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 ...
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?...
That was Da Vinci not Michelangelo.
Oh, and by the way.... She would have had Bernie Madoff executed. HE was a looter. A thief, a scam artist. He produced nothing. He was one of the most vile enemies in ‘RandLand’
Only capitalists who offer honest value for honest value are heroic in her world.
the writer of this article want to say that the Republican party is a cult of Rand fanatics ...I dont buy it . She is one thinker among many
and Michealangelo walked funny
So Ms. Rosenbaum is a founder now?
Dostoevsky beat his wife, and Hemingway committed suicide. Thanks for warning me away from their writings.
Michelangelo was not a homosexual. ...he wrote in a very flush tone about male friends...
LOL - indeed, very flush tones... darling.
I’ve never read one of her books, and don’t agree with her on everything, but this is an over-the-top hit piece.
You know, it is kind of funny... Scanning at your other recent posts, it looks like you would actually be either a Rand Fan or at least neutral toward her.....
IF YOU ACTUALLY KNEW WHAT YOU WERE WRITING ABOUT instead of echoing a left wing hit piece on her.
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