comments Posted on Monday, February 8, 2010
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 23:14:35 mst Name: Sajid "I agree with David McDivitt. Give me a fricken break - tremendous outpouring of puritan rationalism in most of these posts. " Thats nonsense. The analysis is spot on in the earlier posts. There is very little moral justification for replacing the oreos. Having said that, I wouldn't judge anybody for doing that--I've done a lot worse in my life. Just as you can penny pinch in real life, you can also penny pinch when it comes to morality (or as you say rationalism). I think everyone on here agrees that being moral on more meaningful issues is far more important than paying for the minibar oreos. But as a pure technicality, you would have to agree that the correct thing to do would be to pay for the oreos. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 23:10:34 mst Name: Arwen E-mail: arwen83(at)msn.com Diana, this makes me think of your podcast where someone asked about sneaking food into a stadium (the conditions being they wouldn't pay for the stadium's food anyway, so it wasn't robbing the stadium of any money). I see it this way. While checking in - would this person have asked "Hey, I'm starving right now, so I'd like to go eat something out of the mini-bar in my room. However, can I just replace it before I leave and avoid a charge?" No. Because we all know that 99.99% of hotels would say, "um, no." The general understanding of the contract is: You eat the Oreos and pay us $6. The contract is NOT: You eat the Oreos and pay us $6 - unless you can replace them. I tend to think (and this is a bit deductive I suppose), that if you need to sneak around and it feels dishonest, it usually is. In this case, if you could ask the hotel about it and they sign off or don't - then you've made the terms of the contract more clear and you don't need to sneak around one way or the other. It is the hotel's property and they get to set the terms for reimbursement. Most hotels only want to be reimbured in cash - and would not approve of this type of behavior. If you can get a "yes" from a hotel regarding this practice, then go for it. But if you are unsure, clarify the contract. The only item of importance is how the property owner wishes to be reimbured. If he wants cash only, pay the $6. If he'll take cash or an equal replacement of the original item, then save the money and buy the orgnal item at a lower cost at a later time. I suspect most hotels only accept the former, though. :-) View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 23:04:21 mst Name: justin E-mail: parasitius(at)gmail.com I have enough trouble with the moral issue of using a McDonald's restroom when I REALLY really can't bare to eat/drink anything, my head will explode if I attempt the hotel question. As for restrooms, if there's an explicit sign "Customers Only", I won't use it. I prefer rest stops with a shared public restroom with the implication it can used by any general public without cost. I wish they'd just have a quarter or nickle restroom donation box everywhere. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	The Christian Ideal: Suffering
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 22:47:26 mst Name: Diana Hsieh E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog William -- Interesting thoughts! You're right that we don't seem to disagree on the substance, but I'll have to think about the issue more. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 22:17:02 mst Name: Mike Poholka E-mail: thepoholkas(at)shaw.ca I agree with David McDivitt. Give me a fricken break - tremendous outpouring of puritan rationalism in most of these posts. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 21:55:43 mst Name: Publius in Idaho Hi Amit, Thanks for the comment. It takes me forever to edit, so I will have to see if I can carves some time out of my schedule to get it into a presentable form. (As I glanced back over my comments a couple of grammatical errors and misformulations made me cringe.) I very much enjoy reading your blog. I also had the great pleasure of having your brother as a teacher at the undergraduate program of the OAC. (I believe I have that relation correct.) View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 21:37:05 mst Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net Regarding the "broken lamp" analogy, I had a similar situation with a rental car. I skidded off a narrow road and damaged two tires. It was in a modestly-populated area so once I got the spare on (fortunately one tire was still OK enough to drive on for a bit) I pulled off at the first service station and replaced the tires. They were a different brand but of similar quality. A few days later when I turned the car back in I told them what happened and they didn't assess any further damages. However, I was upfront and let them know. I looked back at the contract and noticed that it did have a clause that indicated that tire damage was a personal uninsurable event and that the remedy would be suitable replacement (which is what I did). I suspect it might be the same with the hotel lamp, but it might depend on whether there is anything unique about it. For instance, hotel lamps are usually tied down or molded into the table. It might not be sufficient just to drive to the nearest IKEA and pick up a lamp. