Ayn Rand, I know most of you dont like her but I wanna her thoughts

I have one simple expression for her, btw I learned about her in philosophy and "objectivism" nearly made me :puke:
I couldnt stand it honestly, it was so selfish and stuff. Apparently theres a fair amount of Libertarians in my class too, now the kinda funny thing is this kid who had his friend come in and sing about the evils of capitalism and such and promote socialism seemed to be ok with some of her stuff although he seemed cool with socialism. :shrug: I didnt enjoy Rand in the slightest bit, in fact my quiz on her today could be a reason why I stayed home, other than the stomach and butt problems and bleeding mouth those were most important but I didnt like Rand. I really wanna know what you guys think of her. :puke: on Rand.

What a horrible book. I don't like Ayn Rand, based on what I've read of hers and visiting her "website". The whole philosophy is just... eh, not very appealing to me. :puke:

I mean, I'd actually like to read a few more Rand books to form an opinion... but there's so many other books I'd choose to read before I read her books again.

Period. It simply doesn't appeal to me and I've tried to care too.

It's just... I can't even explain it... I feel the same way.

My English teacher in 7th grade says the Fountainhead is his favorite book... Well if it's written anything like her other books, I would probably hate it!

We saw an old interview with her on Donahue, and I didnt like what I heard and all, oh and this is gonna make some people especially the ladies here :puke: she said she couldnt vote for a woman president simply because she thought a woman wasnt fit, well Ayn I bet with your ego you would run and vote for yourself.

Most people who disagree with her have an immediate, emotional reaction against her philosophy. However, when they express that loathing, the Objectivist's quick comeback is that the person is not thinking but merely feeling -- which is an invalid ground for logical thought. The point they will make is that, if you're devoted to truth, you will unemotionally follow rational thought all the way to its logical conclusion and adopt that conclusion as true, even if your emotions or societal conventions try to sway you otherwise.

In fact, her own novels generally offer the "bad guys" reacting in just the same way. The hero offers a perfectly logical, unassailable argument for Rand's philosophy, and the best the opponent can do is sputter something like "Why, it's just...just wrong! Everybody thinks so!"

And her followers are quick to point to this emotional reaction as further "proof" that her philosophy is logically-certain, and that her opponent's reliance on emotion merely proves that they themselves, as a group, are ignoble beings unable or unwilling to think.

To defeat Rand's supporters, you have to engage them on their own turf. Since she claims to offer a complete philosophy, begin with her epistomology (how humans determine truth on how the world works from their sensory impressions -- in short, how certain one can be of one's view of the world), and show just how weak it is, barely amounting to more than a hardly-"objective" assertion of "this is how I see the world, and thus this is how it is." Comment on how Rand herself wrote on how epistomology is all-important, and a philosophy without a solid one is doomed to collapse; then point out that, after many years, she abandoned her long-promised volume on epistomology that was to cement the whole of Objectivist thought.

Then move on to her ethical basis, as detailed in For the New Intellectual (or, as I like to call it, For the Non-Intellectual) and The Virtue of Selfishness. Point out how virtually her entire ethical philosophy is based on Aristotle's definition of humans as "rational animals," and how she then takes the word "rational" and basically, without logical support, simply re-defines that word to include all her concepts and pre-conceived notions.

You might also want to point out her technique of primarily using novels to promote her philosophy is intellectually lazy. It's an easy way out, because one can simply twist the world of the novel into "proving" whatever world-view one wants to assert. One could write a Marxist novel which "proved" that Communism is the only correct philosophy and just political system. One could write a pro-Nazi novel promoting that agenda. (And, as anyone who has heard of Tim LaHaye knows, one can write a fundamentalist Christian novel showing that the world is on the brink of the Second Coming, and that an archetypal liberal humanitarian is the Antichrist.) But the fact that one can fit one's pet world-view into a novel doesn't mean that the world portrayed there, although internally consistent, has any relationship to the real world and how things really work.

:puke:

My first major college relationship ended when the young lady decided to share some of the books of her idol with me.

