10 Resons Ayn Rand was Dead Wrong.

I thought this was interesting.

I personally agree with this article.

I love how one of his reasons for her being wrong is that she was an "emotinal nutcase"... many philosphers would be classified the exact same...

This article isn't worth reading...

Good for you?

I think individuality is paramount. The individual doesn't exist in the mind of many progressives. This is why I like Ayn Rand.

TheAmazingAtheist said it best

"Ayn Rand was the biggest C*** in the universe."

Good for you?

I think individuality is paramount.

airshocker

The individual doesn't exist in the mind of many progressives.

airshocker

This is why I like Ayn Rand.

airshocker

Cool ... what? O... kay..?xaos

Yes, it is cool. What...? Okay.

I like how in Atlas Shrugged, the main character has a train ignore an emergency light and just go on ahead, and this doesn't result in a train accident. Later, socialist politician does more or less the exact same thing, except it results in everyone dying (and the author is sure to reminds us that they all deserved it).PannicAtack

Because Dagny Taggart is awesome and socialist politicians are not. Simple. :)

[QUOTE="PannicAtack"]I like how in Atlas Shrugged, the main character has a train ignore an emergency light and just go on ahead, and this doesn't result in a train accident. Later, socialist politician does more or less the exact same thing, except it results in everyone dying (and the author is sure to reminds us that they all deserved it).airshocker

Because Dagny Taggart is awesome and socialist politicians are not. Simple. :)

[QUOTE="airshocker"]

The individual doesn't exist in the mind of many progressives.

xaos

Indeed. What are you talking about airshocker?

If that's the reasoning, it explains why objectivists are terrible writers.PannicAtack

I still need to finish the book. I'm halfway through, but I lost interest at how long-winded some of the parts are. And I keep getting this urge to strangle Taggart and Rearden's brothers.

Indeed. What are you talking about airshocker?

chessmaster1989

Let me rephrase, only some individuals matter in the mind of progressives. The people they want to help and themselves.

Everyone else is just there to pay taxes. That's how it feels to me, at least.

I'm halfway through, but I lost interest at how long-winded some of the parts are. And I keep getting this urge to strangle Taggart and Rearden's brothers.

airshocker

I guess the author of the article was looking for something easy to write. Then you're going to LOVE the next half. SeraphimGoddess

Maybe I'll just play BioShock instead. :P

6 is the only point I actually liked. It always bugged me that he's supposed to be protrayed as a great architect when the basis of his work is complete ignorance of the main principle of architecture.

[QUOTE="chessmaster1989"]

Indeed. What are you talking about airshocker?

airshocker

Let me rephrase, only some individuals matter in the mind of progressives. The people they want to help and themselves.

Everyone else is just there to pay taxes. That's how it feels to me, at least.

There's people who need help and people who don't. It would be kinda weird if someone eagerly wanted to help people who need no help, no?

The article was a load of bull, but I'm not particularly a fan of Rand. While I admire some of what she has to say, a lot of it is dogmatic drivel based upon stereotypes, and her vitriol towards religion, altruism (namely the voluntary type) and promotion of self satisfaction as the only objective moral virtue simply are unsupportable in my eyes.

There's people who need help and people who don't. It would be kinda weird if someone eagerly wanted to help people who need no help, no?

GabuEx

So you help them through charity and leave me alone. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

I love how one of his reasons for her being wrong is that she was an "emotinal nutcase"... many philosphers would be classified the exact same...

This article isn't worth reading...

heysharpshooter

I think the point was more that she was an emotional nutcase despite her own philosophy's focus on reason and rational thought. If you regularly fail to follow your own belief system, that kinda undermines that system's credibility.

That said, it was decidedly a terrible article.

I thought it was funny how the people in the comments proved him wrong on some of the points and he had nothing to say.

btw didn't thnk anyone else look at the articles on the top

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]

There's people who need help and people who don't. It would be kinda weird if someone eagerly wanted to help people who need no help, no?

airshocker

So you help them through charity and leave me alone. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Charity iherently lacks the stability that government programs provide.

Not that charity doesn't have its place, but I don't think it's a substitute for government assistance.

Charity iherently lacks the stability that government programs provide.

Not that charity doesn't have its place, but I don't think it's a substitute for government assistance.

GreySeal9

I don't agree with forcing people to pay for government assistance of any kind.

What's right and fair is to allow the individual to decide if they want to help other people or not.

Probably the shallowest and most worthless critique of any philosophy or intellectual idea that I have ever read. Waste of time.

Not a good article, but Rand is painful-to-read tripe. Objectivism in general can shove it.

Does it matter if Ayn Rand is wrong? Not really.

Good for you?

