Reidy

Brook's explanation smacks of rationalization.  The Rothbard / Hess brand of libertarianism lost its dominance about forty years ago.  The ARI people wanted to make some strategic alliances and had to explain away their past statements.  This is what they came up with.

Do you know what this forum is?  Most of us aren't sympathetic to top-down social planning, nor do we consider government the right judge of who is "good," whether your definition be "the healthy, wealthy, comely, intelligent, well-educated, virtuous, rational, individualist, and freedom-loving...who will quickly learn the language, adopt most of the culture, and become a patriot [sic]" or some other.  We came together because of a shared interest in the work of a woman who immigrated to the US with barely any English, no professional skills and no investment capital.  You might be more at home elsewhere on the web.  Search on "Margaret Sanger" maybe.
 
You don't quite say so, but you seem to believe that many or most immigrants to the US actually are "the bad people... highly religious, self-sacrificial, and welfare statist......of bad philosophy...traitorous, bigoted [you should talk!?] lowlifes."  If this is your belief, do you have any data?
 
Finally, why do you want to deport them?  Exterminating them would probably be cheaper counting the costs of dealing with the ones who sneak back in.

Do you know what this forum is?  Most of us aren't sympathetic to top-down social planning, nor do we consider government the right judge of who is "good," whether your definition be "the healthy, wealthy, comely, intelligent, well-educated, virtuous, rational, individualist, and freedom-loving...who will quickly learn the language, adopt most of the culture, and become a patriot [sic]" or some other.  We came together because of a shared interest in the work of a woman who immigrated to the US with barely any English, no professional skills and no investment capital.  You might be more at home elsewhere on the web.  Search on "Margaret Sanger" maybe.
 
You don't quite say so, but you seem to believe that many or most immigrants to the US actually are "the bad people... highly religious, self-sacrificial, and welfare statist......of bad philosophy...traitorous, bigoted [you should talk!?] lowlifes."  If this is your belief, do you have any data?
 
Finally, why do you want to deport them?  Exterminating them would probably be cheaper counting the costs of dealing with the ones who sneak back in.

You are not the first of Rand's readers or the last to make the mistake of thinking that Rand's goal was to deliver microwave-ready, single-serving packets of moral instruction when in fact she was, before anything else, an artist who wanted to tell a story.
 
The remark about Mickey Mouse is a case in point.  She wanted to achieve a particular effect at a particular point in her story by juxtaposing the silliness the character connotes with the sense of solemnity of the moment.  That is all, and The Fountainhead's enduring commercial success suggests that the succeeded.  It does not imply general disapproval of Mickey Mouse or more broadly of popular art.
 
I'm not sure what you mean by "low art."  Is it bad art (vs. good) or popular art (vs. esoteric and esthetically demanding)?  You find all degrees of goodness (i.e. skill and effectiveness) in both highbrow and lowbrow, and Rand was aware of this.  Her published writings and the available biographical material show that she had a lively affection for popular art - the operettas, pop songs and silent movies of her youth, Merwin & Webster, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, The Untouchables and Charlie's Angels among others.
The virtues of the cartoon form that you point out - immediacy and intensity - are reasons why they probably aren't the best medium for high art.  (Did you know that she supervised a comic-strip serialization of The Fountainhead in the 1940s?  She couldn't have created it as a strip, but she had no objections to an adaptation.)
 
Another example is your statement that Roark does nothing to promote himself.  He doesn't use self-promotion as a substitute for talent the way Keating does, and for dramatic reasons we see more of Keating doing this, but this doesn't bear the weight of the conclusion you draw - that he never does this and that Rand necessarily disapproves of such activity.  His buildings get published.  That requires the architect to supply drawings or photos and to provide supporting information to a reporter.  He builds here and there all around the country, so the word is getting out whether we see him get it out or not.
 
Yet another example is what you say about trade secrets.  The characters in Atlas Shrugged have a particular purpose in keeping a secret.  This won't support the generalizations you draw about what Rand did or did not advocate generally.  (How many well-plotted stories, short or long, in any medium, can you name, in which the characters don't keep secrets?)
 
Some of Rand's characters have more than one partner over a lifetime, but they aren't polygamous or promiscuous as you seem to suggest.
Kira Argunova's love is Leo; she takes up with Andrei under duress (as the story makes clear), not because she prefers the arrangement.  In any case it works out badly for all three of them.  Dominique Francon has a lover whom she eventually marries, after two intermediate husbands, but never more than one partner at a time.  Dagny, too, has only one at a time.  Hank Rearden has more than one sexual partner simultaneously, and this arrangement, too, works out badly.  Verdict: Rand did not show multiple-partner arrangements in a favorable light.
 
