Ayn Rand Christmas Cards

kaz said:
If she's "boring" then why did you bother to say address it?
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Same reason I try to explain to you why guns galore means much death - I like Americans and hate to see them behaving like ignorant, half-witted fools.
 
christiefan915 said:
You know nothing about the Catholic church or Christianity and your hate posts prove it.

How about firing up your sad little neurons and actually discussing Catholic dogma v. objectivism?

You've been reduced to shooting the messenger. Pitiful.
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When the messenger deserves to be shot like a rabid dog I see no point in delaying the inevitable.

My point is you have proven you are an un-evolved thinks who relies on feels rather than objective thought. You surround your self with other like minded mental midgets like Rancid to make yourself feel better
 
iolo said:
Same reason I try to explain to you why guns galore means much death - I like Americans and hate to see them behaving like ignorant, half-witted fools.
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What's ignorant and half-witted is your idiotic view that doing nothing about criminals with guns while keeping them away from everyone else makes the situation better
 
kaz said:
Gotcha, you want a philosopher to explain why socialism is right, not why it's wrong...
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No. I want a philosopher who, if when preaching about objectivity, actually knew what it means. A philosopher can rationalize and reason in infinite detail why my ham sandwich doesn't exist. You want objectivity? Talk to Newton or Einstein or Feynman. They knew objectivity. Rand didn't have a clue about it. She was not even remotely in their league. A complete neophyte on the subject.
 
kaz said:
I have to agree with you on that one
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What is it about Russian writers? They seem to have a penchant for "Why say in three words what can be said in three hundred?".

I'm not just picking on Rand either. All the Russian writers I've read are like that. Excepting maybe Dostoyevsky but Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Rand and Nabokov were all gas bags. I mean don't get me wrong. They are obviously great writers. Solzhenitsyn did more than any writer to undermine the Soviet Empire and expose it for what it was and though he wasn't nearly as god awful bad as Rand at belaboring a point to death he was also a seriously long winded gas bag too.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
No. I want a philosopher who, if when preaching about objectivity, actually knew what it means. A philosopher can rationalize and reason in infinite detail why my ham sandwich doesn't exist. You want objectivity? Talk to Newton or Einstein or Feynman. They knew objectivity. Rand didn't have a clue about it. She was not even remotely in their league. A complete neophyte on the subject.
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Yet somehow her point was clear
 
Mott the Hoople said:
What is it about Russian writers? They seem to have a penchant for "Why say in three words what can be said in three hundred?".

I'm not just picking on Rand either. All the Russian writers I've read are like that. Excepting maybe Dostoyevsky but Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Rand and Nabokov were all gas bags. I mean don't get me wrong. They are obviously great writers. Solzhenitsyn did more than any writer to undermine the Soviet Empire and expose it for what it was and though he wasn't nearly as god awful bad as Rand at belaboring a point to death he was also a seriously long winded gas bag too.
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I agree, and I do as you do skip over those parts when I re-read the books. I like the story, but I definitely know what you mean when you call the diversions "lectures." And yes, Tolstoy and other Russians did that as well
 
Mott the Hoople said:
No. I want a philosopher who, if when preaching about objectivity, actually knew what it means. A philosopher can rationalize and reason in infinite detail why my ham sandwich doesn't exist. You want objectivity? Talk to Newton or Einstein or Feynman. They knew objectivity. Rand didn't have a clue about it. She was not even remotely in their league. A complete neophyte on the subject.
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She is credited with developing a philisophical system, that's a league of her own. The dismissivness of her philisophical genius is what's neophyte. You may disagree with her conclusions, but that is due to your own bias against her worldview in preference of your own. Her application of objectivism to capitalism is actually quite a logical marriage, as going back to Aristotle we understand the idea of a closed system of self interest, and see this reference was her framework.
 
J Craft said:
People typically justify or choose to be ignorant of their personal selfishness.

Rands emphasis was on selfish outcomes as applied to capitalism. Capitalism that has appropriate checks and balances, where free enterprise allows for ones work to lift them up, is selfishness at work for good of the individual, and what ultimately is good for civilization.
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I'd like to see where the checks and balances were in Rand's writing as she was a serious advocate of lassiez-faire capitalism.

I'm sorry but there are far better philosophical proponents of market economies than Rand and her god awful bad novels (and I mean that from a literary stand point) and her faux objectivity. John Stuart Mills blows Rand out of the water and is a vastly more important influence than Rand. So is Adam Smith. Both of whom go into great detail about the intersection of economics and ethics/morality. Concepts that Rand disparages as altruistic cannibalism. Want to read a far superior refutation of communism/socialism? Read Scholzenitsyn. He accomplished more in 60 pages (One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich) than Rand did in 600 pages (which is a big reason why I'm a harsh critic of her novels. From a literary standpoint they are horribly written).

