Can someone explain Ayn Rand to me?!

haha. i think ruddy describes objectivists as being crazier than scientologists. anyway, the actual link to listen is on this page. on the plus side, he says ayn was pretty sexy.

lolz Vision is a rand fan? that explains a lot

Whenever I read Garu G's posts I like to picture Ayn Rand.
― walter kranz (walterkranz), Tuesday, 2 August 2005 01:50 (3 years ago) Permalink

Seen on a 'staff recommendations' shelf in a local Waterstone's: Atlas Shrugged (or was it The Fountainhead), with the hand-written card declaring that "it is hard to come up with rational arguments against her philosophy".

Q: Does pompous certainty disbar you from being a philosopher or does it make you a particular kind of philosopher?

I bet there is a Dinosaur Comics about that!

Whoa you are whistling for Vision (or whatevs his name is) to come rail hotly & obfusticate meaning.

― Abbott of the Trapezoid Monks (Abbott), Monday, November 10, 2008 10:42 PM (30 minutes ago)

Haha! First thing I thought of!

It is great when he makes fun of your user name. Great!

No, no it really isn't.

I mean "enormously silly and childish."

thankyou

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n200/youngstunna5/candyman.jpg

That is usually what I mean when I say something is "great," which comes from a childhood of not being allowed to use "bad words."

That's a great word. ; )

more like

http://petewarden.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/10/31/beetlejuice.png

Ah, the mot juste.

oh no! douchebags who either engineered or enabled our current economic shitpile and fancy themselves modern-day John Galts are going on a "brain strike"!! OH NO!!!

She looks like Greenspan with a wig.

Well, she DOES have a sense of humor (not really exhibited in her books unfortunately) -- and lol @ how she loves "charlie's angels" and how much she sounds like Alan Alda or David Van Driessen re how "real men" should not suppress their feelings.

Who cares if Atlas shrugs now? He's already dropped the planet.

Can you say "conservative cunts" boys and girls? I knew you could!

Ayn Rand's zombie presence makes perfect sense. Indeed, her lit cred, thoroughly middlebrow and thus utterly American, lends her capitalist fantasies some theoretical weight. Rand fancied herself as high-minded, an intellectual counterbalance to Karl Marx. In truth, Rand was closer to Walt Disney, minus the Mouse King's showbiz flair. Each used cartoons to convey their message. Both were dedicated anti-communists, hostile to organized labor, friendly to the post-war Red Scare. Only Rand felt that the U.S. government wasn't going deep enough in uprooting commies, primarily those in Hollywood, hypnotizing Middle America with phony smiles and pretty songs while undermining free enterprise and its besieged supporters....

Heller also note(s) that Rand considered the dollar sign "a better symbol than the cross, because it didn't require the sacrifice of anybody." I trust that Heller doesn't share this ahistorical view. Not only have the cross and dollar enjoyed a lucrative, long-running alliance, the dollar requires massive sacrifice across the planet. Poverty, starvation, environmental damage and genocidal violence are some of the dollar's greatest hits. Use any calculator you like to tally the body count under state socialism, and it'll explode when computing the ongoing ravages of global capitalism.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2009/11/atlas-insolvent.html

Indeed, her lit cred

what??????????????????? she has no lit cred.

w/ people who buy books, and biographers, apparently

shooting fish in a barrel

thoroughly middlebrow and thus utterly American,

stfu

xp It would be a better world if that fact was as obvious to everyone as it is to us.

I enjoyed the piece in slate from a couple days ago: http://www.facebook.com/fluxion23?ref=profile

um

Oh. Sorry.

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966

ah

She looks like Greenspan with a wig.

― Goth As A Moth (Bimble)

Perfect.

comparing ayn rand to walt disney is an obscene insult to disney.

I like the comparison in the Slate story much better -- to L. Ron Hubbard.

Slate's latest batch of philosophy essays have been...highly variable, like this ludicrous Hannah Arendt piece

alfred that link just goes to a big list of ron rosenbaum articles for me

Whoops: http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/

Glad I'm not the only one. :)

The banality of Ron Rosenbaum

You're right, that article is horrible.

"Internalizing" lol

The banality of Latinates.

atlas shrugged was boring

also kindof offensive

"lit cred" = high schoolers read Anthem and so think Ayn Rand is Serious Literature.

the arendt piece is one of the worst things i've ever read on slate. incredibly ignorant and hysterical. has rosenbaum always been an idiot?

The tone most offends me -- the smug assurance with which he thinks we'll agree that the banality of evil is a hackneyed phrase.

especially because his own idea of what evil actually is (bad people apparently ALWAYS know what they're doing, and revel in the fact of their evilness) is so laughable.

i get the sense that most of the people who criticize arendt's calling eichmann "banal" haven't even read that book. she hardly lets him off the hook.

And she endorses the death penalty for him!