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Showing content with the highest reputation on 10/26/15 in all areas

  1. I literally chuckled. Haha. Yes, I realize the irony. And yeah, I have stopped frequenting and relying on these forums myself. Most of us are not even really Objectivists. *gasp* I said it.
    1 point
  2. No. You have a very wrong idea about Rand's philosophy. It absolutely is not. If you think this has anything to do with Objectivism then you are completely mistaken. And I mean in a very deep way. No where in Rand's writing did she even come close to calling less skilled workers useless moochers. Rand's fiction focuses on great men. Her philosophy and morality, on the other hand, is for everyone of any ability. Her fiction also does not cast people of lesser ability as unworthy, immoral moochers. In Atlas Shrugged, there are passages such as this: 'He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured' This is a nod to the skill involved in driving a bus. If that is what you have chosen to do, and you do it well, then you are entirely moral. The same goes for electricians, plumbers, and all other trades. They are all moral, rational careers for people. They are skills, and they take a thinking mind when done right. Important to whom? To society? To themselves? And what does rich and powerful have to do with anything? Rand's heroes are not the rich and powerful, but the rational, skilled and highly capable. I don't know how this can be missed in Atlas Shrugged without reading the book and deliberately ignoring anything to the contrary. If you cannot see this, simply recall that James Taggart is rich and powerful and is in fact the president of the rail road, (Dagny Taggart is vice president) and he is a major villain. John Galt, the ideal man, the major hero, does not have much money at all. It is not in Rand's morality to judge things by social usefulness. However, if you were to do so, the people of greater ability - especially businessmen - are more important and lift everyone up higher than otherwise possible without them. Of course, without electricians there would be no lights on, but without the businessmen and scientists who run the businesses, the electricians would have nothing to do, and would not be able to perform the same task. Atlas Shrugged shows exactly what would happen if the men of great ability went on strike. Eddie Willers is left to wander the train track as a symbol of what happens to moral, good men without the men of greatest ability. But this is irrelevant to morality. Each individual's life is their own greatest and most important value. Whether you are a genius or below average, you can be morally perfect within your own sphere of ability. Moochers are people who do not rely on the efforts of their own mind, but rely on other minds. It has nothing to do with ability. By the questions you ask and the misunderstandings you show, I have to assume you are new to Objectivism, and that you have gleamed a few basic things by have not done any real deep investigation as to what it's all about. You may have also taken in false ideas propagated by enemy's of the philosophy. I would suggest reading Atlas Shrugged and reading a few Objectivist texts. I suggest Objectivism: the philosophy of Ayn Rand by Peikoff, and also audio lectures available at the aynrand estore. Also, try not to get too much information from forums like this, but instead from actual source texts by Objectivists like Rand, Peikoff, etc. (http://www.peikoff.com/tag/miscellaneous/page/427/#list) Once you've done some reading and/or listening you will have quality questions to ask that are based on a more accurate, developed idea of Objectivism, and not based on (what seems to me) a caricatured, misrepresented idea of Objectivism.
    1 point
  3. Rand, according to her biographers, opposed US entry into WW2. So did most Americans. She was one of many who believed that the best available outcome that Germany and the USSR should weaken each other to the point where domestic insurrection or minimum foreign intervention could have overthrown them. Maybe she was right. Some libertarians, including Roy Childs, have maintained support for this position long after the war was more recently. The worst available outcome was that one should defeat the other decisively and gain control of (almost) all the territory they had controlled jointly during the war, and that is exactly what happened. The obvious comeback is that the US was attacked by the Japanese and went to war purely as a defensive retaliation; going to war against Japan necessarily meant going to war against its ally Germany. I'm not a historian, but the US had been intervening in the far east at least since the takeover of the Philippines some fifty years earlier, and it had imposed an oil embargo, which is an act of war by standard accounts, before the attack, as well as conducting smaller, clandestine interventions in China since about 1937. The Pacific wasn't big enough, the reasoning goes, for two rival empires. If this is true it doesn't entail that the US should have passively, pacifistically accepted the Japanese attack, but rather that it didn't have to happen in the first place.
    1 point
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