WHY IS THERE NO LIBERAL AYN RAND ???

[theaustinescorts]

Originally Posted by joe bloe

Howard Roark didn't believe that modern architecture was morally superior to any other style of architecture. The moral question involved in the Fountainhead was the importance of being true to your own belief system, refusing to compromise your beliefs because of the desire of the collective.

Ayn Rand practically worshipped Aristotle. Aristotle taught that true self respect was the highest virtue. Rand believed that true self respect could only be achieved by refusing to compromise one's true beliefs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw5YACKiPAk

You are making Roark's outlook too abstract. Why was modern architecture his belief system? Way impose believes on a matter of aesthetic taste? He conflated taste with morality in that way.

He was a sanctimonious nutcase pain in the ass employee is all he was.

If you had someone like him around I know what you would think of him...and so would I...."Just build the building I pay you for you idiot, and stop preaching to me about how you're lowering your principles by building the building I ask you to build!!!!!"

Stalin was "true to himself" also.

Being "true to yourself" justifies anything.

[joe bloe]

Originally Posted by theaustinescorts

You are making Roark's outlook too abstract. Why was modern architecture his belief system? Way impose believes on a matter of aesthetic taste? He conflated taste with morality in that way.

He was a sanctimonious nutcase pain in the ass employee is all he was.

If you had someone like him around I know what you would think of him...and so would I...."Just build the building I pay you for you idiot, and stop preaching to me about how you're lowering your principles by building the building I ask you to build!!!!!"

Stalin was "true to himself" also.

Being "true to yourself" justifies anything.

Howard Roark wasn't paid to build the building, that he destoyed. His only "payment" was the agreement that the building would be built according to his design; that was the contract. He destroyed the building because the contract was voided.

The book is an allegory intended to illustrate that individualism is the fountainhead of life. It was intended to dramatize what Rand believed was fundamentally important. The characters actions are written to be larger than life, intentionally, as a way of dramatizing Rand's point.

[theaustinescorts]

Originally Posted by joe bloe

Howard Roark wasn't paid to build the building, that he destoyed. His only "payment" was the agreement that the building would be built according to his design; that was the contract. He destroyed the building because the contract was voided.

The book is an allegory intended to illustrate that individualism is the fountainhead of life. It was intended to dramatize what Rand believed was fundamentally important. The characters actions are written to be larger than life, intentionally, as a way of dramatizing Rand's point.

If she had a valid point to make then why'd she use such an abstract and ridculous allagory?

If you needed a building built and some idiot like Roark came along and did this you'd say he was a moron and an idiot.

You wouldn't say, "Wow that guy really has principles! What an awesome Dude."

Individualism has it's place. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are rugged individuals, but they'd never pull the stupid shit Roark did.

Individualism isn't all there is in each and every situation, and you can't rationalize anti-social behavior by claiming to be, "true to myself."

By that logic Charles Manson was being, "true to himself." What an individualist Manson is.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

"Poop" jokes. "Homo" giggles, and spells "fuc" like a middle schooler. I forgot who I was dealing with. No wonder he doesn't understand Ayn Rand.

I understand her perfectly well.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

It is you numb nuts that pick and choose out just wtf you want to hear.

Tea Poopers are incapable of seeing the big picture. They just believe things without any facts to back up that belief. Exactly wtf Ayn Rand despised.

More I R O N Y

[WTF]

Originally Posted by joe bloe

. Rand believed that true self respect could only be achieved by refusing to compromise one's beliefs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw5YACKiPAk

What a crock of shit.


The only way you can live your life with no concern for others is to move to a deserted Island!

Any married man will tell you that to keep your balls, you must compromise your beliefs and do so daily!

[IIFFOFRDB]

Originally Posted by Whirlaway

Very interesting piece............I highlighted the key observation (IMO).

That’s the question Beverly Gage poses on Slate.com yesterday, with the even more instructive subtitle: “American conservatives have a canon. Why don’t American liberals?” She comes to this question because of the fact that Paul Ryan cites Rand, along with Hayek and other conservative heroes, as inspirations for his thought.