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 21:25:34 mst Name: softwareNerd E-mail: softwarenerd(at)gmail.com Today it's a "harmless" replacement of Oreos. Tomorrow a pirated downloaded that "I wouldn't have bought anyway". What next: move into homes when folks are on vacation, clean up and maybe leave a a few dollars on the kitchen table before one leaves. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 20:56:45 mst Name: Amit Ghate E-mail: amit_ghate(at)hotmail.com URL: http://amitghate.blogspot.com/ Hi Publius, Though I'm not conversant enough with all the details and examples in your comment to really be able to judge it, it strikes me as a careful and valuable response. Perhaps you should consider submitting a version of it to CapMag or some other venue which will give it a wider audience. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 19:48:12 mst Name: Tod URL: http://Blog.ByTod.com Diana, that's a good point about frugality being a virtue when it's in the service of something greater. When I think about it more, the kind of attitude that bothers me is when frugality is a virtue unto itself. Some people think they should live a smaller life "just because." Whether the Oreos are fungible is pretty interesting. I would say no, because you're expected to pay for them -- they are goods for sale. If you broke a lightbulb and replaced it without telling them, that would be fine. Lightbulbs are commodities and hotels generally aren't trying to sell them. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 19:31:50 mst Name: David McDivitt E-mail: david(at)subjectivist.org There is no ethics violation by replacing the cookies for the following reasons: - There was no motive expressly to cheat. Because motive can only be speculated, judgment goes to accused. - Financial settlement occurs when the maid inspects the inventory. If the motel did not implement a different type of inspection or locking mechanism, it is not the responsibility of the tenant to assume the mind and best interest of the motel, except to honor apparent protocols. Replacing the cookies does not necessarily violate protocol. - No harm was done. - Without no known ethical rule or precedent to the contrary the tenant cannot be said to have acted "unethically". Future actions of this nature may (might) be deemed unethical should the results of this analysis (done today) stipulate that and be duly published. - The tenant has an ethical obligation to serve self and represent self interest. The extent of that obligation is established by the tenant, which may include exploration of safe, legitimate ways to save money. - The cookie "object" does not necessarily identity a specific package of cookies. Such could only be done by a different inspection scheme or locking mechanism. - Ethics do not apply in this case. Results of this analysis (done today) are not binding on the tenant, and if not binding the tenant cannot be deemed "unethical". Maybe we can find something that is unethical by further nit picking behavior. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 19:21:22 mst Name: Dan G. I concur, by all metrics legally and ethically, the person in question stole $6.00 from the hotel. In re: the penny pinchers, those that I've met tend to be penny wise and pound foolish. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 19:03:28 mst Name: Mike E-mail: michaelbahr(at)cox.net I think there is a missing element in the discussion, which is that you have paid the hotel for control of the room during a given interval. Your minibar purchases are not assessed until you leave. Basically in paying the hotel you have paid for the right of exclusion of that room until a given point in time, at which the total price of products and services rendered becomes due. If you broke one of their lamps and replaced it with an identical lamp before checking out, I don't think anyone here would suggest that you somehow still owe for damages. The room only reverted to being "their property" in the moral sense of our hypothetical at the time you turned in your keys to them. (This is setting aside the concept of a room license/sublicense obviously because we're looking for the abstract here, not the concrete.) Assuming you could replace the Oreos with the IDENTICAL package (allowing for "food service" packs and such, and liability), I'm not sure you count as having actually taken anything. And I mean WITHIN the rights of the hotel. Without foul play at all, maybe this is legit. Of course that's pretty much limited to a hypo, because I don't think the foodservice package of Oreos is going to be available at 7-11, so you're out the $6. It changes with the motion-sensored stuff; clearly the hotel considers movement of the item to be tantamount to a purchase (and they do give fair warning very obviously in most cases). Touch-move, to use the chess analogy. So there would be no question of an Oreo (or Coke, or Budweiser) replacement to the mini-bar. You knew the terms of the transaction before touching the goodies. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 16:53:45 mst Name: Alfred Centauri E-mail: alfredcentauri(at)bellsouth.net "If you wanted to eat $2 Oreos, you should have brought them..." Yeah, so let's go with that. You've checked in with a package of Oreos you *know* to be identical to the package in the mini-bar. (1) you can be ethical and eat the package you brought with you (2) you can be un-ethical and switch the package you brought with the one in the mini-bar and eat *that* one instead. (3) you can be ethically adventurous and take the package out of the mini-bar, toss it in bag with the one you brought, shake it a bit, pull out one package and put it inside the mini-bar and then (whew) ponder whether it is now possible to *know* whether it is ethical to eat the remaining package or not. