[308MBR]

Are you so sure of that? That quote from Rand at the top of the thread sure seems like what is happening in the USA. Making all this silly stuff illegal (airing out your ride, growing what you smoke, making your own whiskey without permission from the feds, making strippers wear pasties, taking responsibility for your own protection, etc.) is evident in real life. Rand writes as a reflection of society. Chomsky is a parasite who accepts funding from the same entities he wishes to destroy.

[SteveMcKing]

Chomsky should have been CIA'ed a long time ago, but I won't go into that here....

In any case, I see fiction as a wonderful reflection, or the creative end-product of a society.

Never should it be used as the basis or starting-point of any law, culture, or ideal. That's plain sensationalism... dramatics.

[SteveMcKing]

Off-topic now, but "A is A" was always bogus to me. It's neither useful nor insightful... Ayn Rand should have just written "DUH." and the effect would have been both similar and less patronizing.

What's useful and interesting are statements of equivalence. Energy does not "equal" mass times light-squared, but we speak of their equivalence, semantically anyway.

"A = B + C"... now that's helpful, because we can infer very much about different values this way.

"A = A" is for dopes!