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Mark2

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  1. Another aspect of this case deserves emphasis. The assassination was done with the help of the Yemen dictatorship, which the U.S. has propped up for years. I for one am sick of the U.S. propping up dictators all over the earth. This is really what fosters “Al Qaeda.” Sure, a few crazy Muslim clerics hate America for being the West, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the hatred the U.S. government engenders by at one time or another arming every government in the Middle East, including Uzbekistan – about which read Craig Murray: http://www.craigmurr...orture_and_the/ former British ambassador whose career ended when he protested the torture there. The “U.S. government engenders” as opposed to clueless Americans forced to pay for it, but innocents in war and all that.
  2. A defeatist attitude easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Anyway, with Rick Perry soon to abandon the race, even Ron Paul’s detractors should acknowledge that he has a real chance of winning the Republican nomination. (As for the presidential election, any even halfway reasonable Republican candidate will win over Obama.) But don’t look to Fox News for news about Ron Paul. See this funny – and scary – series of video clips about Fox News and its bias against Ron Paul: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhNGoArBJuQ
  3. Leftistspew defends 2.7% inflation as follows: In other words: Invest your savings in something that yields an interest rate as high (or higher) than the inflation rate and your savings won’t lose value. Only if you fail to invest it wisely, say by stuffing the cash in your mattress, will it lose value. As others have pointed out, you have a right to dispose of your property – in this case your savings – as you wish. Mattress-stuffing, also known as instant liquidity for a rainy day, being an innocent activity, you might expect to engage in it without being punished. If you put your money in a mattress you are robbed. If you invest it you are robbed of the interest you would have made. In the first case you lose real value. In the second, if the investment is conservative, you stagnate. Lefistspew’s attitude towards the man who fails to invest per above appears to be that he’s a fool and deserves the loss he suffers. Somehow inflation is the base line, the natural state, a pickpocket who will always be with us. Yes, only a fool would complain. If, as I maintain, inflation is robbery, who benefits and how? A general rise in costs and prices and wages and fees and salaries is caused by an increase in the money supply, whether paper bills or computer blips. This would be harmless if it were predictable and happened all at once everywhere to everyone. But it doesn’t. Consider the elements of time and population. The bank (the government), untethered by the requirement that a bill must be a receipt for something of real value, creates a number of bills (or computer blips) and lends it to its friend Mr. A. Mr. A looks about him and sees physical objects and real services offered by Misters B, C and D at a certain price and buys them at that price with his new bills. Misters B, C and D in turn spend these bills. The bills in time percolate throughout the population in ever widening circles. Those in the inner circle pay the going price at "time zero." But as time goes by, the extra demand created by the extra money – a demand that likewise occurs in ever widening circles – causes prices (costs, wages, etc) to increase, again not uniformly and all at once, but first at the center around Mr. A, then further removed. Mr. A got his goods at the time zero price, whereas those further removed pay higher prices. All in all Mr. A benefits at the expense of all those at the periphery, as do those close to him. Misters B, C and D for example, benefit in that they make their expected profit, while merchants more at the periphery, not realizing that their costs will soon increase, make less profit in real value. All of which is to point out the obvious: The cronies of a fiat money bank rob everyone else at 2.7% per annum. And all’s right with the world?