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 16:18:52 mst Name: Publius in Idaho I just posted the following at The New Criterion in response to Anthony Daniels's article. Any criticisms would be appreciated. I read NoodleFood regularly and enjoy it. Thanks! I am taken aback by Anthony Daniels’s superficial analysis of Ayn Rand. And this is coming from someone who is enamored of his excellent writing in Life at the Bottom, where he illustrates his critique of modern British society with superbly wrought first-hand observations. I am not, however, shocked. In contrast to his analysis of the British underclass, Daniels has long taken a nonintellectual and lazy approach to cultural criticism. Take his article “Trash, Violence and Versace: But Is It Art?”, which attacks the infamous “Sensation” show at the Royal Academy--a piece in which he never deigns to address the philosophic ideas that led to that deplorable exhibition. To write an article that illuminated the nihilism of the Young British Artists, one would need to do a lot more legwork. To get to the marrow, one would need to address the arc of art history that led us to the dismal state that we are in today. One would need to analyze the people who conditioned “taste” makers like Charles Saatchi--the art critics of the contemporary scene, from Clement Greenberg to Arthur Danto. Most importantly, one would then need to identify the philosophic ideas that conditioned these conditioners--that is, look at the ideas that shape society. People don’t just make and admire sculptures like Dinos and Jake Chapman’s deformed, sexualized children without philosophic conditioning. Daniels, however, demurs from looking too deeply into the matter. Rather he beats around the bush, avoiding the ideas in the cultural milieu that caused “Sensation” (such as the philosophic shift from the Renaissance--when man’s life on Earth was viewed with the benevolent wonder of the Ancient Greeks--to the modern nihilism of the Existentialists and Postmodernists). In lieu of addressing ideas head-on, Daniels waxes eloquently (and to his credit, he does so par excellence) about the cruelty of subjecting the mother of one of Myra Hindley's child-victims to a portrait of the murderer made with the handprints of a small child. He quotes the vapid justifications of the Royal Academy’s chief of exhibitions. And he ends by delightfully turning a quip by Joshua Reynolds, about the desire of youth to find a shorter path to excellence than hard work, into an indictment of a culture that does this through the nihilism of “Sensation.” All of these points are great, but they do not explain the phenomenon of “Sensation.” Such articles are the equivalent of junk food: high in calories, but low in nutrition. Ten years later and Daniels has not progressed when he critiques the loathsome architect Le Corbusier in “The Architect as Totalitarian.” Writing that he was elitist and cryptic, Daniels finally zeros in on what he believes is Le Corbusier’s major fault: he had a “totalitarian mindset.” He does not however examine what ideas the “totalitarian mindset” consists of, or what philosophy underlies it. (In fact, I don’t believe that Daniels knows what a “totalitarian mindset” is, which is why he can be so flip with the label.) Daniels needs to ask himself: What is Le Corbusier’s totalitarian mindset? Could it have anything to do with the aim of shaping minds in the tradition of Marxist dialectical materialism? What philosophic assumptions gave rise to Marx and his theory of class conceptual determinism created by the modes of production? Is it Hegel? Is it Kant’s Copernican Revolution? Is modernist architecture also a nihilistic attack on the bourgeoisie and their beaux-arts standards? What gives rise to nihilism? Mr. Daniels does not ask such questions nor give such answers. He does not write about ideas. In his piece on Rand, Daniels seems to have read The Fountainhead (alas, apart from skimming The Virtue of Selfishness that seems to be the extent of her work that he has read), but is unable to name its theme: individualism--specifically, the first-handed thinker against the second-handed thinker. In the book, Rand portrays people who are the embodiment of these ideas. Take the main character, Howard Roark, who defies the conventions of Beaux-Arts historical forms (a style of architecture I often find delightful), because he is an originator of ideas. In other words, he is not a classicist; he does not take the architectural forms of others and recycle them. (Such forms are often at odds with the function of a building.) Instead he fashions his creations from whole cloth relying on his first-hand observations of the building’s setting and its requirements. This separates him the second-handers like Peter Keating who copy styles from Beaux-Arts to modernism--the latter which she trenchantly critiques as well. The theme of self-guided, rational thought over intellectual conformity was repeated in various permutations and with a variety of characters throughout the novel. (And an aside, Howard Roark was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright not Le Corbusier--and both used reinforced concrete, but to entirely different ends.) What is clear in his analysis of The Fountainhead is that Mr. Daniels can’t get past his hang-up on the