John Day

I can remember an NBI "Intro to objectivism" course where during the question and answer period the question from a student, who clearly cared about people, asked Ayn in one of those hesitant, halting ways of questioning the position of their "guruess" [< new word ?] as to whether, if there was one drugstore in this rural town and the man needed his prescription filled to save his child's life, and the drugest refused to come and open the pharmacy, would the man be justified in forcing the drugest at the point of a gun to save his child's life?

Her answer was cruel, as I saw it on that night in the Empire State Building.

Is this resolvable because it is a stance that clearly is not in anyone's comfort zone that I know.

"Morality ends where a gun begins." Once someone initiates force against another, that person has lost his claim to moral authority.

Jennifer Burns will be on "The Daily Show" tonight at 11 talking about "Goddess of the Market." I spent some time with the book today and I'm pleased to see that the book will be promoted to a mainstream audience. I'll post my thoughts on the interview later tonight.

Very well done, Ed. When I saw Moore on Nightline describing capitalism as going against all the "great religions" of the world, I found it to be one of the more remarkably consistent and spot-on statements he has ever made. He is merely the most consistent adherent to a flawed morality.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hUZamhqvPGVrYZpGq_clUpC7dAUg

NEW YORK — New York's iconic Empire State Building will light up red and yellow Wednesday in honor of the 60th anniversary of communist China.

The Chinese consul, Peng Keyu, and other officials will take part in the lighting ceremony which will bathe the skyscraper in the colors of the People's Republic until Thursday, Empire State Building representatives said in a statement.

The upper sections of the building are regularly illuminated to mark special occasions, ranging from all blue to mark "Old Blue Eyes" Frank Sinatra's death in 1998 to green for the annual Saint Patrick's Day.

Just last week the tower turned bright red.

However, that was not to mark some other communist achievement, but the 70th anniversary of the film "The Wizard of Oz" in which Dorothy wears ruby slippers rather than the silver of the original L. Frank Baum novel.

This is a truly unbelievable and outrageous story. The Empire State Building is one of the greatest symbols of American construction and enterprise and it wasn't by accident that Nathaniel Branden would want to have NBI's headquarters there. For it to be used as a propaganda tool of one the brutal regimes in history is abdication of American values.

Glenn Beck has a very strange charisma about him. I watch his show a few times a week for entertainment purposes and while I'm enthralled by Beck's manic personality, I don't think much of him as a serious thinker. He goes into bromides far too often, his War Room scenarios set themselves up for parody and he rarely addresses the country's real deficit problem of Medicare and Social Security.

I did find it interesting that he told Katie Couric that he thought McCain would be worse for the country than Obama. I don't agree with him on this, but it at least shows that he's not a Republican hack.

John, thanks for the tip. I'll try to soon take a listen to the first one particularly to see if I like his approach.

Where will I find it...buried on the ARI or ARC website?

Reason vs. Faith:

A Study of Galt's Speech: http://atlasshrugged.com/book/a-study-of-galts-speech.html

Enjoy!

Onkar Ghate's lecture series, "A Study of Galt's Speech" is worth listening to. He gets into the philosophic framework of Galt's words and demonstrates how the speech ties itself into the book's plot. I'd also suggest "Reason vs. Faith," a Q&A session he did along with Yaron Brook.

Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, has written a "review" of the two new Ayn Rand biographies that has very little to do with the actual books and is really just a slam on Republicans. (Much like Whitaker Chambers' review of Atlas Shrugged had very little to do with that book and was really just a slam on Rand's atheism) Will Wilkinson provides a takedown of Chait that also addresses some of the problems of Rand's philosophy. This is very worthwhile for any open Objectivist.

Now, I’m more than willing to snicker right along with Chait at ridiculously puffed-up computer engineers who threaten to “Go Galt” at the first hint of an impending tax hike while blithely enjoying the wage subsidy of the United State’s super-stingy H1-B visa cap. But he’s really just careless in conflating the views of Ayn Rand’s confused fans with Ayn Rand’s own. I’m delighted there are two important new books that take Rand seriously as a woman, writer, and thinker. It’s too bad that Chait uses their publication as an occasion to once again take a brave stand for the redistributive state.

I have been to several marches on Washington. The crowd size was clearly under estimated. The National Parks Service [don't you just love the names of these governmental entities] has a policy not to give out crowd estimates. I wonder when that policy went into effect.

It was after the Million Man March in 1995. The NPS estimated an attendance of 400,000 while the organizers claimed it over one million and Louis Farrakhan threaten to sue. Congress prohibited the NPS from making attendance estimates in 1997.

I watched the thirteen episodes of the unfortunately canceled Kings on Hulu. The production values were fantastic ($4 million an episode!) and the concept of a 21st century absolute monarchy was very novel. Since Charlie's Angels was one of Ayn Rand's favorite, I'll probably give that a try.

Will Wilkinson, a libertarian writer I like and respect, recently wrote on his blog about how Marxists are still accepted by the intellectual community despite the overwhelming evidence showing Marxism as a destructive ideology. Unfortunately, Wilkinson fails to mention that it's bad premises that make a bad philosophy and that its victims are only the final result.

Here is a good debate proposition: It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx.