Most of the rest of what you say comes down to the fact that your tastes in art and entertainment are different from Rand's.  No argument there.

What do you mean? - i.e. if you didn't have this fancy phrase "moral status," how would you have worded your question?  In my observation it's usually a way of asking "do I have Rand's permission to do this?"  In my further observation, if you have to ask the answer is virtually always no.
 
One feature that this case and prostitution have in common is that they evoke a misunderstanding of what Rand said.  It wasn't "you shouldn't" but rather, "if you've gone to the effort of creating a good character you won't be interested."  My own response in either case would be that I don't condemn the act, but neither do I admire somebody for wanting it.
 
As a preliminary exercise, try rephrasing your question without any Objectivist jargon.

What do you mean? - i.e. if you didn't have this fancy phrase "moral status," how would you have worded your question?  In my observation it's usually a way of asking "do I have Rand's permission to do this?"  In my further observation, if you have to ask the answer is virtually always no.
 
One feature that this case and prostitution have in common is that they evoke a misunderstanding of what Rand said.  It wasn't "you shouldn't" but rather, "if you've gone to the effort of creating a good character you won't be interested."  My own response in either case would be that I don't condemn the act, but neither do I admire somebody for wanting it.
 
As a preliminary exercise, try rephrasing your question without any Objectivist jargon.

I have nothing against pointing out negatives.  My objection is to inventing them when they aren't there and rationalizing good news into bad.  A few people on the O-web have done just this with the Tingling decision, as in #4 and #8 above.
 
One reason to call this "Randroid" is that it apes the chronic pessimism of Rand's later years, applying her writing style more than her principles to a world that has changed considerably in the decades since she was active.

A Bing search on "nixon cancel elections" turned up some interesting information.
 
Somebody wrote a book in 1970 about Nixon's plans.  You can buy it on Amazon.
 
Bush was planning this in 2004 according to one source and Obama in 2012 according to another, one-time soi-disant Objectivist Robert Ringer.
 
I have worries about the future, but this isn't one of them.

A legally binding contract, if such were possible, would have had to be with the building's owners, not with Keating. He is in no position to make committments for his clients. Suing a government agency is notoriously difficult.
 
My informal but extensive study of architecture makes me skeptical that such a contract could even make sense. I can't help thinking that this is why nobody makes them. The architect sells a service. The notion that he can set the terms on which a paying client may accept this service is hard to credit, although we read in the closing pages of the novel that Roark is making such deals. Methinks it was wishful thinking left over from Rand's unfortunate experiences on Broadway a few years earlier.
 
The posters here have missed a lot by not sitting back and letting Rand's stories take them where the stories will.

Anthem is brief, interesting and a good introduction to the ideas. If your son likes it he can go on to the other, longer novels. Most people start with Rand's novels and then move on to the essays, and I think this is the right way to go about it.

Let us know how this progresses.

Rand herself is one who was aware of the similarities to Plato and More. She said in her early 60s show on the Columbia University radio station that she undertook to write a utopia deliberately, in part, in order to take it away from its totalitarian tradition.

Feelings don't have to lead to action, nor should they. To see this passage (or the one in the Rearden thread) as problematic you have to suppose that they do or should. We can experience feelings and acknowledge them and want to understand them (as Galt and Rearden do in these cases) without acting out.

Branden took this distinction up somewhere in his writings, saying that one of Freud's bad influences was the belief that we either act on feelings or repress them, when these aren't in fact our only alternatives.

She'll soon enough be working for herself, and the question will be moot. She probably won't hire intellectualammo.

Did you know that people have been pondering this question for almost seventy years?

On the strength of the first few sentences of each of the first two links, I can make a few points, the first of which is that the earlier posters are right: you needn't worry.

Rand was talking about learned, chosen behavior specific to rational beings, not instinctive (to use a dangerous term) behavior of non-rational species. What goes for one does not go for the other. If one of us is talking about chess and the other is talking about banking, and we both use the word "check," you can be confident that we aren't talking about the same object. So with "selfish" or "altruistic" behavior.

The articles conflate altruism with cooperation or good will. Rand dealt with that one long before evolutionary biology became middlebrow trendy.

