I, Anonymous Oct 18, 2020 at 11:43 am

Comments

1

Sooner or later young white college kids discover Objectivism and are temporarily fascinated by it. Most outgrow it once they realize it's all nonsense. But there's always that "one guy" at a party that still thinks Ayn Rand is some sort of genius.

2

& didn't 'an rand'
become quite the
Welfare Queen? oops!

3

It's true that late in life, after medical bills all but wiped her out, she received Social Security and Medicare. But that hardly makes her a "welfare queen." A hypocrite maybe but that still doesn't quite capture it. It makes her all too human maybe.

5

If this is for real, it is from Gordon Sondland.

6

ayn rand is just another celebrity whose human failings (the existence of which basically invalidate the validity of the extreme attitudes her work espoused) has long been obscured amidst the use of her work to justify and plan right-wing efforts to grasp power.

don’t worship idols. it’s like the american right has literally never paid attention to the actual teachings of christianity.

“what a disingenuous way to piss away existence.”

7

i’m so tired that i invalidated the validity of something. #2020keepitparty

8

"it’s like the american right has
literally never paid attention to the
actual teachings of christianity" --@6

yah but didn't Jesus write
The Prosperity Gospel
on a pair of jackboots
pretty sure He did.

9

She was also addicted to speed for 30 years.

10

The protagonist in Atlas Shrugged was a railroad company president who based future operations on an advanced steel formula he dubbed "Reardon Metal." Railroad companies made strides in railroad infrastructure since the 1950's but nothing like Reardon Metal depicted in Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand rejects the wisdom of letting far-fetched ideas go by the wayside.

11

How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?
Liberty doesn’t mean freedom to infect other people.

By Paul Krugman

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/opinion/coronavirus-masks.html?searchResultPosition=1

one comment on the article:

Ayn Rand made the most common of all major mistakes: she saw a problem with communism in her native Russia, and thought that the solution must be 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Her conclusion that objectivism is the best possible state of a human being is patently wrong on its face.

Humans are simultaneously individuals with rights and citizens with responsibilities.

Rand and her many Libertarian followers like Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan are all equally incorrect.

12

okay, one more:

The problem with Rand's views is not that she is anti-authoritarian and propagates freedom.

The problem is that she propagates a dichotomy between freedom and common good oriented behaviour where there is indeed none.

The total freedom of Rand simply denies a key aspect of human nature, namely the need to closely interact and cooperate with other human beings.

The freedom to do whatever you want, in particular to focus on your own needs and benefits corresponds to what Dawkins so eloquently named the selfish gene and is thus an inherent aspect of human behaviour.

But just as deeply (and genetically fixed) is our propensity for socially beneficial behaviour.

This behaviour allowed our species to organize in social groups of size and organizational complexity nowhere else seen in other species (including social insects).

It allowed us to take control of the future of this planet.

No doubt, these two aspects of human nature can get into conflict with each other but no one ever said that understanding human nature is easy.

And no one ever said that satisfying human needs as fully as possible is easy.

To simply ignore on of the key aspects of human nature is in fact deeply inhumane: whether it is the need for personal freedom, as the Bolsheviks did, or the need for social cooperation on the basis of the common good.

--Nikita Hund; Germany

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/opinion/coronavirus-masks.html?searchResultPosition=1#commentsContainer


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