The only way I would read Atlas Shrugged again is if I were sentenced to a lengthy prison term and had a lot of time to kill. I'd rather memorize Gray's Anatomy.
 
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J Craft said:
She is credited with developing a philisophical system, that's a league of her own. The dismissivness of her philisophical genius is what's neophyte. You may disagree with her conclusions, but that is due to your own bias against her worldview in preference of your own. Her application of objectivism to capitalism is actually quite a logical marriage, as going back to Aristotle we understand the idea of a closed system of self interest, and see this reference was her framework.
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Except it isn't objective. Rand's work as popular fiction....and that's what it is...have a small but very devoted audience. As serious philosophy she's at best a minor influence. She is not held seriously in academia, government, by professional economist or Wall Street. She's the Gordon Gecko of philosophy.
 
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Mott the Hoople said:
Except it isn't objective. Rand's work as popular fiction....and that's what it is...have a small but very devoted audience. As serious philosophy she's at best a minor influence. She is not held seriously in academia, government, by professional economist or Wall Street. She's the Gordon Gecko of philosophy.
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Well, the elitist snobs write her off, so that's it then...
 
kaz said:
Yet somehow her point was clear
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WELL THEN WHY DID SHE HAVE TO REPEAT IT 10,000 TIMES?

Look, I'm not inimical towards Rand. Just objective. She does make some valid philosophical points. She also makes ones that don't hold water. On top of that, her novels, as literature, are just atrociously bad. My main criticism is how she belabors a point over and over and over, then beats it to death, wrings it dry of any fluids, beats it some more, strangles it for good measure, stomps on it a few times and then belabors it some more just to make sure. This is after you've gotten her point after the first paragraph.

To me that indicates she was either not clear to herself with her own thoughts (unlikely) or did not respect the intelligence of her audience (probably the case). Either way it really made for some tedious reading.

But if you want me to say something nice. She's fucking light years better than reading Thomas Hardy!!
 
kaz said:
Well, the elitist snobs write her off, so that's it then...
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Oh please. There was no greater elitist snob on the planet than Ayn Rand. Foist that sort of anti-intellectual nonsense on someone else. Are you trying to tell me that Rand was some sort of Proletariat champion of the masses? If so you picked an odd champion as Rand would have said "Fuck the masses!".
 
Mott the Hoople said:
WELL THEN WHY DID SHE HAVE TO REPEAT IT 10,000 TIMES?

Look, I'm not inimical towards Rand. Just objective. She does make some valid philosophical points. She also makes ones that don't hold water. On top of that, her novels, as literature, are just atrociously bad. My main criticism is how she belabors a point over and over and over, then beats it to death, wrings it dry of any fluids, beats it some more, strangles it for good measure, stomps on it a few times and then belabors it some more just to make sure. This is after you've gotten her point after the first paragraph.

To me that indicates she was either not clear to herself with her own thoughts (unlikely) or did not respect the intelligence of her audience (probably the case). Either way it really made for some tedious reading.

But if you want me to say something nice. She's fucking light years better than reading Thomas Hardy!!
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LOL. BTW, I like other Russian authors as well. Particularly Dostoevsky. But I agree with your point on Russian authors. That isn't why I like them, but I like them anyway. I thought Kafka was more painful to read. Not for the same reason
 
kaz said:
LOL. BTW, I like other Russian authors as well. Particularly Dostoevsky. But I agree with your point on Russian authors. That isn't why I like them, but I like them anyway. I thought Kafka was more painful to read. Not for the same reason
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Oh I like Dostoevsky's short stories. I'm sure they would be immeasurably better if I could read them in Russian. I really enjoyed "The Gulag Archipelago". That's a great read. That dude had serious balls to write and publish that when he did. If the Kremlin had discovered that book before he smuggled it out to the west they would have shot his ass.
 
I Love America said:
When the messenger deserves to be shot like a rabid dog I see no point in delaying the inevitable.

My point is you have proven you are an un-evolved thinks who relies on feels rather than objective thought. You surround your self with other like minded mental midgets like Rancid to make yourself feel better
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Yeah and you're so evolved you dismiss every race and nationality different from you.
 
kaz said:
Ayn Rand and you have one thing in common, neither of you do charity with your own money. In the end that makes you the same.
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Are you brain damaged? You have no clue whatsoever about my charitable contributions yet you're arrogant enough to type the above.
 
kaz said:
That may be true or not, but since you repeatedly demonstrate you don't grasp what Ayn Rand believed, you're not qualified to make any determination on the subject. You don't understand the basic point of what she means by selfishness, you still think it's bad. When you do grasp what she said, then a real discussion can begin
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This is the type of thing selfish people who like being selfish say about Rand, she justifies being selfish and says it is good, Rand makes them feel better about their selfishness.
 
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