I completely disagree with you about being inspired by her is like being inspired by Hitler. Hitler's philosophy was a complete sham on every level, and contradicts itself numerous times. Objectivism's foundation works well on many levels. Personal aspiration, bettering yourself, valuing logic and knowledge over emotions, those types of things are valuable to an extent.

Objectivism is ultra-logical in the end, very much the same as Social Darwinism. Fundamentally, those ideas have value in some situations and settings. A business for example, in the end, if an employee is not doing his or her job, it's not necessarily the business's job to figure out why unless it's within their self-interest to do so, and they shouldn't have to think that stuff through in every single instance. They should have the flexibility to fire someone in that instance without a second thought about the social ramifications.

It ultimately is a societal problem though that this employee be taken care of as a member of society, which is where Objectivism falls on its face, among other areas. Another one is Objectivism really has terrible implications in many aspects of parenting, to put it mildly.

I was personally inspired by Ayn Rand in high school quite honestly. She made me care about philosophy, about achieving the most I could achieve via hard work and self-determination, to learn how to critically think and use reason, to be OK to not conform necessarily to group think, etc. Just like every ideology, it's not perfect, and following it to a T just doesn't work, just like any other ideology and philosophy we may encounter and blend into our own as we age and grow. But it made me want to learn more, achieve more, and think more.

You can do a lot worse than that, IMO, you know, like Fascism. :-)

Boo! That had nothing to do with Ayn Rand or Objectivism. This was anti-pacifier, whereas John Galt & Co had their cigarettes stamped with the sign of the dollar.

But, Horray for the Great Escape homage. It just had no teeth for a smackdown against the GOP/Right Wingnuts. I expected more...

Ayn Rand's philosophy is definitely responsible for many of the 21st Century's ills.
If I had to choose among Fascism, Communism, Monarchism and Objectivism for the one which was to survive beyond the 20th Century, I'm not at all sure I would have picked Objectivism.

I think the first 5 minutes was the most important part of the conversation. It's bigger than both men and he's got a point. The burden of proof in "journalism" has been on a downward trend for the last 10-20 years and sites like Salon have decided to just throw it out the window outright.

What they've discovered is that spreading "based on a true story" style journalism is much more profitable than traditional journalism and their (relatively) new and growing religion allows them to do it without sin.

This religion is much more damaging than any popular, established religion in practice today. This religion doesn't need buildings or ordained practitioners. This religion creates its own propaganda as a side effect of its practice. Its worshipers can often hide in plain sight and subvert civilization for years without direct personal repercussions; in fact they are often rewarded for their behavior.

The religion is Objectivism, and its deity is "the invisible hand". When your morality is judged by your profit than you've undone a core pillar of civilization. The damage of all other practiced religions in the modern era pale in comparison.

The first five minutes of this video were the only part of this conversation that were relevant to the real challenges of our times.

The original video attacked the ideology. this guy attacked the person and made it personal. Big diff.

again we're seeing more tearing down of the existing system and no building up of your system. It's a huge strawman. No one says gov't is perfect. We just went through a large wave of criticizing problems with the police. we are quite aware of the many flaws.

Even Lantern's obsessive defense of the cops is far more rational and understandable than advocating complete removal of the police force and disbanding gov't

As for the Ayn Rand thing, another strawman. I never brought up Objectivism. Ayn Rand hates gov't. non-statists hate gov't. it's pretty easy to see how they're linked. taking benefits from something you despise isn't very cool. If she were so principled, she would have left gov't altogether and never paid into it. She also tried to hide taking the benefits by doing so under her husband's name if I recall correctly.

Whoops, well, for all the objectivism displayed here, it still looks to me like one side of the coin. Aside from the comments from the folks I have ignored on the sift, I don't see any criticism of the USA or very much criticism of Christianity. I don't really want to be that guy, but just remember that especially in the last decade our international reputation among countries on the receiving end of bombs has gone down the crapper. All of these "opinion polls" are trying to link Islam with anti-US sentiments and methods (eg. terrorism), when it's only demonstrating the correlation. Obviously if we bomb a predominantly Muslim country and innocents die, how do you think poll results would lean among Muslims in that country? How would your religious demographic feel if Russia bombed Manhattan and killed a dozen random citizens? What about if we had no Army, Navy, or Air Force, and these bombings happened every week?

Meanwhile, citing statistics from a website which has a clear agenda of being a hit-piece on Islam is a fucking ridiculous idea. Come on, guys. If that website lists 300 polls which emphasize their point, do you think they will include a reference to even one poll which disputes it? If they sifted through thousands of polls just to find those 300, would you still have statistical confidence in their results? I admit that the multitude of sources they pulled polls from is initially impressive, but the #1 goal of statistics is to eliminate bias, and that website is pure uncut bias.

I am not a supporter of Objectivism, but to say Ayn Rand didn't support anything, but was only against things isn't accurate. She was passionately in favor of capitalism, reason, science, and individual rights. Her biggest weakness was as unwavering belief that she was right, and everyone else was wrong without any doubts whatsoever, even when the evidence was practically slapping her in the face because if something contradicted her philosophy, it had to be wrong.

