http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GS6vxb4H...QL&index=3

As far as I know, Ayn Rand was a turncoat against her native Russia and an advocate of rip-roaring-predatory-capitalism, with a slavish worship of Americanisms and their various cults, including their Doomsday Cults and their "Manifest Destiny" docturine of world domination and genocide. Am I incorrect?

(December 23, 2010 at 5:11 pm)GANIMEDE Wrote: Am I not incorrect?

(December 23, 2010 at 5:11 pm)GANIMEDE Wrote: As far as I know, Ayn Rand was a turncoat against her native Russia and an advocate of rip-roaring-predatory-capitalism, with a slavish worship of Americanisms and their various cults, including their Doomsday Cults and their "Manifest Destiny" docturine of world domination and genocide. Am I not incorrect?

She was a parady of her own espoused beliefs - a loud mouthed self-absorbed clown pretending to her self to be the mother of all supermen.

(December 23, 2010 at 5:35 pm)Chuck Wrote: She was a parady of her own espoused beliefs - a loud mouthed self-absorbed clown pretending to her self to be the mother of all supermen.

Beautifully put and how accurate!

Thank U Chuck!

After coming from Soviet Russia a cult of Mormons would probably seem an improvement.

(December 23, 2010 at 9:58 pm)theVOID Wrote: After coming from Soviet Russia a cult of Mormons would probably seem an improvement.

Not if you favor science.

I don't know much about her personally other than what's on Wiki, but I don't know why people had such a problem with her books. I actually rather enjoyed Atlas Shrugged and Anthem and I thought Fountainhead was a pretty good movie. Then again...I read them/watched them as works of fiction, which is what they're listed as. I didn't take them any more seriously than I did Lord of the Rings. Unlike the motherfucker who paid for a billboard along the side of highway 85 to say "Who is John Galt?" just this summer.

Quote:As far as I know, Ayn Rand was a turncoat against her native Russia

Irrelevant to her ideas. Nor,in my opinion may rejecting Stalinism be conflated with treachery.

I reject Rand on her own merits,finding her objectivism shallow and bourgeoise at best,naive at worst. IE Her notion of the nature of human beings has more to do with romanticism than reality

Quote:Rand developed an integrated philosophical system called "Objectivism." Its essence is "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."[94]

MY perception of human beings: Self interested animals with delusions of grandeur


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She had a soft target; Phil Donohue is an ignoramus, and parroted the same old cliched arguments.


Raynd made a couple of logical errors;The first was arguing the absence of evidence* allows the conclusion that there is no god,it does not. It allows the conclusion that there is no evidence.

Raynd said twice that one is never asked to prove negative.That is untrue,and happens in science all the time.The concept is called 'falsification'. In asserting 'there is no God" Raynd makes a positive claim and attracts the burden of proof. IE She has the obligation to falsify the existence of Gods.



*argument from ignorance. As Carl Sagan famously said "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

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PS It's 8.18 am Xmas morning,I'm always up at dawn.My family are all interstate this year.I'm having a late lunch with friends this afternoon.Bored right now and the fucking shops are closed,not even a newspaper.No weekend newspaper pisses me off;it has reviews and my TV guide.

Some examples of an Aussie Xmas:









(an anonymous family)

(December 24, 2010 at 5:27 pm)padraic Wrote: Raynd said twice that one is never asked to prove negative.That is untrue,and happens in science all the time.The concept is called 'falsification'. In asserting 'there is no God" Raynd makes a positive claim and attracts the burden of proof. IE She has the obligation to falsify the existence of Gods.

Falsification is not in any way proving a negative, it is declaring events that are incompatible with the model being espoused. If data comes to light that indicates the model is not consistent with reality then you can say the model has been falsified.

For her to 'falsify' the existence of Gods would require that she discover data that is incompatible with the hypothesis - That is never going to happen because God is immensely vague, any data you uncover can be incorporated into the model ad-hoc, just like evolution is evidence of 'how creative' god is.

Rand has the obligation to necessitate the non-existence of God, that is somewhat different to falsifying the claim.

Apart from that I agree