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To: KC Burke
Her Objectivist philosophy was limited as most doctrinaire ideologies are by their very nature.

Objectivists can be just as stubbornly ideological as anyone else, unwilling to confront facts and history that presents a challenge to their point of view. I think TE Lawrence said it well, about the challenge of doubt to ideologues (in this case, Muslims):

In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.

This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by inmost furnishing: black and white not merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity. With cool head and tranquil judgment, imperturbably unconscious of the flight, they oscillated from asymptote to asymptote.

130 posted on 11/03/2009 2:10:17 PM PST by dirtboy
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To: dirtboy
The Objectivists I have met were kind of scary, but not too bad. I thought she did a good job of pointing to the colorless and lifeless attitudes that socialism bring, plus the importance of freedom to excel.

She may have chronicled the most boring speech ever in her Galt radio address, and some other things she championed were kind of odd. Milton Friedman was a much better proponent of the virtues of the free market.

131 posted on 11/03/2009 2:18:01 PM PST by Lakeshark (Thank a member of the US armed forces for their sacrifice)
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To: dirtboy

great quote...


163 posted on 11/04/2009 11:20:57 AM PST by KC Burke (...but He has made the trains run on time.)
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