Obviously, I'm not a likely candidate to be a convert to either her philosophy or her politics. But I didn't even need to get to them...my immediate reaction, from literally the first page of We The Living was "this is absolutely the worst writer I've ever read!" Think a third- or fourth-rate romance novelist posing as an intellectual heavyweight.

:eyes:

We saw the Fountainhead in school Maggie though. Yea :puke: I agree. I always thought it was pronounced Ann Rand you know like regular Ann, damn I got a happen of misprouncing stuff as of late. I can pronounce your name, I promise :D being I gots a cousin with the same time.

Really?! I didn't know that, I feel stupid!

...when she emigrated from the U.S.S.R., she changed her name. "Rand" was chosen because that was the brand of typewriter she used. I don't know where the "Ayn" came from, but she meant for it to be pronounced "eye-in."

:shrug: that sounds Jewish to me.

...although she declared herself to be an atheist as a teenager, because (and here comes a classic example of her circular reasoning) the notion of "god" implies that there is a superior state of existence that humans cannot achieve. However, since she had already decided that there was nothing the human guided by rational thought couldn't achieve, the notion of "god" must be untrue; furthermore, since it taught people that they themselves couldn't achieve this ultimate state of existence, said notion of "god" was evil, and belief in "god" was therefore immoral.

(All of which, of course, is completely irrelevant to the question of whether a god actually exists...it's more like the joke about Nietzsche, that he couldn't abide for there to be a god because that would mean that he himself wasn't it.)

What was her upbringing? You seem to know a lot. You know its funny she talked a lot about immorality but wouldnt an athiest be against no universal morality.

Her parents were well-to-do Russian landowners who lost everything in the Revolution, forcing them to emigrate; her so-called "philosophy" is nothing more than a visceral and psychotic-level reaction to everything Communism claims to stand for, throwing things like the brotherhood of man and cooperative effort out the window because she associated them with the excesses of the Bolsheviks.

Good place to start looking for serious info to counter the Rand-bots:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Philosophy/Current_Movements/Objectivism/Opposing_Views/

:hi: Maggie I know youre sleeping now, but dont sweat it, I felt the same way but I can pronouce your name :D but I found out when I met Zack that I had been pronouncing LaRouche wrong too, so dont feel stupid when your buddy Kleeb is 3X as stupid and didnt get invited to a kickass conference.

God that movie was hilarious!

I always laughed at the Freudian image of Cooper and his big pulsating drill, down in the quarry, making Patricia Neal all hot and frustrated.

While I cannot stand Rand, I love sitting with friends and laughing at that movie.

:puke: is right.

We all laughed at the whipping scene when she whipped him.

And Neal throwing the statue away!

And the big finale ending, with Neal's character rising up , up the phallic symbol of the building to be reunited with her Alpha male.

Geez-they could not find a better movie to show kids than that crap?

Hilarious.

If knowledge serves me right that was the only movie on Rand they had. We are finished with that unit I think though, and I havent a clue what we are doing next. It was pretty funny to see that Peter Keating guy being forced in to confession and tears by Oswald I think the archiacture critic's name was.

Oooops! I had a JC Professor give us a test based on Dianetics (L. Ron Hubbard....Scientologists)....

I would question that...

But I think if they are reading a book by Rand then it could be sort of classified as research of background and biography on the author...

We never had to read a book by Ayn Rand for school, except for Anthem for extra credit in 9th grade.

We've done Socrates and Nietzeche as well. I wanna do Comrade Marx :( maybe I should bring my copy of the manifesto in.

I was going to say- if this was for English I'd have a qualm about that cirriculum.

...I still have a qualm about it. Socrates (who never wrote a thing in his life), Neitzsche (a certifiable nutcase), and Ayn Rand? Even assuming that by "Socrates" you meant Plato's dialogs, that's still a pretty bad curriculum.

I tried reading "Battlefield Earth" in 1987.


Could not go on. Even on vacation, it was too much. Guess I am lucky, now I might have to watch the movie in school.

