Ayn Rand
- Alex T. Jacob
- Posts: 413
- Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 2:04 am
Re: Ayn Rand
Last edited by Anonymous on Sun May 23, 2010 1:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
I can't go on. I'll go on.
Re: Ayn Rand
"William Edward Hickman was in 1927 the most famous person in America. His fame was based on being a violent serial killing child murderer. In 1927 he kidnapped, murdered, and dismembered the body of a 12 year old girl. It is even farther alleged he had opined that he wanted to kill someone just to see what it was like. He later confessed to even more murders.
Ayn Rand knew all of this as she opined that he was a beautiful soul and that he was the finest example of what it was to be a man. Why?
Because he had no feelings for or connection to others and no ability to empathize with the feelings and needs of others. This cold ruthless inability to empathize or to feel in any way connected with the rest of society permeates her thinking and animates her ideals all the way through writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. and is behind much of today's Conservative Movement attacks on Obama and Liberals.
William Edward Hickman was a true socio-path. Arrogant, narcissistic, devoid of feelings for others or any connections with or ability to empathize with others. These are the personality traits that animate the entire Conservative Movement. This is where Rand's ideas about Altruism is a weakness and a moral sin come from, a homicidal sociopath."
[quote from : Philadelphia Examiner ]
http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/so ... ve-cultism
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/featur ... nnell.html
Ayn Rand knew all of this as she opined that he was a beautiful soul and that he was the finest example of what it was to be a man. Why?
Because he had no feelings for or connection to others and no ability to empathize with the feelings and needs of others. This cold ruthless inability to empathize or to feel in any way connected with the rest of society permeates her thinking and animates her ideals all the way through writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. and is behind much of today's Conservative Movement attacks on Obama and Liberals.
William Edward Hickman was a true socio-path. Arrogant, narcissistic, devoid of feelings for others or any connections with or ability to empathize with others. These are the personality traits that animate the entire Conservative Movement. This is where Rand's ideas about Altruism is a weakness and a moral sin come from, a homicidal sociopath."
[quote from : Philadelphia Examiner ]
http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/so ... ve-cultism
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/featur ... nnell.html
Last edited by Kunga on Sun May 23, 2010 4:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Ayn Rand
i am tired of my opinions...i wanna delete all my posts...i don't care if you ban me.
lol...now i realize how narcissistic that statement is !
lol...now i realize how narcissistic that statement is !
-
mensa-maniac
Re: Ayn Rand
It's ok Kunga, there's better days ahead. You have a smart brain, never tire of what's your's, keep it and cherish it, hone it to perfection, but remember to always share it!
If your words can help just one person, your measure is immeasurable.
Donna
---------------------------
Here is a Jack Pine Sonnet, which means anything goes as far as sonnets go.
I wrote this back a couple of months ago and just recently entered
into GEIST magazine contest, it's when I felt I couldn't write a sonnet no how.
I made several attempts and then wrote this one.
Its called:
I Cannot Write a Jack Pine Sonnet
I cannot write a jack pine sonnet
With fancy words or message on it
I cannot write syllables
I cannot write parables
I cannot write meter and rhyme
I cannot write at anytime
I cannot write a jack pine sonnet
For the judges who mark upon it
I try to write a Jack pine sonnet
With frilly frills like a lace bonnet
Like hand is to glove, as bird is to Dove
As pen is to paper, like food is to love
Like lily white snow cold and bold
Fourteen lines a sonnet is to told
I have written a Jack Pine sonnet
Including French painter Claude Monet
A pen in hand like Ayn Rand
Majestic wings soar off the sand
If your words can help just one person, your measure is immeasurable.
Donna
---------------------------
Here is a Jack Pine Sonnet, which means anything goes as far as sonnets go.
I wrote this back a couple of months ago and just recently entered
into GEIST magazine contest, it's when I felt I couldn't write a sonnet no how.
I made several attempts and then wrote this one.
