6 ms·

Aaah - I was assuming this was similar to the Ayn Rand's books coming back into vogue during recessions, but I guess Glenn Beck works like a recession... Ron Pa

Aaah - I was assuming this was similar to the Ayn Rand's books coming back into vogue during recessions, but I guess Glenn Beck works like a recession... Ron Paul probably increased sales of Rand, Hayek, Von Mises, etc. as well. http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/04/27/ayn.rand.atlas.shrugged/ http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/04/27/ayn.rand.atlas.s...

mistermann 16y ago
Ok, I'll bite, what's your top (1, 2, 3) beefs with Ayn Rand? Also, have you actually read any of her books, or only reviews of her books? Not trying to be antagonistic, its a genuine question.
- barrkel 16y ago
  She's a terrible writer with huge blindspots, and from what I could make out of Atlas Shrugged, a naive and authority-worshipping view of how the world works. I don't think there's a better antidote to her views than actually reading her books, so poorly are they written.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Is this the same book we're talking about? What is 'authority-worshipping' in it? I honestly can't name one single aspect that can be interpreted in that way.
    - barrkel 16y ago
      Yes, almost every chief executive portrayed in the book is described in ridiculously idolatrous fashion, with the direct implication that business leaders - specifically those at the heads of organizations - were all but supermen, that the world would collapse without them, and that when they alone were sequestered away together, they could create a fantastical wonderland of advancement beyond the ken of the plebeian masses.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I was quite amused by the description of the cult she "managed" in "Why People Believe Weird Things": http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0716733870 http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscie...
- philwelch 16y ago
  I was a fanatical Ayn Rand devotee at the age of 17. I highly recommend Ayn Rand to intellectually inclined, socially outcast 17 year old boys who enjoy reading about rough sex, if only because she is less obscure than Nietzsche. ("Less obscure" being a relative term--Rand took great liberties in redefining everyday words like "selfishness", "altruism", "mysticism", "sacrifice", and so forth, quite possibly without realizing it. As confusing as that may be, it's possible to learn and apply Rand's definitions of these words to make sense of her. Interpreting Nietzsche is a much higher order of difficulty, and is recommended to either historians of philosophy or angsty, socially outcast college undergraduates for whom Ayn Rand was not nearly dark enough.) Philosophically, there are a number of technical points that Rand was wrong about. It's hard to blame her for them, but one is almost forced to because she took herself seriously as a philosopher. (On the other hand, most of the points are of little practical interest.) Chief among this are her failed attempts to rationally justify both knowledge and morality, neither of which are satisfactory in the end. Her grasp of the history of philosophy is poor--she claims Kant as her nemesis while appropriating large parts of Kant's ethics, for instance. These are not entirely unrelated faults--on the points of epistemology where she is able to correctly identify her disagreements with Kant, she fails to grasp the reasons Kant is right and she is wrong. Her epistemological system (as expressed in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) is not clearly either descriptive or prescriptive in its outlook--it seems to attempt both, risking incoherence in the process. As a descriptive work, it comes across as an amateur's guess at cognitive psychology, written without a hint of empirical data. As a prescriptive work, it falls short (Rand talks a lot about concepts but doesn't make one hint towards the subject of propositions) and is hampered by the same free-floating departure from empirical reality that hold it back on descriptive terms. For Rand as a novelist, I have to question anyone whose idea of a dramatic climax is a 30 page speech about philosophy. I'm not even going to make a joke about the rough sex, because all things considered the rough sex kind of fits into the general atmosphere of her books. She's actually a fairly clear writer if you're predisposed to read logically and literally. There's a lot good to be said about Ayn Rand, and she's not an entirely bad stop on the path of someone's intellectual development. But as a final destination one can do much better.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Considering that you bring up the 'rough sex' twice, and in a way that makes it seem like the books are full of it and that sex forms a fundamental part of the stories and philosophy, I wonder what it is that makes this single one-page scene in one book the center piece of many reflections on her books on general. If it weren't for that one movie (was it "Cruel Intentions"?) I would've mostly forgotten about that passage. This may be because what is considered "highbrow literature" in my mother tongue (Dutch) contains (relative to English-language literature) a lot more sex, and in much more explicit and colorful ways (e.g. Jan Wolkers but also work by Belgians like Jef Geeraerts), and that reading works like these since early adolescence has blunted my sensitivity to this topic; but still - even when I try to abstract from that personal frame of reference, I find it hard to assign to them the weight that is often done (and that you are implying) On top of that, I resent your attempt at an ad hominem by suggesting that the main audience is sexually hypertensive adolescents. Which is a shame because the rest of your post is sound (even if I don't agree with all of it), and the sophism detracts from that.

