If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that man has to reject.
Rand is right, Christianity is wrong. Why should I give a pickpocket the shirt off my back? And why should I feel guilty if I don't see the sense of doing it?
Posted on 11/03/2009 12:13:51 AM PST by Tempest
Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I've found it odd how the party that claims to support family values can hail this vile and morally bankrupt woman as such an iconic hero.
What did she achieve, besides the corruption of souls.
Out of curiosity, did you ever read Atlas Shrugged? The entire thing?
Oh good Grief. Slate has their panties in a wad. Yes she had many bad traits but on the evil of government she was spot on. Now tell me do liberals think .gov is evil. Of coarse they do if it is not socialist. As I said Good Grief.
They make my heart cry.
I’ve never read Mein Kampf. What’s your point?
What she pointed out is that people are individuals and need to be held to that personal responsibility. To contrast, many collectivists are so lost in group-approval syndrome that even when attempting to be manipulative, they spontaneously use group phrases without even realizing it, like "the party that claims." For all of Rands personal faults, she has had an enormously positive effect of millions of people's understanding of personal responsibility in politics, and the absolute evil of collectivism in any form.
As a result, collectivists hate her with a passion few others receive, and can't help using such derogatory, dehumanizing, hate-filled descriptions such as "vile" and "morally bankrupt." Others go so far as to cynically invoke Christian morality through the use of terms such as "family values" and "corrupter of souls," all while trying to turn their audience against a person who fought against the most satanic of all political threats in the world.
All in all, she evokes an interesting reaction from collectivists the world over.
Have you ever read the book?
I know what you mean.. Collectivist obviously hate all people who preach personal responsibiity. Like Jesus, Law-enforcement personel, and Smokey the Bear...
It all makes sense now. Totally good reason to have Rand as a mascot...
Aww, you’re all wee wee-ed up today. Poor thing.
Perhaps you should read the works before you criticize them.
Even if only under the ‘know your enemy’ department.
Have you read any gay men’s magazines?
I believe you are overdue at your psychiatrists.
How many times have you read the Koran?
Some of the most moral people in the world support evil political ideas. Rand knew the evil of collectivism. As the article states that boot on her neck as a child was never forgotton.
At least four times, actually. A couple of the CAIR-type ‘redacted’ versions and some of the scholarly ‘non-politically-correct’ translations.
I even read Mein Kampf twice - once in the original German, in which it’s really a PITA. As more than one person has put it, it’s ‘heavy going.’
I’ve also read and understand Marx and Guevara. Again, one should know whereof he speaks when he chooses to criticize a work or an author.
Why is she morally bankrupt? Because she is an atheist? Are you saying no athiest or agnostic can have a home in the party that supports family values?
Can you be a non-believer and still accept that the society you live in was built on the tenets of Judeo Christian values and still adhere to those values and laws?
“Some of the most moral people in the world support evil political ideas”
So which ones do you think Jesus would support?
IBTZ
you’re a douchebag
So tell me how enriching was Mein Kampf that you read it twice...
Well, if you really want to get into it, you are aware that Jesus specifically supported slavery, right? Break out the Bible and check out Matthew 8:5-13, Luke 12:47, and Matthew 10:24-25.
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that man has to reject.
Rand is right, Christianity is wrong. Why should I give a pickpocket the shirt off my back? And why should I feel guilty if I don't see the sense of doing it?
Which did Jesus hold in higher regard: the adulteress or the Pharisee?
I read it first in English and then in German to make sure there weren’t any mistranslations.
What do you learn from Mein Kampf? How to identify evil.
If you’d read it, then read one of Obama’s speeches, well, let’s just say that there are more than a few alarming similarities.
As long as Jesus, Law-enforcement personel, and Smokey the Bear link the definition of personal responsibility to the Doctrine of Negative Rights, rather than subject-status group obedience, Rand would be fine with them. But I don't recall any of them addressing political economics.