Her affair with Nathaniel Branden was a perfect example. You can't say she was anti-marriage. She was however passionately in favor of affairs in marriage if one felt as she did about Branden, even as her husband and his wife drank themselves into oblivion in a feable attempt to cope.

If you think she was simply contrarian, then you completely missed what her ideas were.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'ayn rand, john oliver, last week tonight, why is she still athing, objectivism' to 'ayn rand, john oliver, last week tonight, why is she still a thing, objectivism' - edited by calvados

Objectivism doesn't ally very well with the current GOP party, actually. Objectivism is very much against gov't cronyism. Also, Objectivism is extremely liberal on social issues.

It is true that Objectivism is very closely aligned with libertarianism, but that ain't the Tea Party socially.

When you take into account her personal history, her "philosophy" becomes a bit more understandable. Her family lost everything to the Communist revolution when she was a little girl. Thus, her life's ambition was to prevent Communism from gaining any foothold. Objectivism is the result. A philosophy of "not" Communism. If a communist is for it, she's against it. At least in public where it counts.

This makes it perfect cover for the Republican party of No, who built their modern philosophy of government on the same foundation. No to anything the Democrats support.

This.
Objectivism is the political equivalent of Young Adult Fantasy.

“I’d been kind of an Ayn Rand guy before that,” he said. “And then you go to Asia and you see people who are genuinely poor and genuinely suffering and hadn’t gotten there by whining.” While on a break in Singapore, walking back to his hotel in the middle of the night, he stopped by an excavation site and “saw these shadows scuttling around in the hole. And then I realized the shadows were old women, working the night shift. Oh, I thought, Ayn Rand doesn’t quite account for this.”
-- George Saunders, on his time in Asia during the 90s.

more taxation = theft BS. By living here you are agreeing to be taxed to pay for things we all need. Like that pesky police force we all agree is necessary to a just state.

if you live here, you agree with these terms, thus no theft. If you don't like taxation, get out.

yet again we have this hypocrisy. when we agree to the terms of a contract when dealing with private business, no one complains when a business holds you to your end of the bargain. but when gov't tries to collect taxes you agree to pay and tries to hold you to your end of the bargain, suddenly it's this horrible thing.

If you want something, you have to pay for it and Libertarianism is just a way of saying "I want to get away with doing something that I know harms people" or "I want something but I don't want to have to pay for it" wrapped in delusion of freedom.

people throw around the word freedom but in reality, as @ChaosEngine pointed out. you give people freedom and they use it to fuck over other people. We haven't evolved to the point where we can realiably count on people not to fuck each other over. Someday maybe that will happen, but it certainly isn't today.

Voluntaryism is just Objectiveism and Meritocracy trying to divorce itself from the negative stigma of Ayn Rand. rebranding a failed idea to get gullible people to fall for it again. Legitimized avarice.

boy I sure didn't miss blankfist's one note charlie obsession with statism.

Did the people who come up with these ideas completely ignore the lessons they learned when they first became adults? When we're growing up, we hated our parents for imposing rules on us, when we first become adults and we have a first taste of freedom, we go nuts, we do extremely stupid things, harmful things. most adults do eventually learn that these things are harmful and *shock* learn to impose limits on themselves. Eventually they come to realize that their parents weren't jerks after all and they generally did have a good reason to impose rules on us. Sure there some shitty parents out there and the children of those shitty parents throw out the rules that didn't work when they become adults, but guess what, they don't throw out the system, they just come up with different rules. hopefully those rules are better, if not, we just try again.

There is this false notion of an adversarial relation between gov't and the people. PEOPLE CREATED GOV'T!!! gov't is just the current method by which we impose limits on ourselves. just like we do as we grow up. Sure, we don't have a perfect system. get used to it. If gov't truly wasn't necessary, we would have ditched it a long time ago. someday we will have the ability to self limit ourselves without a self-created third party, but that isn't today.

Probably isn't ever going to change until we evolve genetic memory of our parents/ancestors or we develop a way to download knowledge/experience Matrix-style so that instead of learning the hard way to not touch a stove because it's hot, we just already know it at birth or an earlier age.

Williams James wrote about the value of religious experience. It tries to reconcile the disparity between reason and spirituality. This is the "code" that Penn is talking about. It does imply relativism over objectivism which does not gel with people of Penn's rationalistic ilk. His intuitions simply don't allow him to have these kind of contradictions whereas religious people do and also do not see them as contradictions hence their intuitions allow for a kind of dualism between the domain of the rational and the domain of religion. The people in the court are not admitting to the fallibility of their religious beliefs yet also denying the possibility of those same beliefs manifesting in such an obvious and concrete way. So they are at peace with being able to both affirm and deny the factual nature of their metaphysical beliefs without causing disharmony provided the transgression sufficiently big or small. Put it into the realm of the civic where personal gain or other self-serving and un-"virtuous" traits can be attributed and they can happily suspend their metaphysics in favour of the rational that Penn is able to apply to all situations.

It is a kind of metaphysical schizophrenia.

You have to wonder if she would still have faith in 'objectivism' if she were still alive today, considering how poorly the logic of her philosophy has fared.

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