I think individuality is paramount. The individual doesn't exist in the mind of many progressives. This is why I like Ayn Rand.

airshocker

Life is balance, individuality is nothing without a respect for the communal spirit. Soren Kierkegaard wrote that, "Each age has its depravity. Ours is...a dissolute pantheistic contempt for individual man," I don't think that's really a problem anymore. Today individuality has been taken to the opposite extreme, to the point where it's practically a cult and its benefits are regarded to be self-evident. If there is a theme of pulling away from individuality within progressivism it's not because progressives hate individuality, it's because society has embraced individuality so much as to detract from the benefits of communal action. In a play on Kierkegaard's phrase, the depravity of our age is a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the community. It isn't that the individual doesn't exist, more that the individual exists as part of the community.

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]

There's people who need help and people who don't. It would be kinda weird if someone eagerly wanted to help people who need no help, no?

airshocker

So you help them through charity and leave me alone. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

I think a basic dissection of that phrase alone brings to light the true motivations of such a philosophy, people can only be helped through charity. In other words, we don't want to actively empower people to change their position in life. On the contrary, we want them to be in an inferior position, we want them to be allotted only what we (as the financial elite) deem them worthy of having, charity.

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]

There's people who need help and people who don't. It would be kinda weird if someone eagerly wanted to help people who need no help, no?

airshocker

So you help them through charity and leave me alone. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

If charity were sufficient to help everyone who needs help, there would have been no impetus to create government programs.

There will always be things that the government does with tax money that people don't want it to do. Even if the government were as minimalist as some libertarians want it to be, that would still be the case. If the government effectively gave every single taxpayer a veto on how tax money should be spent, then we would have no government.

Democracy, *****es: majority rules. :P

I'm not a Randian myself, but I can't agree with most of the article's points. Yes, the world she described was utopian, but so were the societies of Plato, Augustine Hobbes, Kant, and Marx. That's not to say that those philosophies don't make valid points about human nature in constructing their utopias. For this same reason his second point doesn't hold much weight either. Yes, people have powerful emotions, but that's not to say we can't strive to allow our reason to subordinate them. And that's certainly not a notion that's unique to Ayn Rand; that goes back to the Stoics and earlier. His fifth point I don't really buy. Measuring something doesn't change its nature- it just changes how we quantify it socially. The names and measure are socially constructed; the nature...not necessarily. fidosim

I also have a distaste for the use if utopianism as a slanderous phrase, but I think it holds some validity here. All utopians are at least partially guilty of ignoring practical prblems of actually creating their utopias, but one thing that at least ties them together is that they have positivist ideas of getting to their utopia. Rand's utopianism takes a decidedly deterministic turn, just let everyone act according to their own self-interest and the world will turn into a utopia. Most utopianists before her at least had some ideas of a transformation into an utopia, Marx was very cognizant of the fact that he could not just snap his fingers and make his utopia come to life. Marx believed in a social process, in an evolution that would take decades if not longer. In fact, I believe the endgame, if you will, was very much in line in many respects with what Rand wanted. The difference was that Marx believed that we could one day achieve a state that would be devoid of government intrusion on everyday life and also from other forms of intrusion such as economic intrusion, he just recognized that it would take a long and slow process to get there. Rand, however, believed that you could just abolish any government influence at all and self-interest would automatically serve the common good, a level of utopian idealism distinct from other utopianists.

As for making valid points about human nautre, I don't find her point to be either a unique viewpoint or a particulalrly relevant one. For one, Thomas Hobbes basically made the exact same point decades before she did, like most of her writings she's just taking other people's work and re-publishing it in her own rhetorical style to make herself look like a legitimate philosopher. Building on this, as G.W.F. Hegel said all of history is a progression. Unless society had truly lost sight of the fact that humans are fallible beings, and I really don't think it ever has, there is no need to raise such a dissection of human nature to such a level. In fact, I think that for most of modern history we have accepted the fallibility of humans and simply been looking for ways to mitigate it, to improvesociet as a whole. I don't think there have been many drastic changes in that reagrd, either. I think for the most part positivism has been fighting a mostly losing war of attrition, and I don't think that her crusade against postivism grants any unique insight to the collective unconscious.

Life is balance. Speaking as you do reveals your outlook on life, wanting reason to subjugate feeling, and in general it's not a great way to approahc things. Subjugation of either reason or emotion by the other gives undue influence to the one that reigns supreme. The real goal should be balance, trying to allow reason and emotion to compliment each other as best as one can. Finding the correct balance is a difficult task, but attempting to subjugate one or the other completely subverts this task.