details of architecture in the book to the ideas at its core. I prefer the Queen Anne style to Le Corbusier, but this did not blind me to the intellectual theme of the book. More fundamentally, Rand’s advocacy of rational certainty seems to irk the doctor. He appears to mistake a certainty born of the Enlightenment (Newton’s scientific certainty, not Robespierre’s authoritarianism) for dogmatism. He writes previously of his own “preoccupation--anti-ideology” and his “great surprise and pleasure” when the curators at the Walker Art Galley “appeared to make no point at all” in what could been a polarizing exhibit. Elsewhere, he attacks Le Corbusier because he “believed there was a ‘correct’ way to build and that only he knew what it was.” It is absurd for Daniels to dub Rand as the “Chernyshevsky of individualism” without pointing out even the most cursory ideological similarity between her and the Russian tradition of “angry literary and social critics, pamphleteers and ideologues,” and based solely on what Daniels takes to be her “vehemence, moral fanaticism and mediocrity as a thinker” and her “speechifying.” And yes, I have quoted the whole of Daniels’s case. I suppose then that Newton is the “Stalin of science” for his political maneuvering at the Royal Society. You see the absurdity of not thinking in essentials? (One has the sense that Daniels’s editors at The New Criterion are his fan boys and they are not doing him any favors with their uncritical pen.) What Daniels takes to be the tone of Rand’s writing, that it “bores you like a drill,” and the fact that she held that her ideas were unprecedented (they were) is enough evidence for him to repeatedly link her to Stalin--even though philosophically, were he diligent enough to investigate the matter, he would find them to be diametrically opposed: reason vs. dialectical materialism, individualism vs. collectivism, individual rights vs. class warfare. Again, Daniels does not write about ideas. Such a baseless comparison is chillingly unjust and it is reprehensible given that Daniels must know that her parents died in the prison that was Stalin’s Russia. Such “downright cruelty,” to use the doctor’s own words, along with his bizarre psychologizing of Rand (based on a single distorted biographical detail and a misreading of a once mentioned character in The Fountainhead) is emblematic of a nasty streak in Daniels’s writing, one illustrated in his article “Loose ends in Liverpool” where he gratuitously pokes the corpse of the earnest but mediocre artist Benjamin Haydon while reflecting on the Walker Art Gallery. Daniels passes over some of the greatest art in the world (the Walker's Waterhouse’s “Echo and Narcissus,” Delaroche’s “Napoleon crossing the Alps,” Thornycroft’s “The Mower”) to mock Haydon whom he coldly dubs a “tragicomic character.” Here Daniels displays a shocking lack of regard for the extremely sad, but all too common phenomenon of earnest over-reachers. A noble soul who earnestly struggles to be good, but lacks the ability to do so *is* tragic. To exhume Haddon as an object of ridicule when it has nothing to do with the theme of one’s piece--other than to pretentiously display your grasp of a minor player in the history of art--is shameful, even if the person is long dead. (And this from the man who writes so tenderly and beautifully about those sensitive souls who have to live amongst the brutes in the British slums.) If I were to tear a page from Daniels’s playbook, I would wonder whether such callousness showed a psychopath lurking beneath his eloquent prose. But that would be just as unfounded and supercilious as when he implies the same about Rand. Such superficial and baseless evaluations are the closest Daniels’ gets to Rand’s ideas. He spends the rest of the article attacking a straw man. He declares that Rand divides “mankind into two categories,” that she rejects compassion, that her philosophy “would seem to justify the reign of philosopher-kings,” that she holds that the marketplace is the proper judge of value, that “Romantic Realism is virtuously indistinguishable from Socialist Realism.” All of this is not just mind-bogglingly wrong, but absurd. Daniels should be ashamed of reviewing someone who he doesn't have the foggiest grasp of and someone who he has not read more than a smattering from. This is a schoolboy’s paper of confusions spun around out of context quotes. Daniels is not even familiar enough with Rand’s oeuvre to make a pretense of addressing what she wrote. I think he would be astonished to realize the true depth of her thought from her metaphysics and epistemology to her ethics, politics and aesthetics--something one doesn’t get from reading Anne C. Heller’s embarrassingly trite book. (She is an unbiased biographer? Listen to the bitter, mocking tone and pot shots she takes at Rand when she is interviewed by the New York Times or NPR. Contrary to her meek protestations, she is not “something of an admirer of her subject.” She hates her subject.) But Daniels will never spend the time to actually read Rand and that’s just fine with The New Criterion. Anthony Daniels’s writing can sparkle. He can entertain with erudite and obscure trivia. But he seems unable to think deeply about ideas. His intellect is as wide as an ocean, but as shallow as a puddle. