First Ayn Rand interview.
 

With Mike Wallace from 1959.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ooKsv_SX4Y

Apparently, quite a few of our fellow citizens have fallen under the thrall of this womans work. Including some pretty high ranking Republican politicians. They LOVE this crap and think it's the way our society should go. They call this "Freedom".

Personally, I think it is nothing less than the embodiment of evil.

The weak and poor are undeserving, and the only the successful and powerful are deserving of humanity, love and compassion?

Yeah, I can see how that mentality will lead to a rightwingers utopian society.......:rolleyes:

Ayn Rand was f**king baboon. And so are her latter day acolytes.

Dave

The idea of one of her acolytes speaking of love is assinine, Amanda McBroom put it very succincvtly in "The Rose'

"It's the heart that fears the breaking
That never learns to dance
It's the dream afraid of waking
That never takes the chance
It's the one who won't be taken
Who cannot seem to give
And the soul afraid of dying
That never learns to live"

Another thing that most people don't know is that up until recently the Ayn Rand Institute had two co-chairs. One was full time with ARI. The other was an attorney with Goldman Sachs.

More recently BB&T bank alumni have joined the management council along with a doctor.

That group is up to something. Be careful of what you want. You just might get it.

Here's an interesting fictional video depicting L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand concocting their ideas after a roll in the hay:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5YWTFW5WMw

LMAO! Thanks for the comic relief!

Dave

The Ayn Rand Institute.

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=index

This is the organization that holds all of the copyrights to Ayn Rand's works. They also publish teacher and student study guides, sponsor writing contests, provide speakers for radio and TV engagements, write articles, etc.

Real slimy characters IMO.

The most telling for me was during the 2008 election campaign. ARI wrote an article that called John McCain a traitor for the the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act. The ARI later removed the article from their web site. They are like cats in a litter box.

Notice I deleted that post.

I visited ARIs website. Honestly, I skimmed. Just another rightwing "think tank". Amazing how many of the ideas espoused in there can be heard daily in the rightwing media....VERBATUM, right down to the letter.

Dave

ARI is more evil than a right wing think tank. ARI is the propoganda arm for plutocrats. ARI's job is to make voters feel sorry for rich people. Their job is also advocate for an extreme brand of anarcho-capitalism. Of course they don't call it that. They just call it capitalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

Guess she makes being selfish cool. Maybe that's why so many are willing to believe the philosophy. Makes looking in the mirror a lot easier.



Barney

Gordon Gekko sumarized Atlas Shrugged in three words.

tell us Merrylander!

After watching the Mike Wallace interview I have but two words: HOLY SHIT!

And a point of clarification: in my preceding post that was not a joyous holy shit.

Not really. I think it was unfortunate that she chose "selfishness" as opposed to some other word with less negative connotation. What's interesting is that she is completely against religion; thus, sometimes I do wonder how righties accept that together with the objectivist philosophy. My position is that none of what she purports is particularly new or innovative; however, intertwining it within the context of a novel is somewhat refreshing. Obviously, she made a lot of enemies by denigrating any notion of altruism. Furthermore, just because an action appears altruistic doesn't mean that altruism was the motivating factor.

Good grief! A conspiracy theorist. ARI is relatively small in the world of research groups. There are plenty of opposing groups with far more power.

The people that apologize for Ayn Rand don't understand her philosophy and how dangerously whacked it is. I guarantee it.

Remember -- this isn't a game. ARI plays hardball. Those f*ckers are persuading congressmen to write this stuff into The United States Code at every opportunity.

If anyone that isn't a plutocrat but stills go for this stuff either doesn't know what he is doing or is a traitor. This stuff is designed to persuade us to erase the U.S. Constitution.

Not kidding.

Be careful with it.

That interview was an interesting eye opener as to Ayn's philosophies. She displays a serious lack of empathy for people other than herself. The way she presents herself smacks of sociopathic zealotry, to my unschooled eye. That habit of glancing downwards and to the left compulsively brings to mind the term shifty eyed and probably has an explanation based in psychiatric studies. What that would be I'll leave to someone more proficient in that field, after all I'm a simple person who's a product in part to my upbringing and what I choose to believe as some innate intangible quality that we all bring to the world we live in. Call it a soul or some such label, I really don't know as yet.
This person, if you will, seems to me to typify sociopathism and there is no enlightenment to be gained for her disjointed ramblings in regards to her philosophy. I think she went down a rabbit hole in a quest to break down the human condition to it's most basic components and came up with this "greed is good" Rasputin-like grotesquery.
Maybe I'm biased by the hours misspent in front of the one eyed monster in my childhood but I keep expecting Boris to pop up and start calling her Natasha while they're enjoying some Moose and Squirrel stew.:rolleyes: Kudos to Mike Wallace for skewering this sick and repulsive individual. Just my take on it and thanks for digging that clip up Dave. I can't believe that there are people who take this evil shit seriously.

Ayn Rand would not support Gordon Gekko nor anyone that makes money by financial manipulation or speculating. How one obtained wealth was just as important as the wealth itself and IIRC that was the seminal thread running through all of her works.

That's just name calling. Want me to start? I'm good at it. :D

Yes there are opposing groups to ARI. OWS comes to mind, but they are not as well organized and well financed.

A feeble minded thinker might say that the churches have a lot of money. But that would be forgetting that churches can't speak on political topics without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status.

On the other hand ARI gets to maintain its tax exempt status while being funded by the banks to go into schools and push atheism and dog-eat-dog onto kids.

I thought you already had.:D I try to avoid name calling; however, the multiple posts here that assailed, deservedly or not, Ayn Rand, I found a bit over the top. If you disagree with her, admittedly sophomoric philosophy, fine, but calling her names and casting her to the flames doesn't elucidate what's wrong with her position.