  4. This replies to just the initial post. It’s a most peculiar stability where goods that twenty years ago took 100 dollar bills to purchase today take 170. One could say relative stability, but it would be relative to an even worse performing currency, say one in South America. This is our standard of stability? If you aren’t wiped out – unadorned with Make-Light Of-It quotes – everything’s OK? Not having been completely wiped out, just robbed somewhat – a mere 40%. From the linked-to article: “As 17th-century Latin American silver production dropped, debtors flooded the Dutch economy with debased foreign silver coinage, creating a stagflation risk. The [Dutch] Bank experimented with a bullion standard, converting different coins to paper at fixed exchange rates, but it could never get the rates right for long, triggering Gresham’s Law events where bad money drove out good.” First off it wasn’t the fault of gold or silver that some crooks debased it – meaning filing off the edges of coins or counterfeiting them using mostly tin or lead. Second, comparing paper money to coins, paper money is no harder to debase, easier in fact per unit value. Third, the Dutch Bank didn’t really experiment with gold as money because then there would have been no set rate of conversion to a quantity of paper money. Using gold as money means the users (buyers and sellers) decide how much of what goods an ounce buys, not a government bank. A bank (or the bank, if it’s a government monopoly) can still issue paper money in this system, but the piece of paper saying “1” on it must mean there really is 1 ounce of gold in the bank’s vault payable to the bearer. (A bank – or the bank – issuing more paper than gold on hand, in this system, would be defrauding each bearer. His loss would be inflation.) Fourth, only the author of the linked-to article knows what he meant by bad money drives out good when all the paper money is the same. Maybe he meant people abandoned the money in favor of gold, or vice versa. It’s hard to believe vice versa. I didn’t read much more, so many hours in the day, just skimmed. The introduction is loaded with emotional, over-the-top phrases: “otherworldly purity,” “stomach-churning,” etc. The style of writing is obscure, the above quote about debased coinage is typical. Just noticed: The article is published by the American Enterprise Institute, a hardcore neoconservative think-tank, if anti-Americanism masquerading as Americanism can be called thoughtful. John Yoo of torture infamy is there, and Michael Ledeen (author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago – I’m not making this up) used to be. In 2003 they hosted a dinner celebrating Irving Kristol. Now they’re debunking gold backed currency. Makes me want to buy more gold, at least in the short term. Even if gold’s a bubble it looks like it has a way to go before it bursts.
  5. This sidesteps the question but still needs to be said. 1. Unlike real abuse, which is extraordinarily rare, fat is hard to define even approximately. The same goes for skinny. Look what CPS – Child Protective Services, or whatever it’s called – did to one vegetarian couple. When CPS took their children away from them they tried to get their children back by force. The eventual trial, with Edgar Steele as defense lawyer, was featured on TV (I don’t watch such things and only read about it). The mother, Ruth Christine, spent 7 years in prison, the father will have served 12 when released in 2013. (By the way, the defense lawyer was a free speech advocate who once defended the founder of Aryan Nations, losing. Recently he was charged and convicted of attempting to murder his wife and mother-in-law, which is as authentic as the Christine’s child abuse. The fact that some of his views are disagreeable, to say the least, is irrelevant here.) 2. CPS has a long history of itself abusing children. The late Nancy Schaefer spoke and wrote about this: The Corrupt Business of Child Protective Services Look what they did to Kelly Michaels and children she was alleged to have abused, one of several cases described in No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal. I think we’d be better off without CPS, assault and battery was illegal without it. At least don’t add another quiver to their bow.
  6. Straw man argument. No one here said have faith in a terrorist’s mercy. This sounds as if we’re to conclude that Tanaka means there’ve been thousands of domestic “incidents” in the U.S. since 9/11, which is absurd if “incident” means anything serious. There’ve been several FBI entrapment operations trumpeted as thwarted terrorist attacks. There’s been one utterly incompetent but apparaently genuine attack. Then there was the Underwear Bomber, in a class by itself. Instead of evidence of terrorist danger it’s evidence of our amazingly corrupt government. Again (I’ve mentioned it before), read what Kurt Haskell – a passenger on Flight 253 – has to say about it on his wife’s blog: http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-underwear-bomber-trial-with.html http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-day-one-year-later-underwear.html http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/search?q=umar
  7. They've turned on video-streaming: www.911anniversary.ARIevents.com
  8. Mark2

    BitCoin

    Relative to gold, prices are stable. But consider what this means. From 2001 to 2011 gold went from about $300 to about $1800 – a factor of 5 difference. In the same period prices have increased somewhat over 25% – a factor of 1.25 difference. (Try these inflation calculators, which I don’t think are far off: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ and http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl ) This is a major decrease in purchasing power. While you weren’t looking about a fourth of your savings melted away. It doesn’t matter if this shrinking money is stable relative to anything. In absolute terms it’s pretty unstable, and to the holder’s disadvantage. For now gold is unstable to your advantage. This may indeed be a bubble, and then two questions come to mind: 1. How long before the bubble bursts? 2. How big will it be right after it does? Of course we can’t know the answers for sure but obviously there’s money to be had if you can: • Buy at a price below the post-burst price, then • Sell soon before the burst. Another point: I’ve heard of people making money on the very volatility of the gold market. I don’t understand how it works. Commodities speculation isn’t my field despite the above remarks, which are pretty obvious.