The most powerful way to argue the affirmative is to compare the number of human beings murdered by the devotees of each. That line of attack ought to be decisive, but I’m afraid it won’t get you far with the multitude of highly-self-regarded thinkers influenced by Karl Marx. Fact is, commitment to some kind of socialism and fluency in the jargon of Marxism used to be mandatory for serious intellectuals. And there’s something glamorous in the very idea of the intellectual. Even for those of us who came of age after 1989, Marxism, like cigarettes, remains linked by association to the idea of the intellectual, and so, like cigarettes, shares in the intellectual’s glamour. I don’t know if cigarettes or Marxism have killed more people, but it’s pretty clear cigarettes are more actively stigmatized. Marxists, neo-Marxists, crypto-Marxists, post-Marxists, etc. have an enduring influence on intellectual fashion. So it is not only possible proudly to confess Marx’s influence on one’s thought, but it remains possible in some quarters to impress by doing so. It ought to be embarrassing, but it isn’t. Being a bit of a Marxist is like having a closet full of pirate blouses but never having to worry.

Why am I thinking about this? Because I ran across this N+1 blog post by Benjamin Kunkel about a recently departed Marxist historian named Giovanni Arrighi. I had never heard of Giovanni Arrighi. Should I be embarrassed about this? I’m not, though I’m willing to be convinced. Kunkel seems impressed with himself for being impressed with Arrighi. I wonder whether this should be a source of embarrassment for Kunkel. Knowing nothing about Arrighi I can’t be sure, but I can suspect. Here is something Kunkel says:

Not the least way that Marxism is opposed to capitalism is in its relationship to time. Capitalist culture approaches a pure instantaneousness: no future, no past. Marxism, by contrast, is a discipline of deep memory and long anticipation. It situates the effervescent eternity of our current way of life in the long sequence of the modes of production, from hunter-gathering, to early agriculture, through slave society, feudalism, the notorious “Oriental despotism,” and our own capitalism as, over four centuries, it has swamped the globe.

Do you understand the point of contrasting actually-existing economic culture to a doctrine? Neither do I. Standard, non-Marxist economic history is not only better history, but equally sweeping. Should we therefore say that the New Institutionalist school of economic history, for example, “is opposed to capitalism in its relationship to time”? Not if we don’t want to sound silly.

Here’s another thing Kunkel says:

People in the rich countries live longer today than ever before, even as the lifespans of our ideas, our feelings, our commitments, our fashions, our jobs, and the objects with which we surround ourselves shrink and shrink. One lives one’s long life in a cloud of mayflies.

Perhaps the fear of marrying a mayfly, of being a mayfly, explains Kunkel’s enthusiasm for intellectual vintage. Whatever else Marxism may be (”a discipline of deep memory and long anticipation”!), it’s not a mayfly. Like other time-tested creeds, Marxism is safer than having perishable ideas of one’s own. Unlike most other time-tested creeds, it’s not embarrassing in Brooklyn, whether or not it should be.

I'll close this with one of my favorite exchanges in We The Living:

"I know what you're going to say, You're going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods."

"I loathe your ideals."

"Why?"

"For one reason, mainly, chiefly and eternally, no matter how much your Party promises to accomplish, no matter what paradise it plans to bring mankind. Whatever your other claims may be, there's one you can't avoid, one that will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell: your claim that man must live for the state."

Thanks for the responses, everyone. For the time being, I'll probably forgo Kant's works because it doesn't seem worth it to go through hundreds of pages of incompressible dreck just to find a few nuggets of information. Based on I've gone over, his epistemology doesn't seem that bad, but his notions of duty and ethics are a complete mess.

Ayn Rand described the philosophy of Immanuel Kant as "the exact opposite of Objectivism" and bigger evil than Hitler and Stalin because his philosophy set the stage for them. But under that standard, couldn't David Hume be considered a greater evil than all of them because he set the stage for Kant's philosophy? Based on what little I've read, Hume's skepticism and his rejection of the law of causality is more severe than Kant's. Could anyone try to clarify this for me?

Also, are Kant's original works worth reading to enhance one's understanding of his philosophy? How technical are his works? I greatly enjoy philosophic works, but for instance, I found Introduction to Objectivism Epistemology difficult to understand. Thanks in advance!

If they were to ever make a re-make of The Fountainhead, Jolie would be the perfect Dominique Francon, a passionately idealistic but irrational character. She's a good enough actress that she could plausibly take on Dagny, but I imaging Dagny as being much less sensual.

Laura Linney would be a solid Lillian Rearden.

Thanks for the welcome, everyone! It's hard for me to say how exactly I was introduced to Rand because no one ever recommended her novels to me and Objectivism was certainly never covered in any of my philosophy classes (to be fair, almost no 20th Century philosophy was). The earliest I can remember reading about Ayn Rand was after she was my top choice in a quiz on ethical philosophy. I liked her emphasis on individualism and her like of strong, rational men but at the time I was put off by her atheism.

I've had a casual awareness of Ayn Rand for some years, but I wasn't quite motivated to read her novels until fairly recently. In the last few months, I've read The Fountainhead, We The Living and will be starting Atlas Shrugged shortly. What I love about Ayn Rand's philosophy is that it provides a code of morality existing outside of blind faith, breaking free of the false choice of religion vs. subjectivism.

This is my first post, I'm fascinated by Ayn Rand and her philosophy and what to gain further understandings.