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 16:14:51 mst Name: Kyle Haight E-mail: khaight(at)alumni.ucsd.edu URL: http://www.leftist.org/haightspeech/ I think there's an interesting psycho-epistemological aspect to the pro-replacement argument -- it's very concrete-bound. The idea seems to be "well, there was a box of Oreos there before, and there was one there afterwards, so nothing has really changed, so what's the big deal?" What is left out is the abstract context: the questions of ownership, trade and consent which have been raised by various others in this thread. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 16:03:05 mst Name: Trey Givens E-mail: trey(at)treygivens.com URL: http://treygivens.com "STONE THE HEATHENS!" -- Something I think I heard somewhere one time. I'm against taking the Oreos and replacing them. Even if the replacements were identical, they are not the same Oreos. You ate the $6 ones. If you wanted to eat $2 Oreos, you should have brought them with you or waited. Like Shea above, I don't believe you get to unilaterally dictate the terms of your use of the minibar; you agreed to the terms when you checked in. Also, it's petty and small to be miserly like that. If you're such a spendthrift, you should be accustomed to going to bed without cookies. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hsieh OpEd in Boulder Daily Camera: Polis and Public Option
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:59:37 mst Name: kit E-mail: warmutant(at)yahoo.com Personally I'm all for a public option, but I'm one of the vast horde of uninsured that no one seems to really count in "what America wants". View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:58:50 mst Name: Jason Roth E-mail: jason(at)savethehumans.com URL: http://savethehumans.com Shea is right. When you take the Oreos, you make a deal to pay for them. That's really the end of the story. And I think anyone who replaces the Oreos knows this. And Tod is right: people who would even think of doing this probably have purses filled with rolls and jars of jam. It would be interesting to see if hotel management had a problem with you replacing one brand of booze for a better brand. ("Hey! Our customers would never drink Ketel One! Who stole the *$%#ing Smirnoff?!") Or replacing your room's TV with a newer model. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:36:58 mst Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net Here's a take on the Audi ad from a right-wing blog: http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=5501 He sees it as I do - a commercial that mocks environmental extremists to make a point. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Photos Du Jour: Oliver
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:33:19 mst Name: Diana Hsieh E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog Oliver doesn't do any of those things, but he does go completely bonkers -- rolling around on his back, vaguely swatting at you -- if you blow on him. It's damn hysterical. As I've said: All cats are weird. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:29:52 mst Name: Fortitudine E-mail: canadian.republic(at)hotmail.com URL: http://www.thecanadianrepublic.blogspot.com The fungibility of Oreos does nothing to alter the hotel's property right in that particular package. If the hotel asks for $6 in consideration for their property, they're perfectly entitled to do so. Although replacing the cookies means that the hotel suffers little real damage, the moral status of the act remains theft. To assert otherwise is to destroy the concept of a property right. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Photos Du Jour: Oliver
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:26:40 mst Name: Valda Redfern E-mail: valda.redfern(at)gmail.com URL: http://valzhalla.blogspot.com What a pretty boy! Any time you feel like swapping Oliver for a non-fluffy tabby arrangement that tries to ravish its sister several times a day, defends the home against the vacuum cleaner, and attacks passing dogs but is afraid of kittens, just let me know. On the other hand... does Oliver roll ecstatically in front of the radiator every morning and evening, emitting trills? Does he jump into the empty bath whenever you enter the bathroom and bleat until you pat him? Does he sneak into the neighbour's first floor bedroom from time to time and then leap from the window in a panic when discovered beneath the bed? And I'm not sure I can afford airmail postage to the States. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Refutation by Subjectivism
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:16:28 mst Name: RT Ha! I thought the punchline was going to involve dreaming. Like, he gives an iron-tight answer to a skeptic to the challenge "how do you know you're not dreaming" -- then he wakes up. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 15:02:02 mst Name: KPO'M E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net I think the Audi ad will help the cause because it, in a disarmingly humorous way, points out the hypocrisy of the green "police." Obviously, going out and buying a brand new car isn't particularly "green" if one already has a working vehicle, even if it doesn't have clean burning diesel. That was the environmental folly of Cash for Clunkers. I can burn a lot of incandescent bulbs for all the energy that goes into producing a car. However, the green police would have us believe that buying a hybrid, clean-diesel, or similar car is a sort of "environmental indulgence" that lets us feel good about ourselves. It's really like a religion and pre-Reformation Christianity. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 14:59:56 mst Name: David Robinson E-mail: tehgregzor(at)gmail.com Hasn't anyone here seen the problem? I believe the old adage is, can't see the forest for all the trees. But I digress, the point i'm trying to make is that if he was planning on going out anyways, why eat from the hotel minibar in the first place? Why don't you just get your oreo cookies at the convenience store and just stay away from the mini bar scam in the first place! DUH people!!! View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 13:08:08 mst Name: Mickey D E-mail: mikedialj(at)netscape.net @Isaac, Yeah, after I submitted my comment, I thought that I should have pointed out that your comment was obviously humorous. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Thyroid and Body Temperatures
