Ronin

Well, she did have Merle Oberon's eyes and this great line ~ "The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see."

Of course, even a Raelian could use that one...objectively speaking.

Gurdur

:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy

I also disliked intensely the same social snobbery found again in Ngaio Marsh and whatnot; Lord Peter Wimsy (or whatever his name was) is to vomit, big-time.

fando

Wow, so much vitriol...

Before I dig in, I'd like to comment on one thing:

Emphasis mine. This sounds a lot like what Descartes said when he tried to marry static materialism and the existence of God (really, an effort to legitimize idealism). Specifically, he said,

Thus, if several people agree that God exists because they can 'feel' him or whatever, then he exists. The same conclusion is arrived at with 99Percent's criteria: several people merely need to agree that the existence of God is a fact that is true by experience (they 'feel' his presence or something). Since I deny that this makes any sense, I must be an "intellectual copout." That's kind of insulting, really.

RED DAVE

Just found, online, Rand's Screen Guide for Americans . This piece of McCarthyite/Cold War memorabilia shows that:

a) she was incapable of evaluating a social situation: she believed or said she believed in the myth of Communist domination of Hollywood and she helped to perpetuate it;

b) she was, contrary to the claims of her cranky philosophy, an authoritarian.

This great lover of freedom testified in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, perhaps the most totalitarian governmental organization in American society in the Forties and Fifties. Government repression, government intrusion in our lives, the Big Lie and other totalitarian tactics were fine with Rand so long as her side did it.

I know that she includes a chapter on racism in her book For the New Intellectual . But what is extraordinary is that she attributes racism to collectivism! The historic fact is that modern racism was born with capitalism and capitalism's world crime, slavery. During the 19th Century, which Rand loves so much, racism was epidemic in American society. We had to fight a major war to get rid of its parent and product, slavery. That war was not initiated by Libertarians.

Rand attributes the cause of racism to its enemy: "collectivists." Whatever the crimes of Russia with regard to racism, in the United States Communists and Socialists were among the strongest enemies of racism. W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and A. Philip Randolph were all socialists.

The Objectivists took no part in the Civil Rights movement. Rand herself condemned it: I heard her do it at NYU in the early Sixties. One of the fallacies of Libertarianism, Objectivism, etc., it the refusal to look at the empirical consequences of their beliefs: the perpetuation of all the ills of capitalism: war, racism, exploitation and repression.

RED DAVE

Screen Guide for Americans

Ayn Rand before HUAC

FloatingEgg

I guess I have some reading to do, but it is always unfortunate to find out after I've read and enjoyed something that it's been utter crap

tk

Regardless, perception plays an important role in the pursuit of truth. I think the key lies in ascertaining whether the entity that one perceives is indeed God Almighty Himself, or whether it's in fact one's own back orifice. That's the hard part...

jayh

Well it's not quite that bad. Her books have remained popular, and many people have started there and gone on to more finessed models. The problem is confusing the person with the ideas. Some of her concepts including atheism were good, just as a person she did not seem to live up to them. Enjoy the books with an open eye.

If we judged all works by the personal lives of the authors, there would not be much left.

jay

Hugo Holbling

What really is an "intellectual copout" is when someone works up enough bluster to spout such nonsense without making the effort to study the philosophy they so blithely disregard, and then criticize others for not giving Rand a fair chance. How can i know you haven't made said effort? No, it's not because i can recognize Absolute Truth when i see it (like "anyone"); instead, it's because anyone with an inkling of the on-going antifoundationalist project in modern epistemology would not be so quick to dismiss Sellars, Davidson, Quine, Wittgenstein, Rorty, Putnam, Kuhn, Eagleton, Fish and Derrida, to name but a few. Perhaps you could spare a few moments to write a paper explaining where these philosophers went wrong? I'm sure they'd appreciate it, and the rest of us unenlightened folk will be glad to learn the Absolute Truth from Its latest prophet. Unfortunately i can't say how those philosophers will take to their efforts being called "intellectual copouts", but i'm sure there's an objective (oops! I mean Objective!) reason for it.

:banghead:

99Percent

This is simply an argumentum ad populum. It proves nothing.

99Percent

This really goes into philosophy but I will it give it a try. There are two types of existence: those of concrete objects and those of concepts that are used to categorize knowledge. God cannot possibly be a concrete object by definition so its actual perception cannot be merely asserted because a group of people feel it. Concrete objects such as Antartica, the moon, ultraviolet rays, etc must be confirmable by everyone. This is concrete reality.

Then we have concepts which are certainly objective even though they don't actually exist concretely. These are useful to categorize and comunicate knowledge. For example a car, a tree, a cat are concepts. Concepts can also be derived even though they don't exist in reality such as the number 10, a circle, democracy or even objective morality, etc. God cannot be a concept either because its defined in contradictory terms.