I havent had the "pleasure".

he just liked it for the sci/fi angle, he was Catholic and not into Dianetics.

But, god, the book had , like, 3,000 pages or something. Nightmare.

It made Dune seem easy to follow (and Dune I like).

He made me promise to read it, and I tried, really. But at page 1,200 I had to stop. It was cutting into me and my then-boyfriend's vacation.

But it seemed like a million pages. Tedious books always do.

The book seemed to be four inches thick. I had the paperback.

When the movie came out, I told my now BF-THAT'S the horrible book I tried to read years ago.

...One of her disciples from the "institute" was on Hannity & Colmes last year and the motherfucker was such a racist hateful bastard that he made Hannity look reasonable by comparison. :scared:

We read his response to the 9/11 attacks oh my god :puke:

but not too much of Rand. To tell the truth, I got bored in the middle of "Atlas Shrugged" :shrug: and never finished reading it. I do know that some friends are ardent supporters of objectivism and Rand. I cannot get too excited about it as it seems so irrelevant to today's pressing crisis of Bush in office.

horrible, boring, overdone writing style, and apparently she thinks the Ken Lays of the world either don't exist, or are the pinnacle of human greatness :puke:

Right in the center of the novel.

Fucking awful.

I think I found my toilet paper :D.

in the "Illuminatus! Trilogy"...one of the characters is a nutty author named "Atlanta Hope", author of a book called "Telemachus Sneezed", featuring a character named "John Guilt" who gives long, interminable speeches on the teachings of the philosopher Heraclitus...still makes me chuckle when I thuink of it. Heh.

wasn't really aware of her philosophy, but as a writer i thought she sucked. 'atlas shrugged' was one of the few books i've tossed aside before i was 1/2 thru.

putui on Ayn Rand

has been taken up as a heroine by the neo-cons for some reason, possibly the mention of money, which puts everyone else off her.

Money was only a symbol in her books tho.

She talked about 'men of the mind'...the innovators, the inventors, the ones with intelligence....who were ripped off by everyone else...and how they, the bright ones, were the ones who actually made society function.

Her work was about them, and the world's shoddy treatment of them.

Not a great writer as a writer....but an interesting philosophy...who wrote about a fictional society in order to make a point.

You could read Anthem...it's a very very short book that hits all the high points.

I saw her as a more hardcore libertarian honestly.

libertarians as middle-class hippies.

Everyone has claimed a chunk of her...feminists, neo-cons, survivalists....She was appalled at all that.

You have to decide for yourself what you think of her.

I dont like what Ive read. I read excerpts and such. Its not like I came in here empty handed but thanks for recommending the book.

But yeah, it did hit every single one of the points of her philosophy-it took me like an hour and a half to read, tops.

I read quickly, I finished Stephen Ambrose's D-Day which is like 800 pages in like a month or so.

But as you can tell from all these well-bred shrieks of horror over her very name....you'll need to make up your own mind. :D

Ok thanks.

;-)

...her philosophy is really the cornerstone of their "thought" (in this, I am defining "neo-cons" to be that part of the right wing that isn't fundie Christian, and that looks down on them while still using them to achieve power). Think about it: under the guise of "rationality," extreme individualism and laissez-faire capitalism as the foundations of morality. Isn't that just about the neo-con ideal in a nutshell? Every man for himself, and Social Darwinism will sort out the winners from the losers.

In fact, most active non-religious conservatives I know are those who became addicted to Rand's fictions in high school or college, and embraced her thought as surely as the fundie embraces the King James Bible.

Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books. Sometimes I do believe we are all motivated by selfish reasons. For example, I donate to different charities because I am giving to those who need it but it also makes me feel good about me, I admit it freely.
I suppose I don't understand how her writing can be interpretted to be for the GOP as some here would write. I find her writing to be equally critical of both sides of the political arena.

pronounced "Ine" as in "supine". I find her writing impenetrable and boring.

But worse, every person i've ever met who admired her was a dick. Without exception. I've never known an objectivist that I found remotely likeable.

From what I've read about her (since I find her own writings unreadable), I find her philosophy horrendous.

