Having reviewed the complaints about Rebirth of Reason put forward by Tim Sturm, Robert Winefield, and others, here's my take on the situation.

Jim Valliant has made a number of claims concerning the sales of his book.

But when pressed for specifics, he has said he doesn't know how many copies The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics has sold.

(Subtitle borrowed from Matt Groening, Graduate School Is Hell.)

A passage in OPAR that has become rather notorious reads as follows:

There are men other than criminals or dictators to whom it is moral to lie.  For example, lying is necessary and proper in certain cases to protect one’s privacy from snoopers. (p. 276)

This afternoon I received an email from Kenneth Irvine (aka Kenny), who informs me that he has been banned from this site.

According to Mr. irvine, this action was taken without any warning, either from Mr. Perigo or Mr. Gagnon.  He simply discovered that he couldn't log on any more.

While browsing the website for the recently concluded Ayn Rand Institute summer conference, I came across a most interesting lecture.  Here is part of the abstract:

Outsiders like myself have to treat the Ayn Rand Institute like a black box.  We know a certain amount of what goes in, and a certain amount of what comes out.  We can apply whatever we’ve learned about human nature and organizational dynamics, and that’s all.

 
Ms. Blair,

Your comments about Kathleen Touchstone’s book deserve a blog entry of their own.

You quote a flyer from University Press of America advertising her book.  (I received an identical flyer in the mail a couple of weeks ago.)

Lindsay Blair's recent post deserves a detailed reply, so I'm going to make a separate blog entry out of it.

Ms. Blair,

You’ve made some strong statements.

I've called on Barbara Branden to apologize to Lindsay Perigo, for supporting the publication of “Drooling Beast.” If you have ample evidence that someone can't control his anger, and inadequate evidence that his tirades are due to alcoholism, you're best off confining your charges to the former.

But that's only part of the picture.

It's time for Mr. Perigo to apologize...

to everyone he has unfairly slimed, slammed, maligned, flamed, or trashed, formerly on SOLOHQ, or now on SOLOPassion.

Since the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has changed very little during the time that Mr. Valliant has been subscribing to it, and the attitude toward JARS over at the Ayn Rand Institute hasn't even budged glacially, I'm going to suggest a different reason for Mr. Valliant's recent decision not to submit an article to JARS.

I think his choice not to seek publication in JARS is one of many aftershocks from James Kilbourne's ill-advised essay “Drooling Beast,” which appeared on SOLOHQ on July 31, 2005 (see http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Kilbourne/Drooling_Beast.shtml). As presumably everyone here knows, Kilbourne interpreted Lindsay Perigo's frequent public outbursts of anger as symptoms of alcoholism. In order to test loyalties and rally support around him, Mr. Perigo decided to make the charge of alcoholism public, by publishing the essay on SOLOHQ instead of rejecting it. Shortly after the essay appeared, Barbara Branden praised it on SOLOHQ.

Since Diana Hsieh is remarkably quick to impugn the scholarship of her "detractors," I thought it might be worthwhile to go through one of her own recent public statements about Objectivist scholarship, to see what standards it actually meets.