I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead cover to cover. Utter crap. Boring, repetitive pseudo intellectual nonsense. Rand was, and continued to be for the rest of her life, a victim of her early circumstances. As a child, she found herself in a repressive regime behind the Iron Curtain, and then spent her life seeking solace at the opposite extreme. She rather overlooked the middle ground where most of life happens. In driving parlance, she overcorrected. Big time.
A Collection of Ayn Rand Christmas Cards
- Thread starter Frederick Foresight
- Start date
Victims of oppression are likely to over correct. Take the BLM movement as an example. They take a valid concern about bad cops, apply it across the board, and suddenly every dead criminal is the victim of killer, racist cops. Achieving balance is much harder than politicians, activists and talking heads pretend it to be. One could easily argue that the oppressed are rarely interest in making things right. They want revenge. It's human nature. Tough to get past that.
I'm not a Rand follower by any means, but she illustrated some timeless truths in her books. Her antipathy toward religion however seemed to create a moral blind spot.
That's pretty much what I said. She was also a great symbol in the fight against Communism. She was Jewish. Her family was dispossessed. Her story was a powerful tool to undermine any residual support there was in the Jewish community for the USSR after the war against fascism.
We're not as free as we're led to think in this country, but fortunately we can sample the extremes on both sides, weigh their strengths and weaknesses, and synthesize our own opinions.
That's a lot stronger philosophical foundation than memorizing an official line from an authoritarian government.
Maybe so, but their saga continues. Repeatedly, police continue to apply undue force against blacks much more so than against whites, as videos continue to chronicle, and a fair proportion of those rogue cops continue to get away with it. (Not all cops, of course, but enough to make it very troubling.)
Peer-on-peer violence is bad enough. But unjustified violence perpetrated by authorities is quite another. It is much more destabilizing. Imagine yourself being singled out for "extra special treatment" because of your skin color. Seriously, walk in those moccasins for a mile. Until the police get their collective act together, which includes better candidate screening and training, there will and should be pushback. Until there is a meaningful cultural shift in the collective minds of the police force, there will and should be pushback. If it happens often enough, and it does, victims and potential victims will paint with as broad a brush as their aggressors.
As for Rand, maybe it would be understandable for her to have overcorrected if she had remained where she was. But she fled to a capitalist country and then told the capitalists how to be "better" capitalists. That's way over the top, even for those who overcorrect. She just presented the opposite side of the same perverted coin. She didn't just overcorrect; she went ass over teakettle.
Personally, I thought that was her one saving grace, although I didn't like the tenor of her atheism. She was far too self-important.
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I don't disagree with most of what you write here, but I'd also add that it is imperative that the black community play a part as well. They need to quit pretending that every one of these "victims" is some good boy who made a simple mistake. Fact is many are street thugs and violent criminals who bring this shit upon themselves. I don't want to change the direction of this thread so that's all I'll write about this subject in this thread. Lord knows there are plenty of other opportunities for that.
She presented a false dichotomy. She balked at the idea of synthesis. By her own account, it was all or nothing for her. Sorry, I don't think her "philosophy" had any redeeming value. Just my opinion.
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Rush Limbaugh made a good living countering the lefts absurdity with somethng just as equally or even more extreme on the right. And a lot of that goes on right here on this site. 90% of all life goes on inside our own heads.
It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. - Deng Xiaoping
Rand didn't oppose charitable acts. She rationalized them in terms of making the giver feel good, rather than altruistic duty.