Brant Gaede

You are focused on the result, Rand on the cause. --Brant

Ah, so negation is potency? Like 9/11? --Brant it is to the Jihads and their tribe--are we saying potency is contextual (or is it just me)? I am saying in the context of Western Civilization potency is individualistic and the rest of whatever you want to call it is collectivist and destructive

Lots of great sex! --Brant

Good creates, evil negates; sanction or no sanction. Brant

That's why Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged. You just tossed the novel into the trash can. --Brant

Rand's thesis is that the sanction of evil puts the potency of the sanctioner into evil. No sanction no transfer of potency and evil dies on the vine or it never gets going in the first place. --Brant

His brain is in pretty good shape. I suspect he has heart trouble. I wish him well in his retirement. --Brant

That's a good explanation of what's wrong with Rand's formulation. She meant it like an intellectual self evident pill to be shot right into the brain without digestion. It's rational poison here declined by you and me two different ways maybe ironically proving her point. --Brant oh, your highlighted statement is not true

Wow! That's quite a sidestep! --Brant

You've been drinking, right? --Brant

The dose makes the poison. Literally her statement is false. --Brant

To continue: I see potency a la Ayn Rand as an expression of civilization. It's individualistic as apposed to collectivist or tribalistic. If you were a Comanche warrior in early 1800s Texas on a raiding party and attacked a homestead raping the women killing everybody that was pure albeit tribal potency. The difference here is nothing was created just destroyed with some wealth transfer like a horse or even, if there was one, a little girl to be incorporated into the tribe. So Objectivist potency is acts of creation. --Brant

Potency if is derived from power but there is more to power than that. There is the initiation of force. The violation of rights. We can cleave the difference. --Brant

While I disagree with your last sentence it all comes down to an interminable discussion about what we mean about potency. Rand's fiction corrupted her philosophy. You can take all the bad out of your good guys and all the good out of your badies but not out of the 99.9999 of all people who have ever lived or will live. I'm for a practical philosophy of rational self interest that celebrates integrity. Rand was stuck in the world of her great novel and such was classical Objectivism as taught in the 1960s --Brant

Rand was much more politically sophisticated than Peikoff, which isn't saying much to her credit. --Brant