The most famous Randian in public life today is Alan Greenspan, who was a literal disciple of Ayn Rand in his younger days. I think he's changed his tune a bit since then.

very interesting I didnt know that.

No shit.

...some of which were reprinted in her anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and possibly some of her other anthologies.

Another devotee in his earlier life was Louis Ruckeyser, the former CNN economics "expert."

http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleid.16149/article_detail.asp

and you can find many more articles about them.

When she was alive, she had a salon of sorts where her accolytes would sit at her feet while she expounded on her theory of the importance of selfishness. Greenspan was one of her best students.

I am happy to say, though, that he has NOT made a career of following her. She became a cult leader of the first order and if you research the Rand Institute, you'll find that there's a whole lot of creepy people who still treat her as a prophet.

Thats interesting.
I am also realizing through out this thread that we may disagree on candiates and such but we agree on one thing that the way Rand promotes is not good.

I'd be surprised if you even noticed the difference in which candidates we support. I think I posted ONCE about your candidate in a factual, yet sympathetic way.

I think you're a great contributor here, and whoever we support for the nomination is irrelevant to that. Let the best man or woman win.

Thanks though. I was just saying despite the fighting that Ive been seeing this is welcome relief, *throws pie at Rand*

I've never argued with you about your candidate other than to point out that his poll numbers don't bode well for him. And that was one post in one thread a while ago.

I've also expressed disagreement with some of his positions, but I don't think it was in response to you.

I was just talking in a general sense basically.

He was a member of her original little circle of disciples, well before she was famous. They had some kind of falling out. Obviously he's moderated his stance since then, but he hasn't disavowed the basic ideas of objectivism or anything; his approach to economics is really quite libertarian.

IIRC Greenspan is in his 60's right.

Greenspan was a member of Rand's "inner circle"...and he's actually in his late 70's.

Funny, but accurate.

my two cents' worth. Ponderous writing style. I would say the number one clue why she is not really an "artist" is that her work is propaganda.

Ugh.

of thermodynamics, which John Galt violates with his silly "invention" in "Atlas Shrugged." (Galt however was the inventor of a great soporific, his 200 page speech. I have insomnia right now and wish I had a copy.)

Pure nonsense, all of it, wrapped up in a rather cheap and sleazy pretense of intellectualism.

If you take it seriously and you're over 25, you probably need to get out more often.

that's the best summation I've ever heard of Rand.

She appeals to college-aged libertarians and assholes over the age of 25.

I think I hate libertarians as much as I do repukes.

Because you know that there are a few "Libertarians" here that probably masturbate to Ayn as well as the Cato Institute...

what're you trying to say?

And probably pointing out things that don't need pointing out:-)

Now I'm more confused than ever. You're the most close-lipped overly-effusive person I've ever known! :)

Because once y'all figure this mind out the World will either explode or become really fuzzy.

That's all I've got...I've got to be at a Charette (Workshop. Oh BTW Charette is NOT pretentious! It's an intensive planning workshop that actually creates long range plans in a citizen generated way. We actually draw out the site plan with the people helping.) at 8:00am and frankly I'm incomprehensible now...

Randoids and thier deceased leader seem to think they have it all figured out. Well they don't.... not at all. Even the most powerful objectivist in the country, Alan Greenspan, had to suck it up a few months ago and admit the market won't regulate itself... AND THAT HE WAS FRIGGING WRONG. Will they Randoids shut up? No.

I called them Randites but Randoids has a nice ring. Christ no one told me Greenspan was one or once one, but hey how many people my age know who he even is or even say oh I know the name when they hear it heh, so yeah it was absolute trash to me to hear what she had to say, I saw part of her interview with Donahue, I bet she would support this war for the oil, she said something like its our oil because we built the rigs and stuff.

and be done with it.

:)

but hey if you were thinking about yourself when you gave them the kool aid I am sure they would be ok with you, after all Rand seemed to think the fact in Fountainhead that Roark blew up a building made him innocent.