  9. 9/11 – A Decade Later: Lessons for the Future A symposium sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute / Center Thursday, September 8, 2011 - free and open to the public. National Press Club 529 14th Street NW Washington, D.C. 20045 The program will feature three panel discussions: • Upheavals in the Middle East: Assessing the Political Landscape 1:00 - 2:05 p.m. Panelists: Yaron Brook, Efraim Karsh, Daniel Pipes, Walid Phares. Moderator: Elan Journo. • The Islamist Threat: From AfPak to Jyllands-Posten and Times Square 2:10 - 3:15 p.m. Panelists: Peter Brookes, John David Lewis, Diana West. Moderator: Elan Journo. • Iran, Israel and the West 3:25 - 4:30 p.m. Panelists: Elan Journo, Efraim Karsh, Clare Lopez, Michael Rubin. Moderator: Yaron Brook. About the panelists Yaron Brook – Ayn Rand Institute Peter Brookes – Heritage Foundation Elan Journo – Ayn Rand Institute Efraim Karsh – Middle East Forum John David Lewis – Ayn Rand Institute, Duke University Clare Lopez – Center for Security Policy Daniel Pipes – Middle East Forum Walid Phares – Foundation for Defense of Democracies Michael Rubin – American Enterprise Institute Diana West – Washington Examiner syndicated columnist It will be live-streamed on the Ayn Rand Institute’s event website: www.911anniversary.ARIevents.com
  10. On page 4 of this issue of The Undercurrent you find a reference to “the “homegrown” terrorists who have recently become major threats. The plans of the ‘underpants’ and Times Square bombers were foiled ...” The Times Square bomber – a Pakistani immigrant – was utterly inept. He might as well have had a smoke bomb. How about some effort made in restricting Third World immigration before we consider Faisal Shahzad a “major threat.” The Underwear Bomber, to repeat an earlier post, looks like a fraud from beginning to end. Read what Kurt Haskell – a passenger on Flight 253 – has to say about it on his wife’s blog: http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-underwear-bomber-trial-with.html http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-day-one-year-later-underwear.html http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/search?q=umar
  11. The U.S. helped the Soviets all along, starting with the Bolsheviks. Listen to this hour long interview with Anthony Sutton, made in 1980, about the help given the Soviets and Nazis: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6987303668075230852# Unfortunately the interviewer appends his own ideas at the end after the interview is over. His manner turns me off but Anthony Sutton is well worth listening to. You can skip the interviewer’s introduction too. (The picture quality is very poor, almost useless.) One of Anthony Sutton’s books was favorably reviewed in The Objectivist (January 1970), the first volume of Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development which ultimately totalled three volumes: 1917-1930, 1930-1945, 1945-1965
  12. Aristotle is supposed to have said: “Justice consists of loving and hating aright.” Long before seeing the above I’d come to loath the writing of Edward Cline. It reeks of counterfeit emotion. Phony to the core. Eesh! which I understand is what the ancient Greeks used to say when they couldn’t take it anymore. Note Cline’s admiring nod to Winston Churchill, who helped lie America into WWII. Alternate history isn’t supposed to alter too much, that is, before a certain point in time, yet Cline writes: “Monitored Al Quada communications repeated the query, ‘Is he dead yet?’ They could only have been referring to President Bush, who fortunately was not in the White House that day.” There’s no record of this happening. “... on September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked on its own soil by agents of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq.” In fact the alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia (15), United Arab Emirates (2), Lebanon (1) and Egypt (1). None of the governments of the countries he mentioned planned 9/11. He conveniently omits mentioning that for months Germany and the U.S. harbored many of the alleged hijackers, and that many were known by U.S. government agents to be terrorists and in the U.S. yet left them alone. About the dancing in the Arab street, some of it was genuine, some fabricated. Cline omits the authentic commiseration of Iranians – it wouldn’t have served his purpose. He likens 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, failing to point out that FDR used Pearl Harbor as a pretext just like Bush and friends did 9/11. “Hiding in an Afghan village in the Swat Valley, bin Laden for two months maintained radio contact with his sympathizers and enablers in the Pakistani government and in Kabul. On November 4th, when our intelligence had confirmed his location and that of his enablers and protectors in Pakistan, the village was vaporized with a battlefield nuclear projectile mounted on a drone fired from a nuclear submarine patrolling the Indian Ocean, the Patrick Henry.” After three nuclear “holes” in Pakistan, the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul “was similarly razed.” Then it’s time for the Palestinians! Then the Lebanese! Then Iran! After the last, peace everlasting. Nuke Iran, that’s the ticket! Edward Cline uses the dead of 9/11 to promote his own agenda. “Many people would suddenly believe they were being stalked by jihadists. They would turn around [and] see nothing. The fall of Islam and its virtual disappearance from men’s concerns was a true sign of “Islamaphobia,” but eminently curable. It is not every century when a major faith suffers from mass abjuration.” It sounds like Edward Cline speaks for his own neurosis. Think of all the time he spent writing this cartoonish propaganda when he spends no time at all on the real and growing list of police state measures given in my last post. To repeat, the man is a hypocrite, phony to the core. Politically Edward Cline quacks and waddles just like a neoconservative. He’s an only slightly exaggerated version of Daniel Pipes or David Horowitz.
