News: Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns


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Every now and then I go to YouTube, search for Ayn Rand, and sort by upload date, to see if anything new has come along. That’s how I found what I called the Biographers Summit. Anyway, I did the same today, and there’s this new rant against Jennifer Burns that is either disgusting or incredibly funny, your mileage may vary. I’m not sure I’d be posting this if it weren’t such a slow Sunday here on OL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXxU43qOfC8

So yes, there are people like this out there. What a silly person, he needs to wear a bib to catch the drool. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the name and face on a fundy site at some point. There’s a choice quote at the end, I don’t expect all of you to make it that far: “I would rather talk to Noam Chomsky than talk to some schmuck from the Cato Institute!”duh.gif

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This rant by Ryan D Jamieson is proof that one can actually do worse, much worse than the Ayn Rand Institute.

Kinda reminds me of Beavis and Butthead commenting on music videos...

Robert Campbell

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Burns is subject to all sorts of criticism. In the end she takes conventional ideas for granted, and fails to understand her subject.

The problem with Jamieson is not that he wants to criticize Burns, but that rather than writing out his thoughts and then expressing them clearly, he rages off the cuff, incoherently, as if we would want to hear him do so.

My recommendation would be to delete the above link to youtube. There is no real value in commenting on this stuff, and he doesn't deserve the publicity.

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Actually I think it is good to leave it up.

Jennifer wrote a good, well-researched book. Agree with it or not, it is not a sloppy amateur job. And it has been well received on the market, going mainstream.

What has this guy done?

If he wants to put videos up sniggering unintelligible utterances in a superior snarky attitude, it might be a good idea to get a few achievements under his belt. Then someone might take him seriously.

But my purpose isn't to look down on him as he looks down on others. I find other value in it. I think it is a good sample of something to point to as an example.

Glenn Beck has been hammering at an attitude present in liberal intellectuals (mostly in the press, but actually throughout history), generally of the Ivy League progressive sort. And boy, do they need hammering. It's good to see someone with an audience finally do it. These mediocre souls think that "other people" are too "styewped" to think for themselves, so they need to think for everyone and graciously take on the sacrifice (sigh) and become the self-appointed "thinkers for the masses," presumably in order to take care of all those poor things.

But it generally plays out that their real reason is to dance and prance in front of their in-crowd and play like they are the masters of the universe, lording over the hapless cattle that is humanity, them, of course, being the inherently superior sort that they are. It would be funny in the manner all pompous sanctimonious crap is, except those are exactly the people who pave the way for genocide.

And that is no laughing matter.

Well, we get this sort over here in O-Land and l-land, too. They think that people are too "styewped" to understand Ayn Rand. God knows the common folks don't think for themselves (burp), since if they did, they would agree with Rand without a second thought. Actually, they would own up to their role as intellectual inferiors (snicker).

This dude is a perfect example of that crap. And he's not the only one.

But if he thinks it is cool to leave that kind of mediocre excess of his up on YouTube, I think it is cool to point to it as a good example of what I find it deplorable to do and be in life, especially while waving the banner of Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

Maybe, by his ridiculous example, he will inspire some of the jerks in our neck of the woods to look at themselves.

It's embarrassing to be that, I don't care what your philosophy, politics or religion is.

Michael

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My recommendation would be to delete the above link to youtube. There is no real value in commenting on this stuff, and he doesn't deserve the publicity.

Too late, it’s already out there. Chalk it up to a slow news day. I think I gave fair warning.

Maybe, by his ridiculous example, he will inspire some of the jerks in our neck of the woods to look at themselves.

Indeed. I think this guy took a double serving of Kool-Aid at OCON, something like that. He does achieve something rare, however, he makes me look back on Lindsay Perigo’s rants wistfully. Almost.

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I actually couldn't finish listening to that clip. In addition to the stupidity of focusing on the word 'libertarian' over and over again like a five year old it's as if the guy couldn't utter any sentence other than "I don't want fillintheblanks on my team."

I hope he has a designated driver.

> makes me look back on Lindsay Perigo’s rants wistfully

Mr. Perigo was at least literate. He could vary the subjects, verbs, and prepositional phrases in his sentences. Come up with some imaginative invective.

I had to stop the clip after a minute because I was getting a flash back listening to a drunken senior freshman year at a frat party at 4 AM after he's had about seventeen beers and just before he's about to puke in the flower pot on the mantelpiece.

Edited by Philip Coates
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I dunno, Brant.

Clemson was ranked the #2 party school in the country a few years ago. That's one accolade that our administration didn't put on its brag sheets...