Buncha selfish idiots. You are right. If I booted an assholejectivist in the nuts and told him I was doing it out of selfishness he prolly wouldn't care... or would... and would be hypocrite. My self interest whore... don't interfere.

Kick one in the nuts and say hey man I was just acting out of selfishness, they would say carry on or be likely hypocrites. So they probably love the fact we went to war simply for greed.

He would punch me out of his own self-interest. We would be conflicting with each others selfishness. I doubt he wanted to get booted in the sack.

What the Randoids hate is when people organize to fight for thier interests. They hate that. Like a Randoid would generally hate social security, right? If you cannot make enough money... you gotta die while working.

They like one person gaining alot of power, such as a company... they seem to hate many gaining power together.

Ahh it's useless harping on the point. Rand was like a less powerful capitalist version of Stalin.

He would like that :D. What do you think Ayn would say? Damnit I should have asked that, umm what if you kicked Rand and said I was doing it out of self interest would she be cool with it heh. I get your point.

If you kicked an Objectivist out of your self-interest, he would shoot you (Rand's novels asserted the right of an individual to use lethal force to protect their property) out of his own self-interest. Everyone has the right to protect themselves from force, Rand said.

sheesh, I'll never will kick an objectvist out of self interest.

Although she pretty much avoided politics (because nobody there was a pure Objectivist), she did make an exception in 1972, when she made a big point of endorsing Nixon, because McGovern was an "evil collectivist."

Did I mention that she was a "friendly witness" to the 50s-era HUAC investigation into the alleged communist infiltration of Hollywood (the hearings that gave rise to the blacklist)? No surprise there, I'm sure. In her rather-curious testimony, she claimed to have found all sorts of pro-communist propaganda in WWII-era films. (You remember, back when the U.S. and the Soviets were allies against the Nazis?) In particular, she singled out one film where the American hero tells workers at a Soviet farm that "this is good grain." Apparently, that statement was propaganda meant to subliminally convince Americans that communism was more successful than capitalism! Even worse, in that same film, Soviet peasants were shown smiling (impossible, Rand testified, because people living under communism would have no reason to ever smile...so help me, I'm not making this up...).

:crazy:

:eyes:

They make my library seem dirty.

And I will read them, and pass them on if you want. I like to keep my books but in this case... eh.

It's a deal.

...but my cats use a clumping litter.

which is why I HATE her!

Her books are 100% propaganda...praise for unlimited economic freedom (selfish free market Capitalism in other words)...She hates socialism and all forms of government restriction over her "heros" who are the only ones holding society up from collapse.

I personally liked Rand's writing style style in Atlas Shrugged...In fact, I loved the way she described her characters..and how she dealt with the conversations--it seemed very realistic..plenty of details...but bottom line was...her philosophy SUCKS! She has done much damage to the left over the past 50 years and I don't think we can deny it. Everyone should read the book, and know the enemy.

In fact, I loved the way she described her characters..and how she dealt with the conversations--it seemed very realistic..plenty of details...but bottom line was...her philosophy SUCKS!

In actuality, her characters are but cardboard cutouts to illustrate her philosophy. All those who subscribe to Objectivism are strong, brilliant, beautiful, virile, and always have the right words to defend their position. All those who oppose Objectivism are incompetent, unattractive, and even have ridiculous names (Wesley Mouch?).

In fact, I think a lot of her popularity is due to her being discovered by misfit high-schoolers who seem to think that, just as one can supposedly become "like Mike" by wearing Air Jordans, by adopting Rand's philosophy, one can become like one of her heroes, a commanding, charismatic pinnacle of the human race, while all those who don't (like those surrounding them who are unconvinced of their brilliance) will be doomed to be pathetic, ugly mediocrities.

she sucks..
he philosophy sucks..

but I thought she at least expressed (wrote) it well in Atlas Shrugged

and quit. Slowest, most researched and dull thing I have ever read. I don't why anyone likes her, I'd rather read an architect text book.

Oh and the main character was a lifeless cryptic. Sorry, but making someone a silent 'genius' does not make them deep or appealing as a character.