Obama–he cites mostly . . . himself. Most other modern liberals cite . . . no one.

Perhaps Gage should consider the obvious hypothesis: liberalism is brain dead. But here’s the case Gage lays out:

[O]ne of the [conservative] movement’s most lasting successes has been in developing a common intellectual heritage. Any self-respecting young conservative knows the names you’re supposed to spout: Hayek, Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock. There are some older thinkers too—Edmund Burke, for instance—but for the most part the favored thinkers come out of the movement’s mid-20th century origins in opposition to Soviet communism and the New Deal.

Liberals, by contrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools. This may seem like a strange statement at a moment when American universities are widely understood to be bastions of liberalism, and when liberals themselves are often derided as eggheaded elites. But there is a difference between policy smarts honed in college classrooms and the kind of intellectual conversation that keeps a movement together. What conservatives have developed is what the left used to describe as a “movement culture”: a shared set of ideas and texts that bind activists together in common cause. Liberals, take note.

This is not a new question from liberals who look up long enough from their primal quest for power to ask whether their intellectual shelf is bare. A few years ago Martin Peretz wrote in The New Republic that “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying.

. . Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind [on par with Niebuhr] in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There’s no one, really.” Michael Tomasky echoed this point in The American Prospect: “I’ve long had the sense, and it’s only grown since I’ve moved to Washington, that conservatives talk more about philosophy, while liberals talk more about strategy; also, that liberals generally, and young liberals in particular, are somewhat less conversant in their creed’s history and urtexts than their conservative counterparts are.”

While there is something to this lament, it seems slightly overstated. Even leaving aside the popularity of fevered figures such as Noam Chomsky, one can point to a number of serious thinkers on the Left such as Michael Walzer, or John Rawls and his acolytes, or Rawls’ thoughtful critics on the Left such as Michael Sandel. However, the high degree of abstraction of these thinkers—their palpable distance from the real political and cultural debates of our time—is a reflection of the attenuation of contemporary liberalism. Whereas the left-liberal spectrum once had a vision of the good society based on large ideas accessible to the general public, today liberalism comes to sight more often as pure snobbery, a set of formal values adopted in place of serious political thought, perhaps best expressed in Thomas Franks’ unintentionally hilarious title What’s the Matter with Kansas? Franks wonders why lower and middle class voters align with Republicans when this is purportedly against their economic interests, without ever perceiving the irony of Upper East Side voters overwhelmingly choosing against the party that wants to reduce their income tax burden substantially purely as a cultural statement. Duh.

To continue with Gage:

Liberals have channeled their energies even more narrowly over the past half-century, tending to prefer policy tweaks and electoral mapping to big-picture thinking. When was the last time you saw a prominent liberal politician ascribe his or her passion and interest in politics to, of all things, a book? The most dogged insistence on the influence of Obama’s early reading has come from his TeaParty critics, who fume constantly that he is about to carry out a secret plan laid out a half century ago by far-left writers ranging from Alinsky, the granddaddy of “community organizing,” to social reformer Frances Fox Piven. . .

The problem is that most liberals couldn’t put together the sort of intellectual short list that conservatives now take for granted even if they wanted to. In my Yale seminar on liberalism and conservatism, I try to assign some plausible candidates: Arthur Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Betty Friedan, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, John Kenneth Galbraith. Undoubtedly many people reading this essay can come up with alternatives, and register strong objections to any of the above. But liberals rarely ever have the conversation. Putting together the conservative side of the syllabus is always vastly easier than putting together the liberal one, in part because conservatives themselves have put so much time and energy into the selection process.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archive...l-ayn-rand.php


As a side note; Sandbox posters can attest to the lack of mental acuity exhibited by the lefties; they rarely start intelligent threads and their responses to opposing ideas are typically juvenile namecalling and void of any intellectual response (think CJ, WTF, Fast Goon, Little Stevie, et al). Without an intellectual foundation to argue politics; they are forced to resort to namecalling, stereotypes, and attempts at demaning the opposition.....they are doomed to fail....progressiveism is a dying ideology......here's hoping Obama is it's last great gasp.