Robert Campbell

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An interesting but not very good movie starring Burt Lancaster was filmed at Clemson in 1973: The Midnight Man. I liked it because Burt wasn't over-acting as he sometimes did if the script called for it, something I think of as forced charisma as in The Rainmaker. This is not to be confused with his extraordinarily strong screen presence. I also liked him in Atlantic City for the same reason. He really excelled as a trapeze artist in a movie about a circus. The man did his own stunts, being extremely competent athletically.

--Brant

master of digression

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I dunno, Brant.

Clemson was ranked the #2 party school in the country a few years ago. That's one accolade that our administration didn't put on its brag sheets...

Robert Campbell

My Mother wanted to go to the University of Pennsylvania--some school in that state--circa 1932. Her parents insisted on Antioch not realizing its outrageous reputation for licentiousness. My Father, taking advantage of the situation and Mom, had to marry her. The rest is history.

--Brant

party on, America, party on

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  • 4 months later...

Recently, Dr. Edwin Locke has posted a critique of Jennifer Burns' book on his website:

www.edwinlocke.com/Edwin_A_Locke_Comments_on_Burns.pdf

There's been no public comment on it so far, except over at SOLOP:

http://www.solopassion.com/node/8185

Neil Parille has gone through a number of the points in the critique and shown that Locke scarcely bothered to read Goddess of the Market.

You may want to skip past the customary chorus of abuse from the Perigonian remnant, including Ellen Stuttle.

Meanwhile, I'm convinced that Locke hasn't read The Passion of Ayn Rand. I wonder how many ARIans actually have.

It's sad to see a man who has been a major contributor to applied psychology (particularly the industrial-organizational variety) writing like a middle-grade apparatchik who wouldn't know scholarship if it jumped up and bit him.

Robert Campbell

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There's been no public comment on it so far, except over at SOLOP:

http://www.solopassion.com/node/8185

Wow, caught with both hands in the cookie jar.

Neil Parille has gone through a number of the points in the critique and shown that Locke scarcely bothered to read Goddess of the Market.

Looks like he read it alright, but with an industrial strength Valliantquoter in hand measuring where he could trim, ellipse, and twist to produce his rebuttal.

You may want to skip past the customary chorus of abuse from the Perigonian remnant, including Ellen Stuttle.

What kind of a rebuttal is it to claim an opponent lives with their mother and downloads porn all day? It's like being in 6th grade.

It's sad to see a man who has been a major contributor to applied psychology (particularly the industrial-organizational variety) writing like a middle-grade apparatchik who wouldn't know scholarship if it jumped up and bit him.

I brought him as a speaker, he’s really well known in the management departments at business schools. I don’t remember how many, but I let professors come to the pre and post get togethers (come to think of it, they may have picked up the dinner tab), there were maybe 10, all eager to meet him in person.

A funny story: I picked him up at the airport, and the instructions were that I was supposed to carry a copy of Atlas Shrugged. My copy of that one was a paperback that I'd lent out a couple times, so it was a little ratty and old, but I had a new, perfect reproduction of the first edition hardcover of The Fountainhead, so I took that instead. His first words to me were: You're supposed to be carrying Atlas Shrugged.

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There's been no public comment on it so far, except over at SOLOP:

http://www.solopassion.com/node/8185

Wow, caught with both hands in the cookie jar.

Neil Parille has gone through a number of the points in the critique and shown that Locke scarcely bothered to read Goddess of the Market.

Looks like he read it alright, but with an industrial strength Valliantquoter in hand measuring where he could trim, ellipse, and twist to produce his rebuttal.

You may want to skip past the customary chorus of abuse from the Perigonian remnant, including Ellen Stuttle.

What kind of a rebuttal is it to claim an opponent lives with their mother and downloads porn all day? It's like being in 6th grade.

It's sad to see a man who has been a major contributor to applied psychology (particularly the industrial-organizational variety) writing like a middle-grade apparatchik who wouldn't know scholarship if it jumped up and bit him.

I brought him as a speaker, he’s really well known in the management departments at business schools. I don’t remember how many, but I let professors come to the pre and post get togethers (come to think of it, they may have picked up the dinner tab), there were maybe 10, all eager to meet him in person.

A funny story: I picked him up at the airport, and the instructions were that I was supposed to carry a copy of Atlas Shrugged. My copy of that one was a paperback that I'd lent out a couple times, so it was a little ratty and old, but I had a new, perfect reproduction of the first edition hardcover of The Fountainhead, so I took that instead. His first words to me were: You're supposed to be carrying Atlas Shrugged.

THAT should have given you the measure of him right there...

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  • 6 years later...

Ayn Rand is dead. Liberals are going to miss her.

Quote

Now Rand is on the shelf, gathering dust with F.A. Hayek, Edmund Burke and other once-prominent conservative luminaries. It’s no longer possible to provoke the elders by going on about John Galt. Indeed, many of the elders have by now used Randian references to name their yachts, investment companies and foundations.