  13. Cline must be living in some alternate universe. “War Won, Government Diminishes” ? “Long Live Lady Liberty!” ? Where was Cline when the following outrages on Her occurred: The Administration can lie the U.S. into trillion dollar wars, thousands of soldiers killed, with impunity. (Listen to former Col. Lawrence Wilkerson on this. Lie is the right word.) Real ID. The Military Commissions Act of 2006. The Defense Authorization Act of 2006. The Martial Law Act of 2006. The Cybersecurity Act (not yet law). The Protecting Children Act (not yet law). Illegal domestic surveillance with impunity. The phony war on Drugs. The creeping federalization of police departments. The president set that anyone the President or his men designate an enemy of the state -- including an American citizen -- they can torture to death with impunity. Warrantless GPS tracking. Rampant corruption in the federal judiciary. The TSA. This list could go on and on. And all we get from Cline is happy talk. Where is the outrage? Making heroes out of frauds like Bush (puppet of Cheney) and Giuliani is as low as it gets. What a hypocrite! I wonder if Islam is the real, most basic, enemy. Anyway, with friends like Cline who needs Islam?
  14. Tanaka repeats his assertion that Ayn Rand wrote an essay on Hickman, dishonestly abusing the meaning of “essay” in the process. I think what I wrote about perfect makes sense in the full post. I’m not going to write about details of AR and Hickman. The subject is disgusting and doesn’t interest me that much. It’s inconceivable that AR – later in her mature years when she better understood English and Americans – would either defend any aspect of Hickman or denounce his detractors for hating him as an egoist rather than a creepshow killer. Tanaka – he of the private disorganized and rambling diary “essay” – may have the last word, I shall not reply.
  15. Regarding Zoid’s last post ... 1. AR made a mistake in her evaluation of Hickman. She made a mistake in her evaluation of many, perhaps most, of the journalists condemning him (e.g. Edgar Rice Burroughs). Two private mistakes. 2. Reread Zoid’s earlier statement: “ ... since sociopathy is characterized by a habitual disregard for the rights of others, and since rights are central to Rand’s philosophic thought, it’s clear that she would never have deemed such psychological illness ‘a gift.’” It’s a fallacious, rationalistic argument. What she said in the 1920s is what she said. She could have made a mistake despite whatever is central to her current -- or later -- philosophic thought. In fact, just from reading the journal, no rationalistic or otherwise argument is necessary: she did not say psychological illness is a gift. However she did admire Hickman for seeming to have been born without the ability to care what others think. She makes it clear that she’s purposely taking this out of context. On the other hand she condemns the journalists for not taking this out of context. She doesn’t put it that way, but that’s what it amounts to. My theory is that she projected her experience of Russians onto the hapless journalists. I think this accounts for her last entry, evidently written after she had cooled down, where she says to herself, in so many words, take it easy AR. Dreamspirit: “... it is a little upsetting to hear that the person you admire greatly once viewed something you think is monstrous with positive emotions.” Indeed. How to explain it? AR was good at separating one aspect of something from another aspect, focusing on just one. In the case of Hickman she blundered, privately (and very early in her career), but better examples come to mind. She praised the Marxists, not for their ideology, but for their method of spreading it. She once praised Chomsky – I’m not making this up – for his reasoned denunciation of Skinner. She opposed U.S. entry into WW II, not because she loved the Nazis but because she loved America. Later when asked to write a screenplay praising Oppenheimer et al for their work on the Manhattan Project, she was willing to do it in order that the Project not be praised as a triumph of government science. She focused solely on the fact that it got done. (Fortunately that movie never made it past preliminary planning. Later she used Oppenheimer -- perhaps along with Millikan, who was much in the news at the time promoting government science -- as part of the basis for the character Stadler.) A detractor could misrepresent all this: she was a Marxist, she loved Chomsky, she hated the America Firsters, she thought government science was great, etc.
