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On May 12, 2015, at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), at an intellectual symposium on eradicating poverty, President Barack Obama spoke of:

"...cold-hearted, free market, uh, capitalist-types who, uh, you know, are reading Ayn Rand...[slow derisive laughter from crowd]...and, uh, you know, think everybody's moochers [sic]..."

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.

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The more she's mentioned the more she'll be read. It doesn't matter if Obama dumps on her. The brains will be curious and go read her.

In the 1960s the basic intelligentsia ploy was to ignore her. That dam has burst.

--Brant

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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.

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The Altas Society promulgates Ayn Rand's philosophy. www.atlassociety.org

A literal handful of college activists started Students For Liberty in 2008. The SFL movement is still growing nearly exponentially and is in over one thousand campuses worldwide. SFL holds conferences in greater number each year, now over fifty. It is driven by the student activists who recruit others to the cause, read, discuss, listen to reason, establish beachheads in still more colleges and high schools.

SFL is allied with The Atlas Society and other organizations within the individual freedom movement, e.g. www.fff.org, www.fee.org, www.mises.org

Young Americans For Liberty started on college campuses in 2008 and is now on over 500 campuses. www.YALiberty.org

Recently they reported over 204,000 student activists and still growing.

The focus of each SFL and YAL is Liberty. Ayn Rand is the most ardent advocate of individual liberty with the most rational defense of individual freedom right down to basic premises. Nothing in her philosophy is taken on faith. Objectivism is a breath of fresh air compared to the faith based assertions of those who promise eternal life after death in return for abandonment of ones own judgment.

At the rate these intelligent college and high school activists are going they will be present on virtually very campus in the country and the world and no one will be unaware of their existence. They are sure to be ignored by the Establishment to begin with. They are able to find professors to advise their local group who advocate individual freedom thanks to the works of Ayn Rand, von Mises, and so many others in the movement.

It is conceivable to me, as usual, that they will number in the hundreds of thousands and then the millions very quickly. Tens of millions is within their reach soon after and then they will be able to influence the course of history.

Lots of generators generating generations of generators.

Donate to the cause: www.studentsforliberty.org and www.YALiberty.org

They are not top down organizations. It is all done by the student activists with help from the top in terms of what works.

The power of compounding is thought to be the most powerful force in the universe according to Albert Einstein.

Endless doubling and redoubling until individual liberty wins once and for all time.

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the ascent of her ideas and ideals to world domination.

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.

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Lady at the party "How come no one knows when a philosopher dies?"

Francisco, "Eventually they do."

A...

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the ascent of her ideas and ideals to world domination.

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. reason, individualism, freedom] will win the world -- not pure Objectivism.

Philosophy doesn't do anything. It just is. It's all about people. People advance (most don't), for many reasons, economic ones for instance (or even regress), not just philosophical ones.

--Brant

everybody has a philosophy, which goes through age from growth and plasticity to rock hard and unchangeable--philosophy on a page has a long ways to go to much effect that

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