Its called:
I Cannot Write a Jack Pine Sonnet
I cannot write a jack pine sonnet
With fancy words or message on it
I cannot write syllables
I cannot write parables
I cannot write meter and rhyme
I cannot write at anytime
I cannot write a jack pine sonnet
For the judges who mark upon it
I try to write a Jack pine sonnet
With frilly frills like a lace bonnet
Like hand is to glove, as bird is to Dove
As pen is to paper, like food is to love
Like lily white snow cold and bold
Fourteen lines a sonnet is to told
I have written a Jack Pine sonnet
Including French painter Claude Monet
A pen in hand like Ayn Rand
Majestic wings soar off the sand
- Alex T. Jacob
- Posts: 413
- Joined: Mon Jun 27, 2011 2:04 am
Re: Ayn Rand
Kunga,
It seems you edited your post (the first) and took at the part containing your opinions. I thought what you wrote was interesting. I think to understand Rand, and this is true with all thinkers, you have to consider her context: coming out of a supposed idealism (communism) that had turned so ugly and so destructive to the individual. Seen in that context one can better appreciate her work as reaction. And like certain thinkers or many thinkers whose brains boil atop a sea of their personal and social neurosis, she was captured by her own ideas, propelled along by them.
Clearly, there is value to becoming a focussed individual, taking stock of one's strength (and one's 'virtue') and setting out in the world to achieve something. 'The first order of offering is to the self' as an old (magical) axiom goes. Once the individual is realized, the individual is better positioned to 'share' (or to 'invest') in the productivity and well-being of others.
What should/must be rebelled against is the value of the insufficient mass who, because of their own weakness or incapacity, seek to parasitically gain their sustenance from other 'productive' individuals. The problem or a problem is that people are taught to live in this way.
The other side of this question is when, for example, private concentrations of capital, through the mechanism of the corporate structure, convert themselves into a parasitical entities that have powers and 'rights' the individual does not have and cannot secure.
As a novelist---and novels often deal with idealistic, imaginary and romantic situations and possibilities---she placed her philosophical ideas in a 'realistic setting'. But a good reader knows, or should know, that the novel is not reality, it is an imagined space where ideas, personality and conflict are projected. The problem (or a problem) is when people take their reading (or their writing) too seriously and suddenly one assumes, or the author actually believes, that their imagined reality could even be imposed on 'real reality'.
(Is this the article or your writing?): "Because he had no feelings for or connection to others and no ability to empathize with the feelings and needs of others. This cold ruthless inability to empathize or to feel in any way connected with the rest of society permeates her thinking and animates her ideals all the way through writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and is behind much of today's Conservative Movement attacks on Obama and Liberals."
I guess it might be possible to say that about Rand, but you would involve yourself in psychological speculation. Many, many people have been influenced on a personal level by her work and her ideas. An individual, taking stock of himself, needs to arrange his own world and secure his own situation. He also needs a philosophical 'shield' to protect him self from others who would hinder him in his self-realization or place burdens on him, weaken him.
I would say that these are generally speaking 'conservative' notions, but they are good ones, necessary ones. What we see in society and is called 'conservatism' is really not. It is usually a fierce mixture or different ideas and tendencies all rolled together. A true conservative position would likely look a little like libertarianism/constitutionalism mixed with Chomskyism. I don't think a true conservatism actually exists and if it does it is way on the fringe.
The attacks of Obama and 'the liberals' are non-simple. There are a dozen different tendencies that have melded together in recent 'conservative' expression that are in so many ways absurd, even ridiculously so. But the same is true of a strict Obama-Liberalism: it is non-simple and very complex, and the people who drink these elixors are complex, complicit individuals. This is, I think, a symptom of an epoch in history when discourses, like waves crashing together, get so convoluted and absurd that no one can really pick through them and sort them out.
It seems you edited your post (the first) and took at the part containing your opinions. I thought what you wrote was interesting. I think to understand Rand, and this is true with all thinkers, you have to consider her context: coming out of a supposed idealism (communism) that had turned so ugly and so destructive to the individual. Seen in that context one can better appreciate her work as reaction. And like certain thinkers or many thinkers whose brains boil atop a sea of their personal and social neurosis, she was captured by her own ideas, propelled along by them.
