zantonavitch

George Smith -- Does no-one else have an original copy of your Nathaniel Branden 'Reason Magazine' interview? How about an audio recording? How many people ultimately read or heard the real interview? This is quite valuable. Seems like it must exist somewhere...

However funny Chris Rock is, when the police are in the wrong, they need to be confronted and challenged. Submiting to their evil only makes it worse. Taking away their moral authority thru verbally promoting individual rights, during and after the car-stop, makes it better. If everyone did this, the police would behave far better. The fundamental problem, however, is the Welfare State. It persuades the cops to be personally corrupt, and forces them to be physically tyrannical. If the laws were pro-freedom, police abuse of the citizenry would fall like a rock.

Hillary will always be the Wicked Witch of the West.

I was shocked that Mr. Coleman chose to reply -- at least initially -- to my comments on The Rational Augumentor. This makes his story considerably more credible, in my view, and I regret a bit my loose, quick, initial analysis. But the truth is that at practically every high-publicity "racial incident" the police seem ultra-quick to lie and the racist blacks too.

Remarkable and passionate discussion about America's recent "police vs. blacks" controversy: http://www.rationalargumentator.com/index/blog/2015/07/handcuffed-and-helpless/

My thanks to Stephen Boydstun (in post 12) for calling to my attention the book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop (2014)! I came across a similar book about 12 years ago which was lightly discussed on the WeTheLiving.com Atlantis forum. I haven't read either book, but the ideas inside certainly seem important, however profoundly mistaken. I carefully read the first 4 of 27 sections, and 48 of 442 pages, of Inventing the Individual. It doesn't seem worthwhile. It's five main authorities are hopelessly obscure, and most of its initial claims are false, misleading, or irrelevant. It's also immensely boring -- which is often a clue to a book's quality. Still, these are ideas worth considering! Ayn Rand herself seemed to fall victim to some of the above pro-Christian fatuous claims.

If religion gave Western Civilization individual rights and ethical individualism, did it also gift us with science, logic, and reason? This long- and tedious-seeming book looks like an insidious, pernicious destroyer of Western liberalism, along the theoretical lines of Berkelely, Hume, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, rather than the practical lines of Jesus and Marx.

I also noticed that, Kyrel. Many of his statements were true. He just chose to draw horribly evil conclusions from them. It isn't just that most of the observations and claims in that manifesto were true. It's that they were also relevant and important to society today, as well as his personal concerns. And he wrote it with a palpable air of sincerity and earnestness. He certainly seemed to be haplessly seeking the truth about major sociological and intellectual issues which he saw all around him. Unfortunately he was asking questions which virtually no-one today has the honesty, courage, or integrity to answer. This includes the current Objectivist/libertarian community. Also Ayn Rand. The answers the mass-murderer was evidently seeking involved a gross contradiction of today's near universally-accepted social norms and values. That whole hastily-written piece was stunningly in opposition to the standards of political correctness, multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion, sensitivity, egalitarianism, democracy, and peace. Thus to even begin to address his concerns -- however valid -- is to step into a philosophical minefield from which there is virtually no exit. Almost no-one "respectable" cares to. Edmund Burke observed over two centuries ago that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." On the seminal issues of the deleterious impact of blacks upon historical and contemporary Western society, and their remarkable current level and practice of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc., the good men of this world have chosen to do nothing. Certainly this includes the Objectivist community. Ayn Rand called this the sin of evasion. She described it, in part, as: "the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think -- not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment -- on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it... Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality." Sadly, Rand herself practiced it on almost all these related issues. Her zombie followers do likewise. One result of good people falling silent on pivotal questions of controversy is that they allow bad people to sweep the field. When that massacre-perpetrator went looking for answers to his legitimate questions seemingly all he could find were comments from various white racist groups and cult organziations. They almost certainly didn't have a good impact upon an already disturbed mind and personality. And look at the result.

Two elephants in the room here are the way blacks notably degrade the quality of life of almost every white society they come to, and the considerable level of racism and bigotry currently practiced by them. The mass-murderer's manifesto wrestled with these two verboten issues.

How long? --Brant Philosophy advances slowly but fairly surely. I'd guess around 100 to 150 years. But the ideology and culture of neoliberalism [i.e. reworked and uplifted Reason, Individualism, and Freedom] will win the world -- not pure Objectivism.

