source Posted June 17, 2004 Report Share Posted June 17, 2004 Hi all. I must have missed this section of the forum when I first came here and I never properly introduced myself. Recently there was some confusion in the discussion about where I live, so I found it a good time to finally let you know who I am. As my sig says, I'm Nikola Novak. I own OneRight.Org, but I'm not going to talk about it here because some here have probably already heard of it. I'm from Croatia and I'm a college student. I'm studying Electric Engineering and Computing (that's the name of the college), where I will narrow that down to Computing only at year 3 of my studies (that's when I can choose what in particular I am going to study). Fred Weiss asked me: Out of curiosity, how did you discover Ayn Rand? The short answer is: some guy told me about her works and philosophy over the internet. The long answer follows: That "some guy" one day posted a link to a Yahoo! atheism group (actually it was still clubs back then), and it was a link to his site. I was a member and I ran into his post and I got intrigued. The site had some beautiful forums and what also looked like good thread topics, and since I can't resist a good discussion, I joined. Incidentally, this "some guy" also claimed to be an Illuminati light bringer and the site was used to recruit people into this secret society he liked to call "The Illuminati Order." He claimed that the philosophy of this order was Objectivism and that the Objectivist philosophy was Ayn Rand's, but that she based that philosophy on the philosophies of the thinkers of the Illuminati Order, such as the founding fathers and other philosophers (the first that come to mind are Nietzsche and Adam Smith). Ayn Rand herself, he claimed, wasn't the member of this order and had denied the offered membership on several occasions. Somehow he intrigued me about Objectivism, while I still remained skeptical about the whole idea of the Order and secret societies in general. Given my financial situation at the time, however, I had no way of learning more about Objectivism except to listen to what he was saying, and for some reason when I did a search on objectivism on search engines, I never got anything that would interest me (except the ARI site, where I looked for new op-eds every now and then). Then, finally, one day I managed to save up enough money to buy Ayn Rand's novel - The Fountainhead. It was the first book by Ayn Rand I ever read. When I finished reading The Fountainhead, I had already bought another book and I read that too. Soon enough, I acquired almost everything I could find on Amazon. I still haven't read all the books I bought, but I'm doing them one at a time. In any case, the more I learned about Ayn Rand, the clearer it was to me that the "some guy" wasn't objectivist at all. In fact, in the end it turned out that he was a mad man; some bum who somehow managed to squeeze $100,000 out of someone's pocket and spent it all on the "enterprise" he was running on the net (there was about 20 different sites owned by him on the internet). Anyway, that's how I learned about Ayn Rand and Objectivism. See you guys on the board. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AwakeAndFree Posted June 17, 2004 Report Share Posted June 17, 2004 Hah! In Israel there is a myth about a secret organization of Objectivists who established their own Galt's Gulch somewhere near New Zealand. As the story goes, Moshe Kroy, who was once a proponent of Objectivism and eventually changed philosophies and went mad, met with them and promise to keep a secret. He then told his best friends about it, and when this secret group found out - they injected him with a drug that made him go mad, so that no-one will believe his stories. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
source Posted June 18, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 18, 2004 Yeah, the Order also had, according to the person who introduced me to Ayn Rand, their Galt's Gulch. After I read Atlas Shrugged, I asked him whether they had it and he said yes. He wouldn't mention where (figures), but that was about the time when his mental illness went out of control. Eventually, he proclaimed on his own forum (on AuthorZone.Com, which still exists, BTW), that he would kill himself unless someone sent him financial support because if they didn't he'd have to earn money by being a truck driver and to him that wasn't a career he had in mind. He didn't kill himself, though, and when he returned to the forum (a few months later), he deleted all his posts about his suicide (it was his habid to arbitrarily delete all the posts to which he did not have an answer, or where he said something stupid). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AwakeAndFree Posted June 18, 2004 Report Share Posted June 18, 2004 Wow, what a looney. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldsalt Posted June 20, 2004 Report Share Posted June 20, 2004 Boy, you never know where the loonies will pop up. At least he got you here. Source, yours is the oddest story of discovering Objectivism I've ever heard! Welcome to the forum. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
source Posted June 20, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2004 There's a site with a lot of information about that guy. Not that I think you'd be interested, but here's the link to it anyway: http://nodeity.com/tulbure.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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