Originally Posted by
Snarge
I'd reconsider Rand. She has been Co-Op'ed from the neoliberals...
Here are some disqualifiers for Rand:
She adored William Hickman, a psychotic killer who kidnapped a 12 year old girl, hacked her to pieces, wired her eyes open and meet with her father for a ransom trade. Hickman, took the money, then her father, who thought she was alive found her dismembered body. Rand thought Hickman was wonderful because he shunned society and made his own rules.
Alan Greenspan, the glorious Economist and Fed chairman, was a disciple and cult follower of Rand. His mea culpa Congressional testimony is really a testimony of Rand's Objectivism...
In Rand's cult, dissent was not allowed.
The movie Atlas Shrugged was a flop. So are her books, considered 2nd or 3rd rate novels.
She is really just a angry Russian Jew who got a raw deal during the Russian Revolution..... Ayn Rand isn't her real name.
She took a lover outside of her marriage and considered it just.
She rejected God. An atheist. Which is fine, but most conservatives who love her junk writings, believe in God.
A hypocrite, Rand took social security in her old age under another name.
The reason why so many people like Rand is because she gives them a false sense of identity... most of the people who adore Rand aren't the producers or innovator she writes about, rather they are the moochers or parasites. It is all really childish and unrealistic... yet attractive. Most people would not know how to go Galt if they really wanted too.....
Not quite, but it is easy to see why many people are much easier to attack than their ideas.
Collecting SS after you have been forced to pay into it all your life, is not exactly a deviation.
As to Hickman:In 1928, the writer Ayn Rand began planning a novel called The Little Street, whose hero, Danny Renahan, was to be based on "what Hickman suggested to [her]." The novel was never finished, but Rand wrote notes for it which were published after her death in the book Journals of Ayn Rand. Rand wanted the hero of her novel to be "A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me."[4] Rand scholars Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Jennifer Burns both interpret Rand's interest in Hickman as a sign of her early admiration of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, especially since she several times referred to Hickman as a "Superman" (in the Nietzschean sense).[wickie}
The Atlas shrugged movies may have flopped, but Honey BOO-
Boo is a winner with the public.
Lots of people got a raw deal during the Russian revolution, possibly 100 million got the rawest deal possible. Perhaps this caused a lot of hard feelings that continue even today. I know they still exist in former soviet states.
If you think Greenspan was actually a Rand follower, you have no idea what you are talking about and neither did he. He may have harbored fantasies, but you really don't understand his job-it was based completely on free market intervention and still is for that matter.
Rand's ideas may not reflect her own life, but that does not make them invalid nor does it prove their worth for they have never really been given a trial on a large scale.
What few people really understand is that there is not a dimes worth of difference between what we call liberal and conservative today, it is almost purely sleight of hand. None of them have actually done us any favors and both of them have created far more problems than they have solved.
Whether we like to admit it or not, humans-much like other species-are locked into competition for many things on many levels. Like it or not we aren't about raising mankind out of the mud, we are more concerned with the group we identify with-state,local,family,country. The system that seems to work best is to allow people the greatest range of individual choice in free markets and social parameters while supporting technical advancement.
Hammering humans against the anvil of social engineering in an effort to improve them has not provided those results. It has created long periods of stagnant development, a much larger class of have nots and a much greater concentration of wealth and special treatment in much smaller numbers. It has also killed a hell of a lot of innocent people.