Your attempt at pitting Christians and Cops against Rand is contrived and grotesque. Rand warned - massively and overwhelmingly - against communism and socialism in particular, and any other form of political collectivism generally. To compare her writings, as you do, with Mein Kampf, is pathetic and insulting to her work, especially since Nazism was one of the collectivist forms she tried to protect people from.
I take it you didn’t read the article...
Michealangelo was a homosexual, does that mean his sculptures were bad ?
Ann Rand is ia celebrated writer, if she hadn’t written what she wrote she would be forgotten.
in short art transcends the artist
This article is is silly
Quoting Slate and playing into the liberal stereotype of the willfully ignorant bible-thumper. Why, I’d almost think you were a plant. If I were as paranoid as you.
Thank you for your honesty
I’m taking the same amphetamines that Ms. Rosenbaum did they make me paranoid, but an awesome writer...
Sun Tzu said it best:
It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
To be victorious time and again you must know your enemy. And it is a Buddhist saying that you know yourself by seeing yourself as others see you. Only by reading and learning your enemy can you know them and also, by their own statements about you, learn more about yourself, thereby assuring yourself of victory.
Roman Polansky wins again!!!
Why, because I disagree with you?
LOL
Yeah, I especially loved the end, where Eddie was completely forgotten about, even though he successfully managed Dagney’s company while she went on a sexual exploration with three lovers, cursing Christians the whole way, until she too learned to cheer the destruction of mankind and the starvation of six billion people.
But what’s really terrifying is that folks like Alan Greenspan and Hillary Clinton love it. The only redeeming thing about it (and what gets conservatives to love it) was its hatred for the shackles that goody-too-shoes nanny-staters place on society. How does Clinton relate to that?
Frankly, the book is every bit as hate-filled as the Turner Diaries, just much, much more seductively written.
So, does that mean you'll vote for the Doctrine of Negative Rights of the U.S. Constitution, or socialist/communist tyranny?
Thank you for that wisdom.
LOL - like hell they do!
What rot you've come up with! Rand fought collectivist tyranny - period. Leftists hate her with everything they've got.
Exactly so.
Now, while Nietzche had a point about being careful when learning about evil (”And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”), Camus had the right of it. “The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
Some of Rand’s personal choices, and the ‘romance’ in her novels make me cringe.
That said, she understood ABSOLUTELY what she chose to write about, and her socio-politico-economic philosophy is the only one that works in the long run.
Martin Luther King Jr. was much less than ideal in his personal life... That doesn’t make his “I had a Dream” speech any less true and any less world-changing.
Roman wins nothing ...he is avery good, maybe great, film maker guilty of rape.
Try this ...hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time....you might have to practice
None. I do not think Jesus taught politics or economics. He came to save souls not cash.
If they love it... then why does everything they do/did seem to be contrary to it?
The true test of someone’s beliefs is not what they claim to believe in, but the actions they take. The actions that Greenspan and Clinton have taken show them as no lovers of Rand’s philosophies.
Fool.
There is a good reason why Slate and folks of that ilk would prefer people NOT to read Rand.
Her views on the destruction of capitalism were so prescient you would believe it to be written today.
Damn, I hate it when conservatives accept liberal BS. Michelangelo was not a homosexual. His contemporaries sneered about what he was doing with corpses, and he wrote in a very flush tone about male friends, but which were normal before men had to worry about being called homosexual.
(seriously, look at the way he draws a weenie, and tell me he was a homosexual.)
And by the way, I get the larger point you’re trying to make, but it doesn’t really hold up for Ayn Rand. Her books aren’t mere fiction; they are philosophy which uses fiction to contextualize her sermons. The fact she so terribly fails to live up to her own standards and found the lifestyles she propounded to be such miserable suffering shows she does not understand the human nature she proposes to instruct us about.
He taught social values that have ormed a strong basis for political definition. the same core social values can be seen or expressed in evreyday topics and politial issues. So which of those core topics do you suppose is evil that Jesus would support?...
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