  16. Don’t know what whYNOT is talking about. Nothing I wrote should be construed to mean what he’s arguing against. Tanaka is mistaken not only about Dreamspirit’s post, but about Ayn Rand ever writing about Hickman in an essay. It was in her very early private journals where she wrote about him, blown way out of proportion by her detractors. Defending Ayn Rand by saying she was perfect, never made a mistake, only helps them.
  17. Zoid’s two arguments are fallacious. (1) One can make a mistake in private just as one can make a mistake in public. (2) The argument: “AR was an Objectivist, an Objectivist thinks X, therefore AR thinks X” neglects the fact that AR was only in her 20s. Give the lady a break. She wasn’t born fully formed and armored like Minerva out of the head of Zeus. I think Dreamspirit’s post #5 is correct. It should be noted that AR sort of retracted these Hickman journal entries at the end, telling herself to calm down – I forget the exact phrase she used.
  18. If you think someone said something outrageous there are three possibilities: 1. You misunderstood. 2. They weren’t speaking precisely. 3. They intended the outrage. Assuming the person is otherwise fairly reasonable – which I think applies in this case – which of the three is the least probable? How about a little goodwill? Dreamspirit is not obligated to present evidence for her opinions. It’s perfectly acceptable to state something without giving one’s reasons for believing it. Of course if you want to convince those who disagree you’ll need to argue your case, but that’s a separate issue.
  19. The title and first sentence seems to say that in Libya freedom is replacing dictatorship. A more accurate description is that one dictatorship is replacing another. Regarding Kuwait, what happened there in 1991 is the U.S. government defended the Kuwait government when Iraq invaded the country. The Emir of Kuwait’s dictatorship was just as brutal as Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq. Egypt doesn’t belong in the same sentence with Libya. Egypt’s regime change was truly local and spontaneous, Libya’s is primarily due to outsiders, principally NATO. About the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights: on a very superficial first reading it sounds imitative of the U.S. Bill of Rights but a close inspection reveals it to be the opposite. Every “right” in the U.N. document is qualified by the equivalent of “except in the over-riding interest of the state.” Anyway, it isn’t the West’s or America’s business to insist – with soldiers and guns and bombs – that Libyans do this or that. There’s a sense in which America is, to quote Wotan, “scumbag, pro-slavery.” For over a generation the U.S. government – rather distinct from America and Americans – has propped up dictatorships all over the world. For another example besides that of Kuwait already mentioned, read Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. His retailing of U.S. outrages goes on and on, it seems like you can click “next page” forever. “Uzbekistan: The Banality of Evil” doesn’t seem to be there anymore, which is what I was looking for.
  20. Third the motion. Bad rubbish. The crack about his being the second husband of Monroe might have had a humorous intent but if her death was by suicide Miller probably contributed to the reason. He made fun of her in public right from the beginning. His script for “The Misfits” (only a small part of which I’ve seen) was intended to make her look bad. After her death he wrote “After the Fall”, a roman à clef – or whatever you say when it’s a play (I haven’t seen it, only read about it) – making her out as a shrew and jeering at her. A truly repulsive creature. Don’t believe the whitewash some of his biographers apply to this creep.
  21. Just who are these “rebels”? I’m reminded of the so-called rebels in the Kosovo War of the late 1990’s, the “Kosovo Liberation Army”. We were forced to pay for their so-called liberation of Kosovo, which some people might not have done had they a choice. Current events sound like the same old story: replace a recalcitrant dictatorial government with another, more compliant, dictatorial government. It’s interesting to note that many Objectivists (not very Objective in this case) approve of regime change in Libya but not in Egypt. The change in Egypt really was spontaneous: unlike in Kosovo and Libya where NATO was the driving force. Relevant ancient history: The Lockerbie Pan Am flight 103 crash in December 1988 was not perpetrated by Libya but rather Iran (in retaliation for the USS Vincennes downing of Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988 when the U.S. was supporting Saddam Hussein) – see the work of Rodney Stich. The terrorist attack in France in 1986 that was blamed on Libya was only made to look like it was done by Libya, after which Reagan bombed Tripoli and other Libyan areas killing about 40 civilians – see The Other Side of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky. Why are we forced to pay for the “liberation” of Libya? There’s only one reason: the powerlust of elements within the administration. And they will spin the war as in your self-interest, per usual. They did it all for you, us Americans I mean, so be grateful lil chilins.
