What a load of bollocks. At ~ 4 minutes he starts talking about poor persecuted Ayn Rand and how it's impossible to have a reasoned conversation with a non-libertarian, because they instantly dismiss libertarian arguments.

Meanwhile the irony has gone sailing so far over his head it's practically in orbit.

It is perfectly possible to have an interesting reasoned discussion about libertarian values. I've had several myself on VS, where both sides made non-hyperbolic informed points. Ultimately libertarianism, like communism, is a failed ideology and there are many valid arguments against it.

you guys keep mistaking shiny's long winded-ness for intelligence.

Trying to read his posts is like trying to read Ayn Rand. I can only take so much self-importance and self-masturbatory rambling.

@bmacs27

Or, like every other perpetual motion cheater on the internet they just have some form of ducted air blowing across the top of the device.

They ought to have prisons where the prisoners learn remedial science all day long so they can send the perpetual motion nuts along with the dwfttw, young Earth, Intelligent Design, Ayn Rand, and all associated believers along with the climate change deniers there until they can pass a basic science aptitude test.

The world would be a better place.

Ayn Rand talking about the non-aggression principle among other things... Seems to me that her philosophy has more in common with Ralph Nader and Ron Paul than with Paul Ryan or anyone in either of the two major political parties.

very cool sift. Here's a little essay suggesting certain problems with Rand's philosophy
https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatwritings/errors-of-ayn-rand

its a little heavy handed, but a good counterweight to this piece. I think Ayn Rand is a great example of how brilliant philosophy does not translate into good politics - allow our philosophy to direct our science and our science to direct our lives, one tempered by the other, that's how to progress as a species. The sanctification of ideas is a dirty game, one i think Rand is guilty of playing a bit too much of.
</rant>

I agree. Fun video, but maybe it's because that I am fundamentally an introvert no matter how well I try to disguise it, but the whole thing felt like a huge DUH! to me.

So you're telling me that collaboration isn't always good? Sometimes you have to work alone? No shit sherlock! What's that? striking some sort of balance between collaboration and independent work is preferable to mindlessly succumbing to group think? Common sense much?

problem is, certain people will see this and take it too far and use it as a justification for Ayn Rand's philosophies and legitimize selfishness

A balance has to be struck. There is value in individualism and there is value in collaboration. just have to find the right mix and it's not always going to be the same mix.

Rand is proof that Republicans just really are incapable of learning from their mistakes.

McCain/Palin didn't win. Let's go further Right!!

The Robot and the Ayn Rand disciple didn't win, Let's go even further Right.

Republicans have moved the goalposts countless times that they have lost all perspective and are completely out of touch with the american public.. In reality, Obama is a moderate conservative but to the right, he's a flaming socialist muslim dictator.

The right is its own worst enemy. The party of Lincoln?? That hasn't been true for a long fucking time.

Rand was grandstanding for publicity. period. his filibuster was a huge strawman

Epistemological issues seem so central to everything. Within the libertarian devotion to reason that Chomsky has praised, two camps seem to be at odds with one another, in a kind of in-house brawl.
One camp holds the empiricist skeptics who also happen to favor scientific materialism (like Penn Jillette and James Randi and some others you may not have heard about, or maybe you have) and the other camp holds the natural law axiomatic-deductive philosophers who don't outright dismiss homeopathic medicine, for example, and who question flouride in the water.
We can broadly see at least seven different positions. One writer I enjoyed a bit in college, Robert Anton Wilson, seems to have accepted empiricism in conjunction with intuitive-mysticism as valid sources of knowledge but not axiomatic-deductive reasoning. He wrote a short piece on his opposition to natural law in "Natural Law and Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy." I don't think he developed his opposition thoroughly. He devoted more to his writing to oppose scientism (like double-bind dogmatic empiricism) with a whole book, "The New Inquisition."
Another position is that of Ayn Rand and her Objectivist followers who accepted neither intuitive-mystical knowledge nor much empiricism, but only (or mostly) axiomatic-deductive reasoning.
In my opinion, a stronger view accepts all three and tests theories against all three.

The State will tighten the leash when this gets too popular.

The Aristotle avatar still has to be programmed. Who will do so, Karl Marx or Ayn Rand?