These days almost all publicity is good publicity for Ayn Rand. She has a tremendous amount of truth, virtue, and intellectual power on her side. So even most mocking and insulting comments -- from the innocently ignorant, and her calculating enemies -- tend to advance her philosophy, and make her impact on the world deeper and stronger. Generally speaking, silence is her worst enemy. But if she's vastly misrepresented, and uniformly lied about, with the result that people don't much read her actual words, then that publicity may, in fact, actually hurt the ascent of her ideas and ideals to world domination.

On May 12, 2015, at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), at an intellectual symposium on eradicating poverty, President Barack Obama spoke of: Notwithstanding the contemptuous amusement of that brain-dead, empty-souled room of baboons, Ayn Rand is the greatest philosopher that ever lived during the past two thousand years. She knew far more about politics, government, and the law -- let alone about enriching the poor -- than everyone at that conference combined. Thus the hopeless nitwits and pitiful lowlifes at that symposium need to read Ayn Rand and learn from her -- not chuckle at some inaccurate, primitive caricature of her ideas. Lazy, arrogant, malicious, dimbulb Obama needs to study her most of all. To be sure, it isn't entirely easy to read Ayn Rand. She's a tremendous radical and philosophical world revolutionary. She's immensely controversial, by today's standards, and is arguably about five times as intense and ferocious as Friedrich Nietzsche. She's also very challenging personally and psychologically. Like the most extreme of political and religious fanatics, Rand can scare the living hell out of you. Karl Marx and Martin Luther are practically pikers next to her. And Ayn Rand frequently writes like a thundering prophet -- not a disquisitional sage. Whatever her strengths and demerits on this, she doesn't quietly, coolly, ruminatively, patiently, systematically lay out the truth for her readers to slowly and dispassionately peruse. Far more Rand tends to startle and stun. Still, almost everything she says radiates simple rationality, common sense, familiar experience, and aspects of the obvious. So people most assuredly should make the effort to learn what she has to teach. Rand writes in a kind of direct, non-nonsense, fierce, stylized, middlebrow manner, without much jargon or intellectual complexity, which is relatively easy to comprehend. This is especially so if the reader begins at the beginning, and tries to read the easy stuff first. You may need to read some of it twice and think it thru rather carefully. But in considering her enormously powerful and important ideas you need to evaluate her writings on your own, and in your own way, deriving whatever truth or value you can get from them, if any. Do not take anyone's word on the material, including mine. The best way to initially approach the surprising, amazing, thrilling, exacting philosophy of Ayn Rand, probably, is to brace yourself for both raw intellectual newness, and for a subtly hectoring, judgmental, fierce, intellectual style, which will sometimes resemble a fire-and-brimstones sermon. Moreover Rand -- in all her relentless radicalism and revolutionism -- sometimes judges her readers, and presumed intellectual opponents, as evil even before she presents her avant-garde ideas to them. Obviously this isn't fair, professional, or properly philosophical. But Rand is a ruthless fighter seeking to overwhelm and overthrow the world's philosophical, cultural, social, and political status quo. And she seeks this apocalypse now. For all this, however, Ayn Rand's ideas are still quite accessible and comprehensible, generally. They're even rather friendly, hopeful, and inspiring. And, should you prefer it, there are a decent number of philosophical summaries and introductions out there with which to get you started. Ayn Rand is a one-person Second Enlightenment, and probably has as much to impart and educate as Bacon, Locke, Smith, Voltaire, Jefferson, Mises, Hayek, and Friedman combined. So she's imminently worth reading and being informed by. Rand can also significantly alter and enhance your entire life. Ayn Rand and her dynamic, noble philosophy have the ability to massively intellectually educate, morally uplift, and spiritually exalt. Sadly, our world today is a philosophical and cultural Dark Age. But Rand constitutes a superlative antidote. She's a virtual supernova of intellectual, moral, and spiritual enlightenment.

Happy birthday Michael, and thanks for Objectivist Living!

I wonder if by any chance that Vanity Fair cover photo of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner in post #69 was minutely airbrushed or photoshopped?

Even a handful of nukes in the hands of Islamic activists is an unspeakable menace for the West and America. Even one in the hands of ISIS is a nightmare to contemplate. This horrific objective threat needs to be eliminated.