grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

Dr. T- The same can probably be said of libertarians, hemp activists, and a bunch of other groups.
I'm not driving at any larger point here.

My 14 year old son read Atlas Shrugged and loved it; now he wants to read a biography of Rand for an English paper. Anybody have any recommendations?

Dude, at 14 marginally obnoxious is a blessing. That wasn't so long ago for me, I remember being a total jackass.

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"Elevating" the discourse since 1982

Read Anthem in high school at the behest of my English teacher. (Who was the first person to introduce me to libertarianism. She was pretty, too.)
In college I read Atlas Shrugged and really loved it. Except for the speech. Which I skipped.
After that, The Virtue of Selfishness, which while dry as a martini poured in Ogden, Utah, still had a lot of interesting ideas and concepts in it.
A year or so later, I picked up The Fountainhead, and though I found it really dull in places, I slogged through it. A couple of months after reading the book, I watched the movie, and really enjoyed it. One of the few movies I've liked better than the book.

A couple of years ago, I tried to re-read AS, but didn't get more than a couple hundred pages into it. And reading Peikoff's fawning intro just set a bad tone to the experience.

I like Rand's writing. While the philosophy crowd sneers at her, I've found her ideas and concepts to be generally much more applicable in real life than the serious stuff.

As a person, she seems to have been a full-blown weirdo, but that goes with the territory.

StuartL-Cool. Let me know what you, and your son, think.

I have never read a poem or song written by Tolkien. I slog through Pynchon's musical numbers, but I don't get them.

Ok, fair point. I have read that one before. I just haven't read any of the fantasy history ones.

Is that one of the poems in Lord of the Rings? I'm just saying I skipped all the poems and songs in Lord of the Rings; I've never had the stomach to read The Silmarillon and such.

Oh, HELL yeah! In fact, I do that with any story that has what purports to be a song or poem embedded in its prose, unless it's VERY short.

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"Nope. Sounds dildos. Agains."

confession: i've never read any tolkien.

"i mean, he sort of looks like the guy who shows up to the critical mass ride with a bicycle covered in stuffed animals." - Mr. Steven Crane, Gentleman

JD, you know very well what happens when people start fighting over rings...

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I've been chewed up and spit out and booed out of the seminar. But I kept trying, kept writing the next equation...

That decoder ring is precious to me! But, you know, maybe we could share it...

You wanna go for a ride in a boat while we talk about this, dear Timothy? We could eat fish, my precious...

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I've been chewed up and spit out and booed out of the seminar. But I kept trying, kept writing the next equation...

He did get about five minutes as Odysseus in Troy. It's too bad that movie was awful, or we could have had a good Odyssey adaption.

My wife's main thought about most customers is "I wonder if I can get him to sign up for our Membership Card and meet my quota for the day."
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I've been chewed up and spit out and booed out of the seminar. But I kept trying, kept writing the next equation...

oh man i've also not read any heinlen, and i don't think i've ever read anything longer than a short essay by von mises.

i've only ever really been embarassed when buying two things; underwear for women and interstate commerce implementation platforms. being the only solo dude in a victoria's secret is like, weird; cause it's not like a toys in babeland or whatever where everyone's supposed to be buying gallons of lube and barrels of cockrings or whatever, but a respectable-type establishment.

"i mean, he sort of looks like the guy who shows up to the critical mass ride with a bicycle covered in stuffed animals." - Mr. Steven Crane, Gentleman

Maybe not, it's a bookstore after all. I would assume that the criteria for dork are different there than say, at a dance club or The Sports Authority.

You know, it's awesome that being a dork isn't all that big an impediment to getting laid once you're out of high school.
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"Elevating" the discourse since 1982

ouch!

don't kid yourself. we all pay in the end.

"i mean, he sort of looks like the guy who shows up to the critical mass ride with a bicycle covered in stuffed animals." - Mr. Steven Crane, Gentleman

I read somewhere that most men's underwear is also bought by women.

i meant metaphysically. [/ronhardin]

"i mean, he sort of looks like the guy who shows up to the critical mass ride with a bicycle covered in stuffed animals." - Mr. Steven Crane, Gentleman

Alright, let's get this noise back on course...

I think it goes without saying, but yes, I am a big Rand fan. Given that, I am going to go ahead and say the amazing:

Atlas Shrugged is boring

Seriously, I haven't read the whole thing. Why? Because the characters are wooden and the storyline is pretty predictable. It's not a good book. A serious Rand devotee should say this in her defense: her nonfiction is 1000X better than her fiction.

OTOH, The Fountainhead is pretty good.

The thing about it is, I think that most people around here adopt the fundamentals of Objectivism without even realizing it. Most of you are either non-believers or Deists (even if you're Christian, you're not hardcore about it and inject some realism into your beliefs). You guys really enshrine reason and non-contradiction above other types of thought. I think really where most folks break with Objectivism is that Rand took her philosophy too far in the issues of taste, something that I have been wrestling with for a while. Are there right and wrong tastes? Are Objectivists really relativistic? (in the sense that they demand context in all arguments, but I think that there's a time and a place for context and some Objectivists don't know where to draw the line) Are they too absolutist?

