The chief defect of Ayn Rand

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

Andrew Usher - 29 Nov 2008 02:56 GMT

... was her sex, of course. I am not being facetious - I mean that it
is an easily seen fact that no woman has ever written anything of
interest philosophically, and that includes her. The hypocrisy of her
movement is well known; that it did not tolerate any dissent despite
being ostensibly devoted to reason, which, all should agree, requires
open debate.

Her megalomania convinced her that what she came up with was The Truth
and that all disagreement with it was somehow evil. Yes, that
describes all manner of cult leaders (though I believe that many are
just faking it - certainly not in her case), but not many have
explicitly invoked reason as their one and only support. Of course,
this effectively holds reason as a form of revelation, which is
basically a contradiction in terms and so silly that only a woman was
likely to come up with it.

Objectivism, and libertarianism in general, are ideologies for losers
in the money/power/status game that wish to fantasise about being
winners; and the easiest way to sucker them is to convince them that
they'd be winners if not for the damned government! This appeals to
the vanity in all of us that tells us that 'Though not all people can
be winners, _I_ am a 'natural winner' that ought to end up
successful'. If there is any such thing as 'natural winners',
independently of any particular social arrangement, it would be those
of highest intelligence. While social success is always correlated
with intelligence, for several different reasons, it is never as much
as they would have one believe. This is because general intelligence
is not the trait most highly valued by those that control the power.

Government is not the problem in this respect, but I do not hold
government to be good in itself. It has the capacity for evil as much
as for good, and in reality it can only be a function of who
effectively controls it. This is why I am a socialist, albeit an anti-
authoritarian one - and yes, for the first time I am not afraid to use
the word 'socialist', it is exactly the word that describes it - and I
would like to communicate to ordinary men that the only way that
outcomes can be improved for people like them is by controlling the
ruling classes' co-option of our society.

Andrew Usher

Reply to this Message

GemRuinsKeeper@gmail.com - 01 Dec 2008 01:50 GMT

> ... was her sex, of course. I am not being facetious - I mean that it
> is an easily seen fact that no woman has ever written anything of
[quoted text clipped - 36 lines]
>
> Andrew Usher

Have you, any of you, ever READ Ayn Rand?

If you did, you'd realize that you can't have socialism without big
government, and that the propensity for corruption is highly
correlated with its size.

Reply to this Message

jmfbahciv - 01 Dec 2008 13:23 GMT

<snip.

> Have you, any of you, ever READ Ayn Rand?

Yes, I have.

> If you did, you'd realize that you can't have socialism without big
> government, and that the propensity for corruption is highly
> correlated with its size.

However, her belief that people will function as she describes
is not valid. If she had spent some of her time working
at a farming or blue collar job, she might have figured
this out. However, her upper class attitudes would have,
more likely, blinded her to the obvious.

/BAH

Reply to this Message

GemRuinsKeeper@gmail.com - 01 Dec 2008 16:13 GMT

> GemRuinsKee...@gmail.com wrote:
>
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
>
> /BAH

You're missing the point entirely. Her theory isn't about how people
WILL act. It's about what people DESERVE. Those who do nothing but
complain that they aren't getting enough do not deserve to get what
they want. This goes all the way from the lowest class to the highest
class. That doesn't mean that people won't be fooled into giving them
what they want. That also doesn't mean that the complainers won't try
to steal it from others.

Obviously you just skimmed through Ayn Rand's works, or if you did
understand it, you failed to integrate the message. That is a failing
on your part, not Ayn Rand's.

Reply to this Message

spudnik - 01 Dec 2008 23:45 GMT

not much of a reader, but her followers can
be very annoying, aside from Greensperm.

the current head of the local Aynstitute in Marina del Rey,
is one Yaron Brook, who has advocated on campus
-- during Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week,"
whcih was muzingly protested by the Avakian's Maoists --
that the US should nuke a mediumsized Muslim city, and
"then they'd stop being terrorists."

> Obviously you just skimmed through Ayn Rand's works, or if you did
> understand it, you failed to integrate the message. That is a failing
> on your part, not Ayn Rand's.

thus:
I am not sure that the pseudosphere is a model
of hyperbolics, but it is very well known,
using the Poincare model, which is on a disk;
all of the lines are defined to be circles,
with a limiting case of lines, and
the dystinguishing circles are those that are orthogoanl
to the circle of the disk. there is also a spatial form
of it.

of course, you might say, it was obscure, iff
you are basing your research upon Wolframitism, or
Wookypoopeeya; I just use old books at the library!

I see that PA dumped this item,
to begin another outline for another book,
alas -- time to boycott the turkey, for ever.

--Cheeny -- 4 mo'years:
pssed the nukeyellar football to Biden:
"We must have US miltary intervention into Sudan,"
his post-annointment ejaculation.

Reply to this Message

spudnik - 02 Dec 2008 03:59 GMT

of course, Greensperm is somewhat *more*
than meta-annoying, as a disciple
of the Great Scriptwriter Who Escaped
from Stalinism, or what ever.

thus:
your point about differentiability is taken, but
do you seriously want PA to apply his new math
to math itself, or even physics?

would he really want to try to do that?

> I'm curious as to what AP-reals have to say about a
> function with such a property.

thus:
sorry, I said, I'd boycott PA in the item -- I mean,
book -- that he abandoned. anyway,
Stevin quite explicitly stated that
his decimal representation of numbers has this one ambiguity,
that 34.659999... is the same as 34.660000...,
with thte usual meaning of the notation of "ellipsis" or
three-dotism. (I don't know that
he used three dots for any thing, but
he did define the decimals formally, and very popularly;
may be you can googolplex the original text .-)

thus:
not much of a reader, but Ayn's followers can
be very annoying, aside from Greensperm.

the current head of the local Aynstitute in Marina del Rey,
is one Yaron Brook, who has advocated on campus
-- during Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week,"
whcih was muzingly protested by the Avakian's Maoists --
that the US should nuke a mediumsized Muslim city, and
"then they'd stop being terrorists."

thus:
I am not sure that the pseudosphere is a model
of hyperbolics, but it is very well known,
using the Poincare model, which is on a disk;
all of the lines are defined to be circles,
with a limiting case of lines, and
the dystinguishing circles are those that are orthogoanl
to the circle of the disk. there is also a spatial form
of it.

of course, you might say, it was obscure, iff
you are basing your research upon Wolframitism, or
Wookypoopeeya; I just use old books at the library!

I see that PA dumped this item,
to begin another outline for another book,
alas -- time to boycott the turkey, for ever.

--Cheeny -- 4 mo'years:
pssed the nukeyellar football to Biden:
"We must have US miltary intervention into Sudan,"
his post-annointment ejaculation.

Reply to this Message

jmfbahciv - 02 Dec 2008 12:19 GMT

>> GemRuinsKee...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
[quoted text clipped - 25 lines]
> understand it, you failed to integrate the message. That is a failing
> on your part, not Ayn Rand's.

I suggest that you do some more rereading.

/BAH

Reply to this Message

Sean_MacCloud@yahoo.com - 01 Dec 2008 16:20 GMT

On Dec 1, 11:12 am, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bru...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Sean_MacCl...@yahoo.com wrote:
> > On Nov 28, 9:37 pm, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
[quoted text clipped - 126 lines]
>
> --

Charts and graphs (bout pres`o dents) --groovy. How is it germane to
what I said?

Reply to this Message

Space Forum / Astronomy / December 2008

The chief defect of Ayn Rand