mistermann 16y ago

Ok, I'll bite, what's your top (1, 2, 3) beefs with Ayn Rand? Also, have you actually read any of her books, or only reviews of her books? Not trying to be antagonistic, its a genuine question.

barrkel 16y ago
She's a terrible writer with huge blindspots, and from what I could make out of Atlas Shrugged, a naive and authority-worshipping view of how the world works. I don't think there's a better antidote to her views than actually reading her books, so poorly are they written.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Is this the same book we're talking about? What is 'authority-worshipping' in it? I honestly can't name one single aspect that can be interpreted in that way.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    Yes, almost every chief executive portrayed in the book is described in ridiculously idolatrous fashion, with the direct implication that business leaders - specifically those at the heads of organizations - were all but supermen, that the world would collapse without them, and that when they alone were sequestered away together, they could create a fantastical wonderland of advancement beyond the ken of the plebeian masses.
- arethuza 16y ago
  I was quite amused by the description of the cult she "managed" in "Why People Believe Weird Things": http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0716733870 http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscie...
philwelch 16y ago
I was a fanatical Ayn Rand devotee at the age of 17. I highly recommend Ayn Rand to intellectually inclined, socially outcast 17 year old boys who enjoy reading about rough sex, if only because she is less obscure than Nietzsche. ("Less obscure" being a relative term--Rand took great liberties in redefining everyday words like "selfishness", "altruism", "mysticism", "sacrifice", and so forth, quite possibly without realizing it. As confusing as that may be, it's possible to learn and apply Rand's definitions of these words to make sense of her. Interpreting Nietzsche is a much higher order of difficulty, and is recommended to either historians of philosophy or angsty, socially outcast college undergraduates for whom Ayn Rand was not nearly dark enough.) Philosophically, there are a number of technical points that Rand was wrong about. It's hard to blame her for them, but one is almost forced to because she took herself seriously as a philosopher. (On the other hand, most of the points are of little practical interest.) Chief among this are her failed attempts to rationally justify both knowledge and morality, neither of which are satisfactory in the end. Her grasp of the history of philosophy is poor--she claims Kant as her nemesis while appropriating large parts of Kant's ethics, for instance. These are not entirely unrelated faults--on the points of epistemology where she is able to correctly identify her disagreements with Kant, she fails to grasp the reasons Kant is right and she is wrong. Her epistemological system (as expressed in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) is not clearly either descriptive or prescriptive in its outlook--it seems to attempt both, risking incoherence in the process. As a descriptive work, it comes across as an amateur's guess at cognitive psychology, written without a hint of empirical data. As a prescriptive work, it falls short (Rand talks a lot about concepts but doesn't make one hint towards the subject of propositions) and is hampered by the same free-floating departure from empirical reality that hold it back on descriptive terms. For Rand as a novelist, I have to question anyone whose idea of a dramatic climax is a 30 page speech about philosophy. I'm not even going to make a joke about the rough sex, because all things considered the rough sex kind of fits into the general atmosphere of her books. She's actually a fairly clear writer if you're predisposed to read logically and literally. There's a lot good to be said about Ayn Rand, and she's not an entirely bad stop on the path of someone's intellectual development. But as a final destination one can do much better.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Considering that you bring up the 'rough sex' twice, and in a way that makes it seem like the books are full of it and that sex forms a fundamental part of the stories and philosophy, I wonder what it is that makes this single one-page scene in one book the center piece of many reflections on her books on general. If it weren't for that one movie (was it "Cruel Intentions"?) I would've mostly forgotten about that passage. This may be because what is considered "highbrow literature" in my mother tongue (Dutch) contains (relative to English-language literature) a lot more sex, and in much more explicit and colorful ways (e.g. Jan Wolkers but also work by Belgians like Jef Geeraerts), and that reading works like these since early adolescence has blunted my sensitivity to this topic; but still - even when I try to abstract from that personal frame of reference, I find it hard to assign to them the weight that is often done (and that you are implying) On top of that, I resent your attempt at an ad hominem by suggesting that the main audience is sexually hypertensive adolescents. Which is a shame because the rest of your post is sound (even if I don't agree with all of it), and the sophism detracts from that.