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ajm

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Everything posted by ajm

  1. I agree that the selection of Rand's books should be based on the age of the reader and Anthem is a good choice for high school students. The people I am talking about are adults over the age of 20. These are people that should understand Atlas Shrugged and if they don't they are unreachable. Great to hear that you found out about Ayn Rand in school. I am very interested in how young people react to reading her work at a young age. How did students react? Did any others besides you pursue finding out more about her work and philosophy?
  2. This is a big problem. If someone can read any portion of Atlas Shrugged and not see the truth in it, the person is not reachable (certainly at this time and maybe never). I held a lot of very wrong ideas before I read Atlas Shrugged and within the first 50 pages I knew that I was wrong about a lot of things. If your friend can read 1/3 of the book and still attack Objectivism, something is wrong. My only advice is urge him to finish reading Atlas Shrugged. If after that he is still on a crusade against it, there is nothing that will reach him. I have met my share of people who have read Atlas Shrugged and didn't "get it". If they don't get Atlas Shrugged they will never accept Objectivism. I am very interested in the phenomenon of people who have read Atlas Shrugged and didn't get it. I'm currious as to what is wrong with these people. What makes them not see the value? I have found that there are two classes of people who do not get it: The first, those who just shrug and say basically nothing about the book as if it made no impression on them at all. And the second, those that rant about how wrong the book is. I feel both types are unreachable.
  3. Self destructive pragmatists are apparently at the helm of a lot of major businesses. Have you seen the suicidal commercials by GE? Ecomagination? And BP? If you go to their web site the "Environment and Society" tab comes before their "Products and Services" tab. From these companies are some of the worst "Sanction of the Victims" examples that I have seen to date. What are these executives thinking (or not thinking)? I think the biomedical industry and the plastics industry have taken the correct path in their advertising. It is defensive advertising and it is a shame that they have to waste money telling people that they are good for human survival and making our lives better but at least they are taking the correct path towards combating irrationality. I can't help you in the area of finding an Objectivist business association. If there is one, I would be interested in joining it.
  4. I discovered Rand because of 2112. If that album did not have "dedicated to the genius of Ayn Rand" on it I, to this day (20 years later), may never have discovered her. I did want to add to this conversation that music today generally does not have an upbeat life affirming quality. Even the often quoted band in this discussion The Postal Service has a down beat mopey tone to it. By comparison music from the 80's was very upbeat and had a 'life is great' feel. I discovered this a few years ago when I was listening to an Internet 80's station and the difference between then and now was obvious. Consider pop bands from the 80's like the Go-Gos. You can't get much more upbeat than that. Even metal bands at that time were upbeat and happy sounding, for example Poison, Ratt, etc. Even a band that many people though of as rebellion music at the time, The Ramones, is ridiculously happy sounding. My point here is that the contemporary bands that are being mentioned in the posts in this forum are nowhere near as life affirming as 80's music, even when those 80's musicians were trying to be negative. I think this is because bands today are being measured against bands like Nirvana which was not a very upbeat band and relative to them these other bands seem upbeat.
  5. I don't think this is really a critique at all. But more accurately the author trying to determine if what Rand means by Egoism (Selfishness) is the same as Moore's. And rightly, the author determines that Rand holds a different meaning of the term. The author has done quite a bit of research but missed a few key things that would help clear up his confusion as to what Rand means. The author's main difficulty is that he missed where Rand uses the dictionary definition of Selfishness as "concern with one's own interests." Here "concern" is a far cry from the "commandment" style statements the author is trying to fit Rand's views into. There was one point in his analysis that worried me (okay, there was more than one). When the author is defining Rand's definition of "value" he leaves half of it out. He quotes Rand, "The concept 'value'...presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom." End quote! What happened to "and for what." I don't think the author was going to be able to link together "Ethics" with "Egoism (Selfishness)", as he was attempting, without understanding Rand's definitions of either.
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