It was a somewhat facetious comment… I understand indoctrination, but many Randians seem to be self-made Randbots. Do they think that the bad writing is a sign of great writing and hence swallow what is fed to them hook line and sinker? Is being immune/inured to bad writing a co-symptom of not recognizing bad ideas/logic? Perhaps Randians come from very religious households where the bible was worshiped and thus associate a thick, difficult to read book as something one should use as a life guide?
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Anyone want to join my Church of Pynchon?
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Ayn Rand was chosen because her “philosophy” was exactly consistent with the agenda of a handful of industrialists who were being inconvenienced by government regulation. Take a look at the comments on any climate story. It’s flooded with science deniers. Twenty years ago they all called themselves John Galt. They’ve learned not to do that, but when their guard is down they’ll recite Randist philosophy like the “characters” in her novels. Randism is the Social Darwinism of the late 20th Century, promoted by the public relations apparatus which exists to cast doubt on any science which reveals risks to public health and safety from industry. If Atlas Shrugged weren’t already in print, one of the “right wing think tanks” would have had to write it.
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Kung Fu Monkey: Ephemera 2009 (7)
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
– John Rogers
One of my other favorite JR quotes:
This…is why screenwriting pays so well. They don’t pay me to write. I’d write for free. They pay me NOT to punch people in the neck.
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Hubbard was a terrible writer. They accept pulp in exchange for the self-aggrandizement and replacement of personal neuroses/insecurities.
Well sure, how she felt towards religious zealots and spoke to them in interviews is totally enjoyable to watch. I don’t think people who dislike her cult of personality “hate” everything about her. Objectivism is the target of scorn.
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Thx for surfacing the Orcs/Galt quote source.
Thx too for the delicious cherry-on-top 2nd quote. As one who’s worked with editors, I strongly identify…
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And Tea Partiers.
Remember Oliver Wendell Holmes? ‘I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.’ (there are several versions of this quote but he clearly said something like it.) The opposite, of course, also applies.
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Nae bishop!
Nae king!
Ayn rant!
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As Chambers noted, Rand claimed to have read Aristotle but was really influenced by Nietzsche. The author she didn’t read was Marx. Which is odd, because they ended up in a similar place.
Marx believed virtue lay in the proletariat (the industrial workers who actually built the developed world) and in speculating on his ideal world mentioned the “Dictatorship of the proletariat” as the stage before Communism. Rand pussy foots around, but in the end her worldview is the dictatorship of the technologists - the engineers and financiers. The dictatorship of the proletariat was bad enough in Russia but it was most truly horrible in China. We are currently seeing where the dictatorship of the technologists is leading; bank crashes rather than famines, resource wars rather than political wars.
Chambers is right; Marxism and Randism are horrible because they omit the very human qualities that, for most people, make life tolerable.
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There is no requirement for a belief set to be reality based or even internally consistent.
You can easily believe in an arbitrary number of arbitrary hells for arbitrary person sets, including but not limited to a “multihell” concept where the same soul can be spending eternity in several hells at once. Try it, it’s fun. You cannot disprove the reality of such beliefs anyway.
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Nope. Too many bananas.
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I think we have a winner.
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As I always point out to people who strongly favor boycotts as a universal mechanism for social change. They have their uses, but let’s not pretend that we reach our better angels through relentless commerce.
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I just imagine that being either of them was plenty of punishment. Poor Ayn Rand lived in a world of wretched ungrateful inferior beings… where she was singularly above it all.
Imagine the hell of waking up to that every day.
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How do you peer review an objectivist?
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It’s called “Being a psychopath.” Unlike most psychopaths, who conceal their beliefs in order to succeed, Rand wrote books about how psychopathy was the best way to run the world. And she made a go of it…because around 4% of the population are psychopaths and most authors would die for a niche market that big.
The thing about being a psychopath is you don’t know it is unpleasant.
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I postulate that they do not know even what pleasant is, so I have to agree. Chicken/egg Tomato/Tomato.
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Don’t hate us because we’re beautiful.
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The first book by Heinlein I read, when in my early teens, was Friday, which I liked because the protagonist was a smart, sharp-tongued, and very confident woman who enthusiastically enjoyed sex. I read a few more of his books, and aside from a general theme of it being good to rebel against oppressive governments, I didn’t really pick up any political themes, and none to object to, until I read one collection of loosely related short stories which included one character who deliberately breaks a strike.
The one time I tried reading Ayn Rand was one time, later in my teens, when I was in a book store, and decided to see what they had in the philosophy section. They had a few Socratic dialogues, and a book by Ayn Rand, who I’d never heard of. I read the first two pages, and noticed they were full of blatant contradictions, such as the flat assertions of absolute free will and absolute determinism, and the direct assertion that capitalism and representative democracy, as practiced in the US, was the ideal social system – which I found dubious, and weirdly propagandistic.
On a friend’s suggestion, I went to the library and checked out Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and read that instead.
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Not to go without mentioning How Ayn Rand became a big admirer of serial killer William Hickman - Raw Story
My god, can we also set Change.org on fire?
Thanks,
blessings,
namaste.
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