Agreed. American conservatives have completely bastardized the term "libertarian". Modern American right libertarianism has nothing to do with liberty, it's capitalist fundamentalism. >> ^enoch:

rusty is talking about the twisted definition of libertarian we see bantered about in political circles these days.
but his commentary is spot on with the ripping giant vortex of mangled logic these zombified "libertarians" use to promote an ideology that was spike-injected into their brains.
and any libertarian that states that ayn rand inspired their political philosophy...
is by definition..
a cunt.

rusty is talking about the twisted definition of libertarian we see bantered about in political circles these days.
but his commentary is spot on with the ripping giant vortex of mangled logic these zombified "libertarians" use to promote an ideology that was spike-injected into their brains.

and any libertarian that states that ayn rand inspired their political philosophy...
is by definition..
a cunt.

Fuck, that mentality scares me.

As a former combat arms Marine, I've had countless hours behind the butt of an assault rifle and I still don't think I could have really done shit in a situation like Aurora. If I had a clear shot, sure, that's easy enough as long as I'm not shot first. But when you have people running around and screaming (not to mention the fucking smoke screen) I'd be very hesitant about returning fire.

Compare that to some 22 year old thinking he's Billy Badass who took a 4-hour concealed carry permit class. Suddenly he's fucking Rambo and thinks he can save the world. Never once do these idiots think about ANY of the details.



>> ^dag:

Couple of Ayn Rand loving freedom fighters. If we only these guys were at that Batman screening I'm sure they would have handled the situation well.

Ayn Rand's Influence on Alan Greenspan
In The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan describes the influence that Ayn Rand had on his intellectual development.

Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life. It hadn't taken long for us to have a meeting of the minds -- mostly my mind meeting hers -- and in the fifties and early sixties I became a regular at the weekly gatherings at her apartment. She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value. In that regard, our values were congruent -- we agreed on the importance of mathematics and intellectual rigor.

But she had gone far beyond that, thinking more broadly than I had ever dared. She was a devoted Aristotelian -- the central idea being that there exists an objective reality that is separate from consciousness and capable of being known. Thus she called her philosophy objectivism. And she applied key tenets of Aristotelian ethics -- namely, that individuals have innate nobility and that the highest duty of every individual is to flourish by realizing that potential. Exploring ideas with her was a remarkable course in logic and epistemology. I was able to keep up with her most of the time.

Rand's Collective became my first social circle outside the university and the economics profession. I engaged in the all-night debates and wrote spirited commentary for her newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte drawn to a whole new set of ideas. Like any new convert, I tended to frame the concepts in their starkest, simplest terms. Most everyone sees the simple outline of an idea before complexity and qualification set in. If we didn't, there would be nothing to qualify, nothing to learn. It was only as contradictions inherent in my new notions began to emerge that the fervor receded.

One contradiction I found particularly enlightening. According to objectivist precepts, taxation was immoral because it allowed for government appropriation of private property by force. Yet if taxation was wrong, how could you reliably finance the essential functions of government, including the protection of individuals' rights through police power? The Randian answer, that those who rationally saw the need for government would contribute voluntarily, was inadequate. People have free will; suppose they refused?

I still found the broader philosophy of unfettered market competition compelling, as I do to this day, but I reluctantly began to realize that if there were qualifications to my intellectual edifice, I couldn't argue that others should readily accept it. [...]

Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her. All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented. I was a talented technician, but that was all. My logical positivism had discounted history and literature -- if you'd asked me whether Chaucer was worth reading, I'd have said, "Don't bother." Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I'd learned. I began to study how societies form and how cultures behave, and to realize that economics and forecasting depend on such knowledge -- different cultures grow and create material wealth in profoundly different ways. All of this started for me with Ayn Rand. She introduced me to a vast realm from which I'd shut myself off.

From The Age of Turbulence, pp. 51-53. Omissions from the text are shown with bracketed ellipses. All other punctuation and spelling is from the original.

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/turbulence.html

>> ^Edgeman2112:

Why must life be always black and white? Why can't we be both greedy and helpful?


Polar opposites.
You might as well say, "Why can't the electrical charge of an electron be both positive and negative?"