Clearly, there is value to becoming a focussed individual, taking stock of one's strength (and one's 'virtue') and setting out in the world to achieve something. 'The first order of offering is to the self' as an old (magical) axiom goes. Once the individual is realized, the individual is better positioned to 'share' (or to 'invest') in the productivity and well-being of others.
What should/must be rebelled against is the value of the insufficient mass who, because of their own weakness or incapacity, seek to parasitically gain their sustenance from other 'productive' individuals. The problem or a problem is that people are taught to live in this way.
The other side of this question is when, for example, private concentrations of capital, through the mechanism of the corporate structure, convert themselves into a parasitical entities that have powers and 'rights' the individual does not have and cannot secure.
As a novelist---and novels often deal with idealistic, imaginary and romantic situations and possibilities---she placed her philosophical ideas in a 'realistic setting'. But a good reader knows, or should know, that the novel is not reality, it is an imagined space where ideas, personality and conflict are projected. The problem (or a problem) is when people take their reading (or their writing) too seriously and suddenly one assumes, or the author actually believes, that their imagined reality could even be imposed on 'real reality'.
(Is this the article or your writing?): "Because he had no feelings for or connection to others and no ability to empathize with the feelings and needs of others. This cold ruthless inability to empathize or to feel in any way connected with the rest of society permeates her thinking and animates her ideals all the way through writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and is behind much of today's Conservative Movement attacks on Obama and Liberals."
I guess it might be possible to say that about Rand, but you would involve yourself in psychological speculation. Many, many people have been influenced on a personal level by her work and her ideas. An individual, taking stock of himself, needs to arrange his own world and secure his own situation. He also needs a philosophical 'shield' to protect him self from others who would hinder him in his self-realization or place burdens on him, weaken him.
I would say that these are generally speaking 'conservative' notions, but they are good ones, necessary ones. What we see in society and is called 'conservatism' is really not. It is usually a fierce mixture or different ideas and tendencies all rolled together. A true conservative position would likely look a little like libertarianism/constitutionalism mixed with Chomskyism. I don't think a true conservatism actually exists and if it does it is way on the fringe.
The attacks of Obama and 'the liberals' are non-simple. There are a dozen different tendencies that have melded together in recent 'conservative' expression that are in so many ways absurd, even ridiculously so. But the same is true of a strict Obama-Liberalism: it is non-simple and very complex, and the people who drink these elixors are complex, complicit individuals. This is, I think, a symptom of an epoch in history when discourses, like waves crashing together, get so convoluted and absurd that no one can really pick through them and sort them out.
I can't go on. I'll go on.
Re: Ayn Rand
yes...and i realized that....that's why i decided to snuff out my biased opinion of her....although i think she is brilliant and truthful/honest in many areas of her philosophy...when she praises the individualistic freedom of a psychopathic killer, yet condemns the government of overpowering our individual freedoms...i see a hypocritical paradox there. I understand the psychology behind her idealistic views regarding individual freedom....but i can't agree with her sociopathic and narcissistic behavior towards humanity. Although i admire her ability to find compassion for such a despicable character as a serial killer.Alex T. Jacob wrote:I think to understand Rand, and this is true with all thinkers, you have to consider her context: coming out of a supposed idealism (communism) that had turned so ugly and so destructive to the individual.
Alex T. Jacob wrote:(Is this the article or your writing?): "Because he had no feelings for or connection to others and no ability to empathize with the feelings and needs of others. This cold ruthless inability to empathize or to feel in any way connected with the rest of society permeates her thinking and animates her ideals all the way through writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and is behind much of today's Conservative Movement attacks on Obama and Liberals."
No. I quoted that from the Philadelphia Examiner.
i have never been interested in politics and i've been ignorant of the goings on in politics for many years....i've just recently been reading what's going on
(as far as the NWO) and now i understand why Islam thinks of the United States as "the Devil" . May God help us.
-
Conservationist
- Posts: 76
- Joined: Sat Dec 12, 2009 2:48 am
- Contact:
Re: Ayn Rand
No, no, yes.uncledote wrote:Any constructive thoughts on Ayn Rand's abilities as a Novelist, Philosopher, Character?
She's an awful writer and philosopher, but an iconic personality.