The basic premises, of course, are:
A world with causal actions at its base, rather than one where human minds think they can change reality with enough "belief"
Reason over faith
Rational Self-Interest (making yourself happy) and
Capitalism (which is really just libertarianism, but Objectivists don't admit that because of the 'hippy' start of some libertarians during Rand's day)

I think most of you guys kicking it around agree with the basic premises, but don't like the label because of the stereotypical baggage associated with Objectivism.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins
-Ayn Rand- (of course)

Monsieur Darkly, rest assured that the pleasure is all mine.
)
I never considered traditions and why they work before. It's akin to the Jewish ban against pork...it's likely that this was instituted as a "rule for good living" (because pork was very unsanitary prior to proper cooking methods) that eventually became enshrined as "pork is spiritually unclean"

I believe, though, that what a lot of what Rand was trying to do was eliminate those things which tend to psychologically (although Rand's understanding of psychology, like most people in her time, was very elementary) hamstring otherwise normal, healthy people. Let's face it, if we're going to be honest about Christianity, it implores us to be Christ-like, and the most important thing Christ did was sacrifice himself for others...literally! Of course, Rand saw that the chord of "sacrifice yourself for the greater good" ran deep in Soviet Russia (where her father's livelihood was sacrificed for that very dogma). So it's entirely possible that Rand saw the logical conclusion of Christianity and collectivism as one in the same, which is not, in my opinion, an entirely off-base philosophical point. Given that, her overt condemnation for religion as a destroyer of reason was probably rooted not only in her reasoning mind, but also in that she saw what collectivism wrought in her personal life. However, Rand had much praise for religion as man's early philosophical tendencies toward understanding the world around us. I think she felt that the yoke of guilt and shame for what's naturally human (that is, self-preservation and flourishing) was egoistically self-destructive, and it was time that mankind embraced a new philosophy that went moreover with what Sowell called "articulated rationality", that is, knowing the REASONS behind why we do what we do.

OTOH (for my C. Young moment of the day), there is a lot to be said for systemic rationality where it applies to human emotion. I learned this when I attempted to date my ex-girlfriend's best friend. Articulate rationality told me that the former relationship should play absolutely no part in the (attempted) new relationship; after all, it was a long time ago and we're all friends now. However, systemic rationality smacked me in the face...relationships with ex-girlfriends friends are emotional trouble, and while nobody knows exactly why that is, it's a systemic and societal "truth" that would've saved me some serious drama :-)

Am I tracking?

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins
-Ayn Rand- (of course)

AR- I suspect that you're right, to an extent, about many of us being semi-consciously influenced by Rand. In my case, it's certainly true. I went through a fairly lengthy Rand period, although I never really thought of myself as an Ojectivist–to me, Objectivists were entirely too uncritical of Rand's thoughts. Eventually, I studied enough Philosophy to realize that her understanding of a lot of thinkers, especially Kant, was simply wrong.

That being said, I still base my thinking on some of her basic notions. Individuals exist.* No individual has more of an inherent right to exist and pursue his own goals than anyone else. Reason is an attribute of individual minds*. People who base their identities on others are, for lack of a better term, second-handers.

*My reasons for believing that are different from Rand's. While she had absolute confidence in the power of reason, I don't. I simply think reason is the best thing we have going–fallible, but better than the alternatives. Reason can not conclusively prove that individuals exist. But I can work out a justification of an individualist ontology that goes something like this: I probably exist. Certainly, everything I think and experience suggests that I am an individual consciousness processing sensory data and thinking thoughts. So, I exist as an individual. Also, the people I see around me don't seem fundamentally different that I am. They seem to act as though they are individual consciousnesses. So, I will go on the assumption that all people are individuals who exist.

Of course, there are a couple of problems here. The last step is inductive, and therefore shaky. The rest is based on probabilities or guesses based on sense data, mind-states and subjective experience. But the ideas seem right. And that's really my point about her philosophy: she dealt in supposed certainties. My philosophy (on the ontological and epistemological levels) is based on probabilities and best-guesses.

The other night, my fiancee asked for something to read. I decided to see how she'd react to We The Living. No comments on the philosophy yet, but last night, she asked what the deal was with all the Russian names. I explained the whole patronymic thing, but beyond that just had to admit that the Russian way of using surnames, diminutives, and patronymics is just weird.

BTW- The image I remember most clearly from that book is the woman secretly scarfing down a potato on a train. Talk about one moment that speaks for the whole disaster of communism!

Timothy-note that my comments would apply to a brain in a jar as well. For my purposes, what is "really real" doesn't matter. My point really has more to do with how we deal with the world and each other. I agree that most people work from the same basic precepts, but I think there are a lot of moral and ethical commitments that flow from the precepts that people don't necessarily recognize.

I agree completely. We the Living is a real novel, which is why I recommended it. The future Mrs. Six has a finely tuned bullshit/polemic detector, and I thought the Fountainhead might scare her off. She loves dense, complex stuff like John Fowles, so I don't think WTL will be too much of a challenge. I have noticed her reading it in about every off moment, so I presume she's enjoying it.