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 13:05:05 mst Name: Jeanie E-mail: jeanie(at)naturally-yours.net a)Perhaps Jeff doesn't know to whom you are married?? b)Right on, Andrew! View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 13:01:29 mst Name: Isaac E-mail: ijspiel(at)gmail.com Also, when the mini bars disappear from lack of profit, maybe the hotel will be kind enough to provide a map to the nearest 7-11! ...I meant the irs comment tongue in cheek, of course. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Open Thread #136
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 12:57:19 mst Name: Jim May E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com "I thought the Audi ad was well done. It unwittingly (or perhaps consciously) showed the ultimate goal of the "green" police to control every aspect of everyone's life. If it didn't ring true, it wouldn't have been as effective." That's the thing, though.... post-Climategate, too many people are now aware that the Green Police is what the envirocult is after. (Hell, no American conservative would fail to notice the last scene where a *real* cop is being harassed by a GP officer... it looks too much like local [American] authority being overrided by [blue] green-helmeted usurpers.) And remember, this is a *football game*; consider what demographics form the bulk of the viewership. I don't know what really went on behind the scenes there, but in terms of the net effect, I really think that this ad can work to our advantage. Caricature is a double-edged sword, and must be wielded very carefully. Observe what happened to Maurice Joly's satire about Napoleon... View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 12:45:49 mst Name: Jim May E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com "* In the last analysis, it's their property, and they're entitled to set rules, such as "If you eat our Oreos you pay us six dollars." That's the nub of the ethical argument: the hotel has set terms for use of its property, and it is unethical to unilaterally override them without their consent, period... and this is not contingent on whether there was a net benefit or harm to the hotel. I too agree with Tod, in that a lot of penny-pinchers actually lose out when you factor in the actual return of pinched pennies on the time and effort they put into it. And I say that as an avid reader of slickdeals.net and fatwallet.com. :) And here's a frugality joke I heard (from an actual Scot): Do you know how copper wire was invented? Two Scots arguing over a penny. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Thyroid and Body Temperatures
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 12:04:43 mst Name: Andrew Dalton E-mail: andrew.s.dalton(at)gmail.com URL: http://witchdoctorrepellent.blogspot.com Jeff - But your flippant, long-distance, armchair *psychological* diagnosis is A-OK, right? View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Hotel Minibar Ethics Question
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 11:57:29 mst Name: Johnathan Reale E-mail: jpreale4biz(at)mac.com Regarding the reasons people offer to justify the cookie replacement, why not actually offer those reasons to a hotel manager or whomever has authority before you act against their stated policy? If they agree, you're in the clear! If not, at least you can make a decision without clouding your mind with what-ifs. View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment
	Thyroid and Body Temperatures
	Monday, February 8, 2010 at 11:41:36 mst Name: Jeff Does not this concern with body temperature smack of neurotic hypochondria? You people are not doctors! You have a superficial knowledge of the human body and the myriads of things going on in it; in fact, someone who has studied it for 4 years and practiced medicine for many years longer knows only a small fraction of the available knowledge. It is intellectual vanity to think that you, a student of philosophy, which I suspect you are quite knowledgeable about, know even one one-hundredth of what a second year med student knows. No one would even pretend to know chemistry and fluid mechanics based upon study on one's down time, but somehow one can understand a system involving this and more. "Hypochondria is often characterized by fears that minor bodily symptoms may indicate a serious illness, constant self-examination and self-diagnosis, and a preoccupation with one's body. Many individuals with hypochondriasis express doubt and disbelief in the doctors' diagnosis, and report that doctors’ reassurance about an absence of a serious medical condition is unconvincing, or un-lasting. " View Blog Post / View All Post Comments / Post Your Comment