Very well said Brother...fuckem Now can I read post #2...LOL

[theaustinescorts]

Originally Posted by WTF

What a crock of shit.


The only way you can live your life with no concern for others is to move to a deserted Island!

Any married man will tell you that to keep your balls, you must compromise your beliefs and do so daily!

Well said. Rand is a crock of shit because she never set out to cobble together any philosophy in the first place.

She ONLY WANTED TO CRITICIZE STALIN, whom she fled from, and had nothing left to work with so she ended up on this wild tangent.

What's crazy is that so many rich little punk bully boys like to read her before they go to their chess games and debate tournaments because all the girls are dating jocks and they're pissed about it.

[Whirlaway]

Rands Objectivism is rooted in respect for individual freedom, free markets and liberty.

[theaustinescorts]

No one who's actually read and understood Rand would say that.

Rand is about one thing - Doing what you want to do because you believe it's best for you.

Problem is with humans that they believe in different things.

She doesn't exactly argue for cooperation.

Actually anyone who's lived in Africa, as I have, will find there a Randian paradise.

Africans only do what's in their own self interest, and they don't trust or cooperate with each other in any way. They know it's a jungle and every one is strictly for themselves.

Ayn Rand would love the result Africa offers.

There is no "altruism" to be found there.

Robert Mugabe = Ayn Rand

[Whirlaway]

You are wrong, she crafted Objectivism...

ipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Ra

Originally Posted by theaustinescorts

Well said. Rand is a crock of shit because she never set out to cobble together any philosophy in the first place.

She ONLY WANTED TO CRITICIZE STALIN, whom she fled from, and had nothing left to work with so she ended up on this wild tangent.

What's crazy is that so many rich little punk bully boys like to read her before they go to their chess games and debate tournaments because all the girls are dating jocks and they're pissed about it.

[ss4699]

Originally Posted by The2Dogs

They do, he is Karl Marx.

Down dog, down!

[theaustinescorts]

Among progressives Chomsky is certainly an icon even more than Rand is for the right.

But progessives are so marginalized in politics that they would never dare to mention anyone as critical of American government and history as Chomsky.

Most "normal and sane" people in the Democratic party think Chomsky is a conspiracy nut.

Personally I think Chomsky is a genius, and probably the single person in the US who understands it's society and government in an explainable way. He also was a Zionist Youth leader, and is accurate regarding the crimes of modern Israel.

But I'm a conservative so what do I know.

[theaustinescorts]

Originally Posted by Whirlaway

You are wrong, she crafted Objectivism...

ipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Ra

I understand but it wasn't her intention. She started out just trying to fight Stalinism and to do that she had to argue against altruism, and that took her on an ideological journey full of "isms" and so forth, none of which could be illustrated with real world examples so she used completely unrealistic allagories. She ended up defending a philosophy and she didn't even believe in philosophy. She was just a mass of contradictions.

But the basic point is that her defenders today ascribe to her all kinds of libertarian ideals that she didn't really voice. They interpret her the way they please...sort of like people interpret the Bible.

[CuteOldGuy]

You can argue against tae's nonsense all you want, but you will only get more. Add WDF to the thread and you have Olympic class boredom. I'd rather re-read Anthem.

[JD Barleycorn]

Some of you can't read very well or have comprehension problems. What is there no liberal Ayn Rand and then there were other conservative authors named. So we could also say why is there no liberal John Locke. It just seems more likely that the caliber of intellect here has heard of Rand and not Locke so that became the example. Still begs the question, where are the liberal, literary giants? If you had the education you might have offered up Teddy Roosevelt as a progressive or Woodrow Wilson. You didn't. Instead Alinsky is offered up. Alinsky was a communist but his book was not really how to run a communist society, it was about how to bring down a constitutional republic so it was all negative.

You know you might even offer Rachel Carson but she only wrote a novel that some people think is research.