  22. The following is from John Dewey’s very influencial little book My Pedagogic Creed, pages 15-16. Note how in the third item he inverts the idea of individualism: The following two quotes are from his book The School and Society (1899, 1907), after he refers to the school as a small society (page 44): Ayn Rand quotes the following from the book (page 10) in one of her essays: Now here are some quotes that might be new to many people. In 1928 Dewey visited Soviet Russia and wrote several articles for the magazine The New Republic gushing over what he saw. In 1929 these were assembled into a book Impressions of Soviet Russia. Among the many outrageous things in it: (page 14-15) Page 57 Page 61 Page 72-73 Page 68-69
  23. Ron Paul never said or implied that all governments are equally valid. The notion is ridiculous to anyone who knows his work. He would probably say the governments of other countries are no business of ours unless they attack us for no reason. The Iranian government had as much to do with 9/11 as Iraq. The U.S. and Germany had more to do with it, having harbored the hijackers for months before the attack. Ron Paul’s position is that 9/11 was perpetrated by a stateless group and should be treated as an international crime rather than an act of war by Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. He points out that the U.S. had for years before 9/11 been engaged in Israel’s wars (England in 1953 vis-a-vis Iran might be mentioned too), consequently it should be no surprise when the U.S. gets attacked as part of those wars. The U.S. government – I almost wrote “my government” but I hate to think of it as mine – is pushing 9/11 like Hitler pushed the Reichstag fire, using it as an excuse to grow into a police state. The latest terrorist attempts are entrapment operations (Portland, Dearborn, the Bronx). One of the attempts – the “Underwear Bomber” – looks like a fraud from beginning to end. Read what one of the victims, Kurt Haskell, has to say about it on his wife’s blog: http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-underwear-bomber-trial-with.html http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-day-one-year-later-underwear.html http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/search?q=umar Maybe Ron Paul would eventually put a stop to this corruption if he were president.
  24. A lot about Israel has come to light since 1982. Much of it already known to those who’d dug into the subject, but new to the public in that it’s become popularized. For example, Ayn Rand never read the book By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, because it came out in 1985, three years after her death. Also, it has to be said that when it comes to a few applications of Ayn Rand’s philosophy to complicated situations there’s room to disagree that Ayn Rand applied her own philosophy correctly. One of these rare examples would be her position on government vouchers to pay for private schooling. If memory serves she was for it. The idea on its face has some merit. Our situation is desperate, even if in a free society such vouchers wouldn’t exist it’s better to risk the problems it would cause for a short term gain -- because all we have left is the short term. However it could be argued, and I personally would argue, that such vouchers would very quickly turn private schools into public schools, that is, lead to government control of all schools. I disagree with Ayn Rand on this detail because I can think for myself. I don’t want to get into an argument about Israel or vouchers. My point is that we must think for ourselves using all the data at hand. The world didn’t end on March 6, 1982, new facts are always coming to light, and Ayn Rand was neither infallible nor omniscient nor clairvoyant. Certainly Ayn Rand herself would have agreed with this. That said, one shouldn’t disagree with a genius without a great deal of thought and research.
  25. Authentic Objectivists perhaps, but some people calling themselves Objectivists, including the self-professed leading ones – such as Leonard Peikoff, Yaron Brook, Harry Binswanger – have been extraordinarily pro-intervention regarding the Middle East. I just Googled ayn rand war and the first four items were from the Ayn Rand Institute/Center advocating such intervention. Similar research indicates that the people at the Ayn Rand Institute loathe Ron Paul. Not to put too fine a point on it ! Still, many people calling themselves Objectivist think of Israel as the 51st state of the U.S. which happens to be on the other side of the earth. Perhaps you could be more articulate in your response. Their argument in outline is very simple: Israel is our ally, defending Israel helps defend us. Three billion a year to Israel, bombs to drop on its enemies and jets to do it with – it helps us, it’s the selfish thing to do. Any weak points in that argument need to be addressed. You “have to say it” because the Ayn Rand Institute has published quite a number of articles saying just the opposite and many people seem to agree with them. The Ayn Rand Institute’s web presence, within its field, is tremendous. You can’t Google Ayn Rand anything without the Ayn Rand Institute/Center coming up in the first few items.
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