Instead, young insurgent conservatives talk about “race realism ,” argue that manipulated crime statistics mask growing social disorder and cast feminism as a plot against men. Instead of reading Rand, they take the “red pill”, indulging in an emergent internet counter-culture that reveals the principles of liberalism — rights, equality, tolerance — to be dangerous myths. Beyond Breitbart.com, ideological energy on the right now courses through tiny blogs and websites of the Dark Enlightenment, the latter-day equivalent of Rand’s Objectivist Newsletter and the many libertarian ’zines she inspired.

Once upon a time, professors tut-tutted when Rand spoke to overflow crowds on college campuses, where she lambasted left and right alike and claimed, improbably, that big business was America’s persecuted minority. She delighted in skewering liberal audience members and occasionally turned her scorn on questioners. But this was soft stuff compared with the insults handed out by Milo Yiannopoulos and the uproar that has greeted his appearances. Rand may have accused liberals of having a “lust for power,” but she never would have called Holocaust humor a harmless search for “lulz,” as Yiannopoulos gleefully does.

Indeed, the new ideas on the right have moved away from classical liberalism altogether. American conservatives have always had a mixed reaction to the Western philosophical tradition that emphasizes the sanctity of the individual. Religious conservatives, in particular, often struggle with Rand because her extreme embrace of individualism leaves little room for God, country, duty or faith. But Trump represents a victory for a form of conservatism that is openly illiberal and willing to junk entirely the traditional rhetoric of individualism and free markets for nationalism inflected with racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

Mixed in with Rand’s vituperative attacks on government was a defense of the individual’s rights in the face of a powerful state. This single-minded focus could yield surprising alignments, such as Rand’s opposition to drug laws and her support of legal abortion. And although liberals have always loved to hate her, over the next four years, they may come to miss her defense of individual autonomy and liberty. Ayn Rand is dead. Long live Ayn Rand!

 

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1 hour ago, william.scherk said:

Excerpt from the passage William quoted:

Quote

But Trump represents a victory for a form of conservatism that is openly illiberal and willing to junk entirely the traditional rhetoric of individualism and free markets for nationalism inflected with racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

So Burns misses the boat too, along with multiple O'ists.

Ellen

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Jennifer Burns expertise on Ayn Rand runs quite shallow.

So too what Trump is about vs who's been running this country since the 1930s--the Marxists. He doesn't know he has them by the throat and that's why they're kicking and screaming. So he kicks them in the balls too boot.

Most of them don't even know they're Marxists. It's been Marxism all along.

Trump is actually clearing the way for Rand in a way that needs to be prepared for in that Rand notions of morality and human nature are deficient. So too is her utopianism and what I call "top-downism." Rand took on the elites with her own contrived elites as if one could replace the other. That happened when this country was founded. Now it's the coming time for true individualism, which is essentially egalitarian. We've got 4 - 8 years before the most wrong people retake control.

Trump is the opposite of Rand's passive-aggressive approach. He's a barger-inner, fixit-upper. We know who John Galt is, but where is he in all this? Working as a laborer in the tunnels of Grand Central Station?

--Brant

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I finally read the article.

20 hours ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

So Burns misses the boat too, along with multiple O'ists.

Ellen,

I agree that Jennifer and a whole host of Objectivists missed the boat with President Trump. They still refuse to see his focus on rational human achievement--not in words, but in actions. Fortunately, they will have to see it. When the bulldozers and cement trucks show up, it's hard to ignore them. :) 

9 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Trump is actually clearing the way for Rand in a way that needs to be prepared for in that Rand notions of morality and human nature are deficient. So too is her utopianism and what I call "top-downism."

Brant,

Ayn Rand had two main weapons in her arsenal of how to treat enemies: she would denounce and reject them, or she would have her fictional characters destroy or abandon what they (the heroes) had created. Someone like Ragnar Danneskjöld was a huge exception and, even then, he was a repo guy, not a warrior out to destroy an enemy.

President Trump, in addition to being a producer, is a warrior who takes the fight to the enemy. We have needed an archetype for this in O-Land for a long time. It's refreshing (to me at least) to admire a winner (Trump) who beats enemies in an open fight, not just quitters (Randian heroes) who beat enemies because they walk away in disgust and let the enemies destroy themselves.

President Trump didn't start the fights he faced in his run for the presidency, but he sure as hell won, or is posed to win, every one up to now.

Winning is good, especially against evil.

Losing is not bad (unless one loses to an evil enemy), but it sure ain't as inspiring as winning.

Michael

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20 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Jennifer Burns expertise on Ayn Rand runs quite shallow.

So too what Trump is about vs who's been running this country since the 1930s--the Marxists. He doesn't know he has them by the throat and that's why they're kicking and screaming. So he kicks them in the balls too boot.