His fifth point is a near universal, if you can disprove it then you've made the discovery of a lifetime. How we perceiver reality shapes what reality means to us, no individual has the exact same outlook on life among the almost seven billion of us that are alive right now and the billions that have lived before us. To call these things objective like Rand does is for one completely unfounded, and two completely ignorant of the intracacies of human perspective.

Didn't like that article, tbh. Sounds like some first year college philosophy student.F1_2004

My only critique of it would be that it's overly simplistic, but I don't disagree with anything he's saying on a fundamental level.

I feel like posting this video here since it involve Ayn Rand. :P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkAXSwd2A5Q

I feel like posting this video here since it involve Ayn Rand. :P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkAXSwd2A5Q

timmy00

That video was pretty great. That one part where he says he went off on a tangent, I dunno if he knows this or not but the philosopher ehose sentiments he was echoing was John Stuart Mill's from a piece called On Liberty, I've read the first couple of chapters and so far I think it's a brilliant work.

Probably the shallowest and most worthless critique of any philosophy or intellectual idea that I have ever read. Waste of time.

-Red-Cell-

If charity were sufficient to help everyone who needs help, there would have been no impetus to create government programs.

There will always be things that the government does with tax money that people don't want it to do. Even if the government were as minimalist as some libertarians want it to be, that would still be the case. If the government effectively gave every single taxpayer a veto on how tax money should be spent, then we would have no government.

Democracy, *****es: majority rules. :P

GabuEx

I think there's a point where the government is going overboard in regards to helping people. I think, at least in New York, we're past that point. There's a reasonable amount someone should be taxed in order to help other people. Obviously I would rather be taxed nothing at all, but I don't see that happening. Right now I think we take care of people way too much, and we pay an awful lot of money for it. I'm not okay with keeping things at the status quo.

I think a basic dissection of that phrase alone brings to light the true motivations of such a philosophy, people can only be helped through charity. In other words, we don't want to actively empower people to change their position in life. On the contrary, we want them to be in an inferior position, we want them to be allotted only what we (as the financial elite) deem them worthy of having, charity.

theone86

You can think that if you want. I'd very much like people to change. The less I have to pay for the more I have to spend on my family.

There are certainly many valid reasons to disagree with ayn rand, but this guy's "reasons" are garbage.

I find it amazing that anyone takes Ayn Rand seriously. Just about everything she believed is either demonstrably wrong or not supported by any evidence whatsoever, yet armchair economists treat her books like religious texts.

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]

If charity were sufficient to help everyone who needs help, there would have been no impetus to create government programs.

There will always be things that the government does with tax money that people don't want it to do. Even if the government were as minimalist as some libertarians want it to be, that would still be the case. If the government effectively gave every single taxpayer a veto on how tax money should be spent, then we would have no government.

Democracy, *****es: majority rules. :P

airshocker

I think there's a point where the government is going overboard in regards to helping people. I think, at least in New York, we're past that point. There's a reasonable amount someone should be taxed in order to help other people. Obviously I would rather be taxed nothing at all, but I don't see that happening. Right now I think we take care of people way too much, and we pay an awful lot of money for it. I'm not okay with keeping things at the status quo.

The problem with this notion is the fact it defeats the entire purpose of social contract theory... These programs are a net to keep the society overall stable.. If we are going to go down the path of not in my backyard mentality, meaning that things that don't directly benefit you.. That you shouldn't pay for.. The society would cease to function.. Because you will have countless people declare they will not pay for taxes because they don't see the benefit from them, INCLUDING National defense.. This would lead to a completely ineffective government in being able to keep together the most basic programs..

See the thing is people have been living with these programs all their life.. So they take forgranted most of it and complain about taxes.. So we see this back lash of people who think they shouldn't have to pay for the majority taxes.. AKA Ron Paul.. Who made ridiculous notion that people should be able to op out of all government services except for defense fora flat tax of 10%.. Ok lets try to understand this.. We all drive roads that have been paid for by the local, state and federal governments.. We go to super markets and buy food with full confidence that the said food is infact safe due to federal services policing it.. We go resturantes in confidence that the health code is being followed..

See the thing is these programs are not really chairty.. They are there to stabilize and improve the life of a person up that will become more productive to the economy, to give them a chance.. Now some people are obviously abusing it, but that is not logical for destroying it.. Furthermore those programs there for you as well, that if some how you hit bad luck and are fired or laid off.. You get unemployment payment while looking jobs.. That sounds awfully kind of like national security wouldn't think? Of a what if event happening that leads to a program that saves you..

I don't know why people even talk about Ayn Rand. She was just a crazy b**** who never put out anything worth paying attention too. If people followed her "wisdom" the world would be a pretty f***ed up place.

:lol:, okay. Geoffrey James is still a douche, though.:P