That might technically be true, but churches still have a significant impact on politicians and certainly have influence on legislation. How about the left leaning think tanks? They would seem to offer a counterveiling viewpoint to the nefarious ARI.

Are you equally against groups promoting collectivist causes in our nominally secular schools or just non-liberal causes?

There is nothing that requires me to pick all sides as winners in a debate of ideas. Of all the ideas that are out there I consider those of the ARI the worst. Hands down.

To me, Rand misinterpreted Adam Smith's "enlightened self-interest" by deleting the "enlightened" aspect of it, probably as a reaction to her experiences in Soviet Russia. She was first exposed to western freedoms at age 20 and somehow came up with the notion that she was the only one who understood the workings of a capitalist nation, when she indeed had no clue. How anyone today can ascribe to her musings as a fully developed political philosophy is beyond me.

Well at least she didn't reproduce! But maybe if she had then some compassion might of been gained.




Barney

It was not for lack of trying, while still married and in her forties she took up with a married twenty something chap Nathaniel somebody or other.

Seems more an attitude than a developed philosophy to me.

Here's more on Ayn Rand's philosophy from Professor Vladimir Shlapentokh. He is a Soviet sociologist that emigrated to the USA in 1979. In this article he describes how perfectly awful Ayn Rand's philosophy is for the USA. He attributes shortcomings in the philosophy to Ayn Rand's Russian roots. He and I had a pleasant discussion on the phone back when he was writing about Ayn Rand and I told him my theory about Ayn Rand actually being intent on destroying the US economy from within. He called me a conspiracy theorist. Par for the course. The curious thing is that the professor and I arrived at identical conclusions as to the problems with Ayn Rand's philosophy. The question then becomes are those errors there by mistake as the professor claims or on purpose as I claim.

The reason I believe they are there are purpose are because Ayn Rand's philosophy nudges traditional American self-managed capitalism towards a more feudal brand of capitalism that occurred in Russia under the czars. That was the brand of capitalism that Marx predicted would fail. I still firmly believe that Ayn Rand was a Soviet plant whose assignment was to perform social engineering the USA.

In any event here is the professor's article.

http://shlapentokh.wordpress.com/201...9s-philosophy/

Here is the professor's web site. He's a pretty fascinating guy to talk with.
https://www.msu.edu/~shlapent/index.html

Thanks for the cite. I'm interested in this subject matter. Your Soviet plant hypothesis is interesting. BTW, since you appear to be into philosophy, have you read Wittgenstein's Tractatus? I had to deal with it in a linguistic seminar on formal languages.

Only a Jesuit can bild (model) that?:D (Yeah, I skimmed the wiki article..)
So how's the weather down your way? It muggy as hell up here. Time for a cool drink and a walk down on the beach in Newport. It's got to be cooler down that way. Have a good one BH.:)

I have not read it.

My exposure to pure philosophy is extremely limited. During engineering undergrad I satisfied a philosophy credit with a class called Introduction to Ethics. That class stayed with the classics such as Plato, Aristotle, etc. and was fun to digest.

A few years ago I read The Closing of the American Mind. That book was a bear for me to get through. The author threw around names like Hegel, Marx, Jefferson, etc. as if the reader knew all of their philosophies. I did not. I spent just as much time doing research as reading the book. It was an enlightening experience.

In law school we really didn't learn any philosophy. Law school is more like a software class. We did simple analysis such as law A ended up with effect Z. The good thing from law school is that it helps students see the big picture.

On the theology front I read Seven Storey Mountain. That was the book that finally made religion understandable for me.

So that's it. My background is two philosophy books with other background in law and a little theology to help put philosophy in context.

It was about 90 degrees with 60-70% humidity. Too damn hot! I tried to do some work, but it's hot enough that my skin is sticking to my Vyco covered desktop. It's great stuff to write on but any sweat and your skin sticks. Balboa Island and a gin and tonic, or several, sounds about perfect. Enjoy your walk.

Make that a vodka and tonic with a squeeze of lime and I'll be right over ;)

No where to park on Balboa Island not too mention no beach to speak of, just a lot of overpriced tourista spots. I usually head down River Rd. off Superior Ave. and park by those tennis courts. Huge expanse of beach just south of the Santa Ana River is great for a late afternoon stroll or a little fishing from the jetties. The other favorite is all the way down at the end of Balboa peninsula where the harbor mouth is. The Wedge....for your viewing pleasure!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedge_(surfing)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0fur...feature=relmfu The last wave launches surfer +++
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgiM-T1xRMM Eatin' it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOAUz76B68 A dolphin joins in!


Photo from across the harbor to the south lookin' north. Wikipedia. See ya!

You know, thinking about this, is there anything more ironic than a bunch of God fearing "patriots" lining up to support, defend and vote for a guy that has based his beliefs in an atheist/communist.

No, not really. Mainly because if you try to tell them about it-----they'll ignore you, anyways.

In their minds, the "atheist/communist" is Obama and no one else. He is the locus of their ire. They are single-minded in mission and determination, focused on destroying him. If Romney or Ryan was to wipe his ass with the flag on television in front of the whole world I doubt they would notice or even care. They would vote against Obama anyways.

Dave

Romney has already done as much by moving his money overseas. Believe in American indeed.:rolleyes:

Minor issue, being an atheist. The message she puts forth of "Greed is Good" or "Makers and Takers" reeled them in. Makes the true believers feel it's all right to feel the way they do. My guess is once you stop being a "Maker" when you retire you start being a "Taker" should do everyone a favor and just die!


BTW interesting show today on her.....http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/20...ntial-campaign

Barney

I've been recently told this is a good thing. And that every American citizen should do the same..................................

Dave