Reply With QuoteYeeeah, Brian Doherty had a pretty good take on the article.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/136075.html
Fun.
Good god, 500k copies a year?Christopher Hayes of The Nation recently recalled one of his first days in high school, when he met a tall, geeky kid named Phil Kerpen, who asked him, "Have you ever read Ayn Rand?" Kerpen is now the director of policy for the conservative lobby Americans for Prosperity and an occasional right-wing talking head on cable television. He represents a now-familiar type. The young, especially young men, thrill to Rand's black-and-white ethics and her veneration of the alienated outsider, shunned by a world that does not understand his gifts. (It is one of the ironies, and the attractions, of Rand's capitalists that they are depicted as heroes of alienation.) Her novels tend to strike their readers with the power of revelation, and they are read less like fiction and more like self-help literature, like spiritual guidance. Again and again, readers would write Rand to tell her that their encounter with her work felt like having their eyes open for the first time in their lives. "For over half a century," writes Jennifer Burns in her new biography of this strange and rather sinister figure, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right."
The likes of Gale Norton, George Gilder, Charles Murray, and many others have cited Rand as an influence. Rand acolytes such as Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson have held important positions in Republican politics. "What she did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," attested Greenspan. In 1987, The New York Times called Rand the "novelist laureate" of the Reagan administration. Reagan's nominee for commerce secretary, C. William Verity Jr., kept a passage from Atlas Shrugged on his desk, including the line "How well you do your work is the only measure of human value."
Yeeeah, Brian Doherty had a pretty good take on the article.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/136075.html
oligatory
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...if#post1735319Originally Posted by Equis
oligatory
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...if#post1339810
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...if#post1088052
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...if#post1051443
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...gif#post748631
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...gif#post709018
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...gif#post626091
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...gif#post382042
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-t...gif#post128480
QT3: We keep posting a comic until it becomes funny and it proves our point (which is never)
Oh reason.com, you never fail to deliver. Rand believed the untermensch deserved to keep all of their laughably small labors! Which apparently are "uncoerced", which is only applied to only rich people in Rand-world.
Edit: And isn't a bit rich for a libertarian to claim that the evidence-based criticisms don't apply because Rand's claim was a moral first-principles claim? Next up: why evidence-based criticism of religious-justified discrimination against homosexuals is a-ok, because it's a moral claim!
Last edited by Jason McCullough; 09-14-2009 at 10:11 PM.
Unless it does. Come on, seriously. Why do you think the Titans, the entrepreneurs, etc. haven't already gone on strike as in Atlas Shrugged? Because they haven't figured out how to do without the rest of society (in their minds, no doubt known as "the herd") for all those practical needs like, oh, I don't know, the food they require, not to mention all the toys they enjoy.
Hey guys, it's fine. Nothing to see here.
Oh, and Digby on these Rand idiots is always a good time.
Rand sprinkles in just enough good thoughts to make her seem believable. For example, she talks about Reason as the key to human survival (Plato/Aristotle) and how the lazy leech off the working (umm...everyone). Work hard and you get to rule the world! Work and talent equals automatic success. Thus, if you do not have success, you must be lazy or worthless in some critical way. You just suck, and it's now your job to serve those who don't; of course, you won't do that, because you are worthless and lazy.
Whenever students come to me about how they can get more Rand, I point them to
Emerson instead. You want self-reliance? Great! Learn about it from someone who isn't totally embittered and naive.
OTOH, I think Rand gets a far worse rap than she deserves, since she does at least sprinkle in some truth. It's not utter crap. It's just filled with overly simplistic false dilemmas of egoism vs. self-sacrifice.
I like how the first paragraph cites the fact that a conservative who once read a book in high school to one-dimensionally explain his politics (and, by extension, American conservatism at large) over the course of the next three decades. You might as well plot out my entire intellectual life by my freshman year enthusiasm for Catcher in the Rye.
The bottom line is liberals are more obsessed with vilifying Rand and blaming her books on all political and philosophical oppositions that disagree with theirs than conservatives are of championing her.
I like how you use a single article to explain American liberalism at large.
I did no such thing. But if I had, that would have been a snarky retort!
I hope to one day be famous enough to have my entire body of work boiled down to my childhood love of the Berenstain Bears.
I like how he conflates Randian idiots with conservatives. That made my day.
Didn't know any objectivists in college huh? They were just as annoying as born again christians, and for many of the same reasons.
Sure I did. That was college. I also knew people who believed tomatoes screamed when they were sliced, and girls named "Moonbeam" who smeared their menstrual fluid on tree bark to demonstrate their oneness with nature. College kids are idiots, but I don't conflate the opinions of teenagers with adult political movements.
