All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

[9thdoctor]

Has anyone seen this before? The interviews don’t look new, particularly Nathaniel looks a good bit younger than he did in the Penn & Teller show a few months back. The show is pretty weird, the Rand stuff doesn’t tie in very well with the rest of the material, and the voiceover commentary isn’t quite accurate.

It seems the computers are taking over, and Ayn Rand’s sex life is to blame. Of course it doesn’t say that, but if you just skim the program I think that’s the impression you’ll come away with. Strange brew.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5jImWRREc&feature=player_embeddedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnSthwB6oMo&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsTYjXhgcg&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfYR-x_tUYs&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZqOVzbCpWU&feature=player_embedded

[Barbara Branden]

Good grief! I've rarely heard such gibberish. The whole thing is almost completely unintelligible. It sounds as if the present recession -- and the abysmal state of the worlld in general -- was caused by Ayn's disastrously mistaken view of computers, by her insistence that they would make government and government regulations unnecessary and would turn us all into "Randian heroes." This is, or course, utter nonsense.. Ayn had no such view of computers. In fact , she had no view of computers at all. She died before they had begun to be a part of our daily lives. I doubt if she ever saw a computer, much less used one or philosophized about their effects.

By the way. if parts of what I said made no sense, it's because you were hearing excerpts from my answers but not the questions I was answering. For the record, I do not believe that we don't need other people in our lives, that we can be perfectly happy totally alone. Nor did Rand believe it.

Barbara

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[syrakusos]

Good grief! I've rarely heard such gibberish. ... For the record, I do not believe that we don't need other people in our lives, that we can be perfectly happy totally alone. Nor did Rand believe it. Barbara

Nice to see you back. Thanks, also for the (unsurprising) clarifications. I mentioned here elsewhere that about a year ago, near the end of the semester, I ran into a fellow grad student working on a paper and he showed me a quote from Ayn Rand. It was vaguely Nietzschean and had the f-word in it. It came from some left wing website as an attribution. There is a lot of nonsense out there.

[9thdoctor]

Here are the two subsequent episodes. Ayn Rand doesn't appear in them, and they are even more bizarre, if possible, than the first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx2asuwcHj0&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0lWB-M_fpU