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I mentioned Ayn Rand on the Alan Colmes Show.

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An Atheist Brian Flemming who organized the dvd promoted on this website www.thegodmovie.com was on the Alan Colmes show last night. He has "declared war on christmas" and is passing out this dvd to people on the street. He praised the book "the end of faith" and spoke of reason and irrationality so I called in. I told him that I liked what he was doing and that I would like to see Christianity go the way of other religious myths like the greek and egyptian religions, and that if it was going to happen it would take Ayn Rands philosophy of Objectivism to take our culture to that place.

He said "aww, and it was going so well" Alan said "you don't agree with the Ayn Rand thing?" and he (Brian) said " i...i...don'know"

they didn't say anything else about it but I thought it was strange that an atheist who is concerned about reason and unreason in our culture doesn't like Ayn Rand. Maybe there needs to be an Athiest out reach group, to educate atheist about objectivism and get them interested in it. you can listen to it here, but the question and answer period isn't on the recording:

http://www.foxnews.com/alancolmesradio/

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'd like to second that, Jennifer.

I heard rave reviews of his book by some associates so I thought I'd give it a check. The beginning seemed good and commonsensical, so I thought I'd flip through the book to find something more of interest to me.

Finally, towards the end, I came upon a chapter titled "Science and the Mind." I started reading and then began to realize that this book, as the author had claimed, didn't negate faith; but rather, supported it.

He starts talking about intuition and how we must take an "intuitive leap" with reason in order for it to work. Pff, how depressing :P.

Maybe if this Standford philosophy graduate had heard of axioms things would be different :(

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  • 2 months later...

Here's a post that some socialist loser posted on the Capitalism board on myspace about the best books on Capitalism, and my response. I posted this on my blog, but since I have a readership of, um, let's see.. zero, I figured people over here might find a little satire of chomsky entertaining:

FoxFistWrote:

Capital Volumes 1-4

Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism

Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media

Necessary Illusions: Thought control in democratic societies

Democracy vs. Capitalism: Restoring historical materialism

The orgins of family, private property, and the state

A People's History of the United States

The Iron Heel

There you go! that should start you off arguing against socialists. If you can read and understand all of those books and still love capitalism, I'm sure might be able to argue against a few first-year socialists. GOOD LUCK!

exaltron wrote:

Of all of those, I would have to say Manufacturing Consent is the sneakiest. Chomskyism is definitely the biggest threat to capitalism going forward, since he is one of the only socialists who is able to cloak his Marxism in the language of populism and democracy. In other words, tyranny by a small group of individuals is bad, but if we all vote together that Bill Gates doesn't deserve his billions because he didn't "labor" (ie, sweat and pant like an animal) enough, then it's perfectly OK to violate his rights and take whatever "society" (ie, another group of individuals who happens to be the majority) needs from him. After all, we know that Gates can't possibly be *creating* wealth, since Marx (oops, back to him again) told us that there is this static pool of wealth in the world, and since the big bad capitalists have hoarded all the means of production, they have cornered the market on all resources from now until the end of time.

Chomsky's trick in Manufacturing Consent is to create a monolithic media jauggernaut that operates in the same way as the death squads and storm troopers (not the ones from Star Wars) have throughout history, except that they don't, you know, murder civilians and torture people. What they do is they all get together and, with the help of Rupert Murdoch and one or two other guys who control the ENTIRE MEDIA, they conspire to.... MANUFACTURE CONSENT!! (sounds tres ominous, no?)

Now, the shell game here is that there is no fundamental distinction made between actual physical force (a gun to the temple, for instance), and the media "forcing" you to believe whatever Bill O'Reilly or Paul Krugman of the New York Times (another well-cloaked Marxist, but Chomsky lumps the NYT in with all the rest as TOOLS OF THE IMPERIALIST CONSPIRACY- they're totally not radical enough for him) -whatever these guys want you to believe, which is to say what the government wants you to believe, since they're nothing more than clever sounding boards for government propagandists. I'm not sure if Michael Moore is part of that conspiracy- He may be some kind of modern-day court jester, unleashed by the powers that be to create the illusion of freedom of speech and diversity in the media.. I'll get back to you on that.

That's why we need to have unlimited democracy! Well, I mean, we won't vote on whether you can have an abortion or have weird sex, cuz that's your business, we just want to control your wealth (that you totally stole from the proletariat) in case you're too productive (and hence in danger of weilding too much POWER). And we need to make sure that everyone gets the right information (namely ours) to make the best decisions, so in the interest of free speech, we will hold a gun to your head and make you pay for our message to be heard over all that other stuff that you *think* you want to read/watch on tv/hear on the radio, but really you've just been brainwashed by those TOOLS (of the imperialist conspiracy).

It really is a sad state of affairs when only the super-elite can afford the $100 or so that it would take buy a computer and connect to the internet, where they could discover the real truth. If the masses only knew that instead of watching Fox News, they could be logging on to MySpace and enlightening themselves with all kinds of regurgitated Marxist claptrap, they would surely slug off their imaginary shackles and taste true freedom.

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*LOL @ Exaltron's comment*

Nice witty style. Props, dude.

I don't understand why people buy Marx's silly views on property. John Locke's complete philosophical system is chock full of flaws, but he has some incredibly perceptive ideas regarding property (and how the introduction of money makes everyone's potential prosperity go way beyond simply controlling finite resources) that make Marx really irrelevant in the big picture.

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they didn't say anything else about it but I thought it was strange that an atheist who is concerned about reason and unreason in our culture doesn't like Ayn Rand.

Why does this seem strange to you? Being an Atheist doesn't automatically make you anything else, let alone rational, even if you claim to be a proponent of reason. Auguste Comte was an atheist and he was the man who invented the word "Altruism", which is the antithesis of Ayn Rand's system of morality.

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  • 2 weeks later...
*LOL @ Exaltron's comment*

Nice witty style. Props, dude.

I don't understand why people buy Marx's silly views on property. John Locke's complete philosophical system is chock full of flaws, but he has some incredibly perceptive ideas regarding property (and how the introduction of money makes everyone's potential prosperity go way beyond simply controlling finite resources) that make Marx really irrelevant in the big picture.

Thanks for the props my neezy :pimp:

I have to apologize for my boneheadedness in posting that in the wrong thread. There was some other thread right next to it that was applicable. Just call me Exaltronus Maximus Non Sequitur.

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