Most of them don't even know they're Marxists. It's been Marxism all along.

Trump is actually clearing the way for Rand in a way that needs to be prepared for in that Rand notions of morality and human nature are deficient. So too is her utopianism and what I call "top-downism." Rand took on the elites with her own contrived elites as if one could replace the other. That happened when this country was founded. Now it's the coming time for true individualism, which is essentially egalitarian. We've got 4 - 8 years before the most wrong people retake control.

Trump is the opposite of Rand's passive-aggressive approach. He's a barger-inner, fixit-upper. We know who John Galt is, but where is he in all this? Working as a laborer in the tunnels of Grand Central Station?

--Brant

What I liked best in Burns' book - and I thought that she did this part sensitively - was early material in which she described Rand's coming to the U.S. fleeing Soviet dictatorship and finding the U.S. intelligentsia being infused by Marxist thought.

However, I think that Burns doesn't understand Objectivism well, and that she's fairly affected by Marxist thought herself.

I agree that "Trump is actually clearing the way for Rand in a way that needs to be prepared for [...]."

I hope you're mispredicting though, Brant, re "the most wrong people retak[ing] control" after 4-8 years.

Maybe "the most wrong people" will be so done for they can't retake control.

Ellen

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I liked Burns' book and also Heller's.  I hope some day there will be a biography that incorporates all of the relevant material (such is the ARI Archives).  But that being said, I don't have any reason to think that the three Rand biographies will be shown ton be "arbitrary assertions."

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Rand had a GREAT idea for a novel--''The Strike"--and she went for it/at it ruthlessly and logically. Kudos. "Who is John Galt?" Not her. She was a fighter. Gods don't fight. They recuse themselves.

But that Atlas Shrugged was some kind of be all to end all is an implicit fallacy commonly shared by her acolytes, me included. Branden took that and ran with it with the Nathaniel Branden Institute--right into a dead end. Peikoff kept going, kind of, sort of and has now petered out. It's more than his age.

Objectivism is dead. Long live Objectivism!

--Brant

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19 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Rand had a GREAT idea for a novel--''The Strike"--and she went for it/at it ruthlessly and logically. Kudos. "Who is John Galt?" Not her. She was a fighter. Gods don't fight. They recuse themselves.

But that Atlas Shrugged was some kind of be all to end all is an implicit fallacy commonly shared by her acolytes, me included. Branden took that and ran with it with the Nathaniel Branden Institute--right into a dead end. Peikoff kept going, kind of, sort of and has now petered out. It's more than his age.

Objectivism is dead. Long live Objectivism!

--Brant

Atlas Shrugged was not holy writ.  It was an alternate time line novel....

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I like Jennifer Burns though she once referred to Objectivism as a “creed” (my guess is after coming under the guns of the ARS.) I wish she would write more about Rand. If you and Rand go back that far, do you remember what it was like when you were 16 or so years old? It was like an explosion went off in my brain, to me! Jennifer's book has a proud spot on my desk. 

Peter

 

From “The Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right,” by Jennifer Burns, pages 217 and 218: Far from welcoming the swelling in Objectivist ranks, Rand was increasingly suspicious of those who claimed to speak in her name, even the Ayn Rand campus clubs, which germinated spontaneously at many of the nation’s top colleges and universities, including Boston University, Dartmouth, MIT, Stanford, and Columbia, began to bother her, for they used her name without her supervision. In May 1965 Nathan issued a rebuke and a warning to the campus clubs in The Objectivist Newsletter. He and Rand were particularly concerned about the names those organizations might choose. Nathan explained that names such as Ayn Rand Study Club were appropriate, whereas names such as The John Galt Society were not. “As a fiction character, John Galt is Miss Rand’s property; he is not in the public domain,” Nathan argued.

 

He also spelled out the proper nomenclature for those who admired Rand’s ideas. The term Objectivist was “intimately and exclusively associated with Miss Rand and me,” he wrote. “A person who is in agreement with our philosophy should describe himself, not as an Objectivist, but as a student or a supporter of Objectivism.” At a later date, when the philosophy had spread further, it might be possible for there to be more than two Objectivists. Further, any campus club that wished to issue a newsletter should indicate their agreement with Objectivism but make clear that they were not official representatives of the philosophy. Nathan closed with a strong attack against another group of Rand readers, the “craven parasites” who sought to use Objectivism for non-Objectivist ends. Into this category fell anyone who advocated political anarchism and anyone who tried to recruit NBI students into schemes for a new free market nation or territory. end quote

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/10/2010 at 9:01 PM, Roger Bissell said:

As for why Tara Smith ... if the reports I have received are correct. Smith is a lesbian. ...

"reports I have received" -- what does that mean?

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