[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Good commentary on Rand, but I still wonder about her premise: does your life belong to YOU, or does it belong to someone else (a group, a government, a society,…)?[/quote]
Mine belongs to me. I was fortunate to see the futility in allowing others to influence my feelings at an early age.
[quote]reshumate wrote:
I got about 100 pages to go in that bear of a book. Ms. Rand could’ve shaved about 750 pages. The last 300 is essentially all about her anti-government, self-based ‘objectivism’ philosophy.
I can understand belief in reason, but why this book was so influential I can’t understand. I’m a liberal though, so I don’t believe in small government and a completely free market. There’s way too many idiots in the world for that system to work.[/quote]
The problem with liberalism is that there are also way too many idiots in Washington for lots and lots of government intervention to work. But, that argument doesn’t belong in this section.
A government of idiots, by the people, who are also idiots.
This country works a lot better when it has Nazis or Communists to fight. Too bad they are all gone. Well, not really.
[quote]CrewPierce wrote:
Believe it or not I have taken many philosophy courses over the years. In one class every time you said something that didn’t make sense the professor would walk over and ring a gong.
There was one girl in class that just loved Ayn Rand. She would quote her or use her as an example in everything. Well she would get “gonged” every day. Finally she dropped the course.
HH if I could I would walk over to the gong and ring it in your honor.[/quote]
Sounds like a cool professor. I could see the ‘gong system’ being of great value in most parts of life.
[quote]Dirty_Bulk wrote:
Sounds like a cool professor. I could see the ‘gong system’ being of great value in most parts of life.[/quote]
This too.
[quote]meangenes wrote:
Dirty_Bulk wrote:
Sounds like a cool professor. I could see the ‘gong system’ being of great value in most parts of life.
This too.[/quote]
Good shit
[quote]Dirty_Bulk wrote:
CrewPierce wrote:
Believe it or not I have taken many philosophy courses over the years. In one class every time you said something that didn’t make sense the professor would walk over and ring a gong.
There was one girl in class that just loved Ayn Rand. She would quote her or use her as an example in everything. Well she would get “gonged” every day. Finally she dropped the course.
HH if I could I would walk over to the gong and ring it in your honor.
Sounds like a cool professor. I could see the ‘gong system’ being of great value in most parts of life.[/quote]
A gong is funny but it is not an argument. It is intimidation: “Think like me or you get gonged!” Also, a teacher/prof’s job is to make a subject intelligible to his or her students.
Instead of proving someone is wrong, far easier to ring the gong. What a worthless prof…
[quote]medevac wrote:
I actually like her non-fiction (The Virtue of Selfishness for example) better than her fiction. Atlas was a tough read, not for the length, but for because she seemed to swing her theories like baseball bats at every page.
Here’s a word to try out: inference. Good writers let the reader meet them halfway, not knock on their door and ram a manifesto down their throat.[/quote]
Every time I begin to feel that she is richly deserving of criticism for her literary style (or lack thereof), her Steven King-like penchant for using ten pages to describe something that merited ten words, her wooden two-dimensional characters, and the bludgeons she wields throughout her writing to impress her points indelibly on her readers, I imagine myself writing an epic on the order of War and Peace in Tolstoy’s native language and decide that I should probably just cut Rand a bit of slack.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Dirty_Bulk wrote:
CrewPierce wrote:
Believe it or not I have taken many philosophy courses over the years. In one class every time you said something that didn’t make sense the professor would walk over and ring a gong.
There was one girl in class that just loved Ayn Rand. She would quote her or use her as an example in everything. Well she would get “gonged” every day. Finally she dropped the course.
HH if I could I would walk over to the gong and ring it in your honor.
Sounds like a cool professor. I could see the ‘gong system’ being of great value in most parts of life.
A gong is funny but it is not an argument. It is intimidation: “Think like me or you get gonged!” Also, a teacher/prof’s job is to make a subject intelligible to his or her students.
Instead of proving someone is wrong, far easier to ring the gong. What a worthless prof…
[/quote]
…I just agreed with a HH post. I feel dirty.