Rand did not say that human nature is naturally selfish. She said that we have to identify the selfish thing to do and commit to it deliberately, all by a voluntary process. To say that it comes naturally is a deterministic position that would have been odious to her. The standard way of putting across this bit of misinformation used to be to call her a Hobbesian.

On the strength of the first few sentences of each of the first two links, I can make a few points, the first of which is that the earlier posters are right: you needn't worry.

Rand was talking about learned, chosen behavior specific to rational beings, not instinctive (to use a dangerous term) behavior of non-rational species. What goes for one does not go for the other. If one of us is talking about chess and the other is talking about banking, and we both use the word "check," you can be confident that we aren't talking about the same object. So with "selfish" or "altruistic" behavior.

The articles conflate altruism with cooperation or good will. Rand dealt with that one long before evolutionary biology became middlebrow trendy.

Rand did not say that human nature is naturally selfish. She said that we have to identify the selfish thing to do and commit to it deliberately, all by a voluntary process. To say that it comes naturally is a deterministic position that would have been odious to her. The standard way of putting across this bit of misinformation used to be to call her a Hobbesian.

When the presidential debates start looking like this, you'll know we've reached the culmination:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELzjQ8F_2gE

A longtime favorite is Comrade John by Merwin & Webster, 1907. They also wrote Calumet 'K', which Rand named as her favorite novel. Comrade John is at once a suspense story and a satire of Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters, an anti-industrial, live-the-simple-life movement of the era. I first read it when hippies were hot, and the insincere sappiness of the "Beechcrofters," as the novel calls them, struck a contemporary chord. Herman Stein, the group's prophet, a mix of charlatan and Nietzschean Superman, hires John Chance, an architect who specializes in amusement parks, to design a temple for the group and let Stein pass it off as his own design. In addition, he and his crew are to pose as members so that the Beechcrofters will think that their own pursuit of "beauty through toil" put the building up. Then things start going wrong.

I suspect that this is where Rand got the idea of architectural ghosting in The Fountainhead.

The Online Books Page has the full text of this and several other works by the same authors.

What these quotes establish is:
1. Franklin and Rand disagree about property rights.
2. Rand did not like Reagan.

Apparently you see a problem in the fact that, in either case, some people admire both. At least three possible explanations come to mind, and more than one might be at work in a particular case:
- The admirers admire the two figures for different reasons, or
- They are intellectually inconsistent, or
- They don't know all the facts, such as the Franklin quote above, and might change their mind if they found out.
(Not an exhaustive list)

Let's suppose that somebody admires Rand for the right reasons. He might also admire Franklin's scientific talent, his role in the American Revolution or what have you, but not his ideas on this subject. This is not an inconsistency, although it would be If somebody claimed to agree with them both about property rights. That would be his problem, not Rand's. (For the record, I don't recall her mentioning Franklin one way or another.)

The same possibilities apply to the Reagan example; any of the three explanations, or maybe others, singly or together, could be at work. I admire him for bringing the USSR down and for steering a large tax cut through congress, but not for what he had to say on abortion.

Rand said repeatedly that thinking is volitional. Being right on one topic does not guarantee that you'll identify why you're right, in principled terms, and apply that to thinking elsewhere. The fact that people can and do hold mutually inconsistent beliefs is not a problem for her theory.

His debate with Biden should be worth a look.

His debate with Biden should be worth a look.

You say that Obama "was actually referring to the previously mentioned roads and bridges." I doubt it. James Taranto points out in WSJ that this misreads the grammar of the sentence in a couple of ways. First, "business" is in the same sentence as "that"; "roads and bridges" is not. The former is the antecedent of "that." Second, "roads and bridges" is two plurals strung together; "that" is a singular. If he'd meant what you say he did, he would have used "them" or "those." It would have been awkward sentence-making, but not a drop-dead refutation of what you, Obama and a few others are trying to claim.

(Taranto didn't say, but I will, that the pro-Obama reading makes the statement a triviality which nobody has ever denied and, unless you are right, nobody has ever found interesting and important enough to deserve stating.)

You claim to have information about Obama's mental states that is more reliable than the evidence of his own words. Where do you get it?

The only part of #3 that I even think I understood is



I spend a fair amount of time following OO instead of working for pay, but I don't see what this has to do with impotence. (Maybe it would if I were a gigolo in my day job, but I'm not.)