Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Prismatic Sphere]

You really gotta admire Stossel. I would never be able to retain my calm the way he does. His reaction was priceless though when that PC cunt said that the hunting vids' filmmakers should be locked up. He was probably thinking, "Oh how I wish I could just strangle the life out of you right now". I don't know that I would be able to maintain my composure.

IMO, it is time for temper tantrum nutboy, social conservative O'Reilly to get the fuck off the air and let this guy take over the main channel's primetime slot. America is now perfectly ready to hear libertarian ideas(which would have been unheard of 15 years ago) thanks largely to the Obama administration's anti-Midas touch.

 

[Badbird]

O'Reilly will stay on the air sadly because of his ratings. We can get rid of him along with Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck off Fox as well.

 

[Dak]

OReilly isn't conservative, he's a warmonger.

 

[Prismatic Sphere]

O'Reilly will stay on the air sadly because of his ratings. We can get rid of him along with Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck off Fox as well.

And I would endeavor to hire Nick Gillespie(Reason Magazine) and Michael Badnarik to take the place of the other two.

And I think that if Fox News took the risk, that Stossel would blow O'Reilly's ratings out of the water.

 

[Prismatic Sphere]

Also really good shit. Watch all six parts if you have the time.

 

[Dak]

Lol at the second guy saying that government provides quality public education, health care, and a clean environment.

 

[Pessimism]

I fucking hate Ayn Rand.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

^ Please please please explain why?

I would really love to hear(read) this!

 

[Cythraul]

Rand is not taken seriously at all by academic philosophers and is in fact derided by many of them. The snippets of her writings that I have read all looked very amateurish to me, like some community college dropout trying to do philosophy.

edit: well, I shouldn't say at all because that's not entirely accurate, but it's probably close enough.

 

[Matt]

I had one professor last year who loved Ayn Rand. Holy shit, what a fucking horrible class that was.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

@ Cyth, Can you provide me with some philosophers and/or links that debunk her philosophy specifically?

I'd like to read something that opposes her theories.

 

[Cythraul]

That's a pretty odd request. I don't know of any such links. Why do you need them anyway?

edit: I get the impression that Rand is largely ignored in academic philosophy, maybe because people in the discipline don't find it worth their time to engage with her works. Whenever I've heard her mentioned around other grad students she is only spoken of in disparaging terms. So the impression I get is that she is either ignored (she only very recently got an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) or derided for the most part. But there are serious academic philosophers who do take some of what she has to say seriously. John Hospers and Roderick Long are the ones I know of who do. I think this phenomenon is probably partly unfair and partly justified.

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

Rand had a brutal honesty about the way in which humanity would most effectively operate, and was thus viewed as being juvenile and unenlightened. I find her agenda of turning selfishness into a virtue to be ridiculous, though she does have some logically sound ideas.

 

[Badbird]

Ayn Rand lol lol lol lol lol

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

straw man lol

 

[Prismatic Sphere]

Ayn Rand lol lol lol lol lol

Brady/Birdy, if you ever did read Atlas Shrugged and then looked around at today's political and economic landscape, you wouldn't be laughing. You'd be turning the inside cover over and over again, looking at it and doing a double take and then be saying, "Holy SHIT! This was written in 1957???"

 

[Badbird]

Might check the book sometime if I have time. She seems to get mixed reviews for her books.

 

[Einherjar86]

Rand is not taken seriously at all by academic philosophers and is in fact derided by many of them. The snippets of her writings that I have read all looked very amateurish to me, like some community college dropout trying to do philosophy.

edit: well, I shouldn't say at all because that's not entirely accurate, but it's probably close enough.

I think most of the time she's disregarded and ignored because people disagree with her on a "moral" or personal level. She's constantly derided and shrugged aside by people at my university (or, where I attended university) because most students simply disagreed with her and thought what she argued was inhumane and irrational. However, most of them had never read her books. Their knowledge of her had been acquired from her Wikipedia page that they read and became convinced they were experts on.

edit: I get the impression that Rand is largely ignored in academic philosophy, maybe because people in the discipline don't find it worth their time to engage with her works. Whenever I've heard her mentioned around other grad students she is only spoken of in disparaging terms. So the impression I get is that she is either ignored (she only very recently got an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) or derided for the most part. But there are serious academic philosophers who do take some of what she has to say seriously. John Hospers and Roderick Long are the ones I know of who do. I think this phenomenon is probably partly unfair and partly justified.

She's ignored in literary circles for good reason: she's long-winded, she continuously repeats herself, her writing is heavily embellished and melodramatic, and she didn't belong to any particular movement (or at least, one that's worth much study). I find her writing slightly intriguing purely because of the fact Prismatic Sphere mentioned:

Brady/Birdy, if you ever did read Atlas Shrugged and then looked around at today's political and economic landscape, you wouldn't be laughing. You'd be turning the inside cover over and over again, looking at it and doing a double take and then be saying, "Holy SHIT! This was written in 1957???"

It is somewhat uncanny how she predicted the way certain government programs/institutions would conflict/interfere with the private sector.

EDIT: In all honesty, criticism on Rand is comprised of two camps, both of them heavily "pop-culture" in nature: a) the uneducated (concerning her works) liberal camp who comprehend only a rough caricature of her and use that as their benchmark for criticism against free market enterprise, and b) the conservative (or neocon) right-wing capitalists who have read her works, but utilize only the most basic premises of her economic theories and choose to ignore her other ideas concerning religion and other social institutions. Neither camp should be considered Rand experts.

 

[Prismatic Sphere]

It is somewhat uncanny how she predicted the way certain government programs/institutions would conflict/interfere with the private sector.

Yup. Right down to enjoying a juicy, fatty, delicious cheeseburger or a real cigarette only in an underground market.
Utterly, utterly eerie.

EDIT: In all honesty, criticism on Rand is comprised of two camps, both of them heavily "pop-culture" in nature: a) the uneducated (concerning her works) liberal camp who comprehend only a rough caricature of her and use that as their benchmark for criticism against free market enterprise, and b) the conservative (or neocon) right-wing capitalists who have read her works, but utilize only the most basic premises of her economic theories and choose to ignore her other ideas concerning religion and other social institutions. Neither camp should be considered Rand experts.

Absolutely right.
Though I would say that there is also a 3rd camp(albeit smaller), who have read her works; but who did so too early or just didn't grasp it. They then go to college and get immersed in academia and somehow get brainwashed to believe in the whole "government is good, capitalism is bad" bullshit.
And then, sadly they consider themselves more educated and view Rand as just a "phase".
Sad.

 

[Einherjar86]

Concerning that third camp, I'd be inclined to agree; but as you said, it's much smaller.

In some ways, I'll grant that she is a phase in a literary sense. I was far more intrigued, when I read Atlas Shrugged, by the fascinating realization that she had somewhat predicted the future. However, as far as literature is concerned, she's a fine writer in the same sense that Dan Brown or John Grisham is a fine writer (i.e. she knows how to sell a story).