The idiot teenagers take many of their beliefs and opinions into adulthood. I would suggest that the root cause of those who start rolling their eyes the moment Rand is brought into the conversation is the same as the root cause of those who start rolling their eyes the moment the rapture is brought into the conversation. Neither has anything much to do with adult political movements.
I agree. In both cases, they are almost entirely the product of rote vilification of opposing beliefs, dismissing people who disagree with you as a universal group of fools due to a handful of past acquaintances of extreme degrees of jackassery that annoyed you.
I don't like to do that. I'm a liberal, but I prefer not to think of conservatives and libertarians as Objectivist morons, not only because it isn't true but because that belief hobbles my own ability to evolve my political opinions. Likewise, I am irritated by the gleeful ignorance of Conservatives who do likewise. Dismissing your ideological opponents as simple morons is too easy, and makes you one.
I think you are confusing vilification of differing views with vilification of annoying assholes. The latter is the group of whom I'm speaking and includes devout outspoken fanatics of any particular faith.
Yeah, ya did, dude. You made a broad generalization about liberals as a whole based on the fact that this article conflated conservatism and Objectivism. I don't really care, but I find the irony amusing.
Again, I did no such thing. I gave my opinion about liberal obsession with vilifying Rand without any reference to the article whatsoever. This article conflating conservatism and Objectivism had nothing to do with my statement; it was a separate thought and declaration, separated -- even! -- into its own paragraph, sparked by yet another one-sided Ayn Rand bitching session popping up on Qt3. The only part of the article I addressed in my post, or even future posts, was the absurdity of judging someone's adult political beliefs by a book they read in high school.
For the record, I invite anyone who needs a take on who talks about Rand more to do a search for her name on Qt3, which never overlooks a chance to screech about her and call out her philosophies as fallacious (which they are). How many earnest and unqualified Objectivist defenses will you find in Qt3's archives? Not many, I reckon. Ayn Rand's name is almost never mentioned on these forums without critique ranging from the knee-jerk to the intellectually cogent.
Granted, part of that is because Qt3 is largely left, and being on the left is inherently opposed to the theories of Objectivism. But it's actually bigger than that, because almost no one is an Objectivist out of college -- that bastion of extreme and hopeless political philosophies -- and that even those who would defend Rand would do so guardedly and with caveats up the stinker. There are very few adult Objectivists, and Rand is a bogeyman to more people than she's a Messiah, in my experience.
Me? I find Ayn Rand to be far more offensive as a writer than she ever was as a philosopher.
Those books ruled! ... even though they were completely socialist. Sharing?? C'mon... Except for maybe the book where Mama bear opens her own Quilt Shop, that was pretty capitalistic.
Extreme Sports with the Berenstain Bears for the Game Boy Color was one of the more inexplicable licensing decisions in gaming history.
Same. I think her philosophies are interesting, but I had to stop reading Atlas Shrugged because it's such turgid crap.
Because the book is fiction?
Ok, so you're basing your generalization about liberals on an internet forum rather than the article. Do you really think that's an improvement?
This is a shock? Sycophant of epic proportions makes millions, film at 11!
Not only is she one of, if not the best, sycophant of all time, but she was one of the 1st in the modern media era. I guess she deserves all of the sales she makes, even posthumous.
You're surprised? Say what you want, but the woman came up with an interesting story hook and was good enough with words to avoid trampling it entirely into the dirt, though she certainly tried her best with her little speech at the end. It might not be great writing, but it's an interesting idea, all philosophy aside. Bad writers can still move paper - hell, get to the fifth or sixth book of The Wheel of Time and tell me that it deserved to be on the bestseller list. I mean, TWILIGHT FFS - it's a book about Elton John stalking an adolescent Michelle Ryan and it made more money in a year than you will quite probably make in your entire life unless you are a very wealthy man (in which case I should probably speak to you privately about how gratifying the act of donating to your local annoying nerd can be).
Yes sucking the cock of people in power is an interesting idea. No, no, wait, it's a really old idea. Nope not interesting, sorry.
The only thing interesting was her vigor at it.
Wait, was Jason talking about actual sales, or the 400,000 copies a year that the Ayn Rand institute sends to advance placement classes?
The article does discuss a bit how an awful lot of conservative and GOP Rand cultists didn't give it up as their way to define life after college.
I'm sorry, is this equal time for cults here? You also won't find much in defense of Scientologists or LaRoucheites.How many earnest and unqualified Objectivist defenses will you find in Qt3's archives?
Posting Permissions