Objectivism and the GOP

Samir Mehta | April 27, 2009
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | April 28, 2009
Do people claim it's good writing? I figured it was only liked because of its worldview and message. Plenty of badly written books still matter because they were widely read and influential in people's thinking.

Just yesterday, I read a bunch of Twilight fans upset that Stephen King called Stephenie Meyer a bad writer. King acknowledged her popularity and was glad that she was getting people who don't read often to pick up a book, but his assessment of her wordcraft was pretty bleak. The irony of this apparently escaped him.

Tony Peters | April 28, 2009
what makes me laugh about the GOP and that book is how many republicans have only read the cliffnotes version of the book, not to mention they are cherry picking different parts and filling in with contradictory info to promote their agenda

I will likely make a few enemy's with this statement but King is a hasbeen in my eyes, it's been 20 years since I've read a King book that kept me marginally interested....I've reread the Twilight books already and I only read them the first time before Xmas

Steve Dunn | April 28, 2009
To me Stephen King falls into the category of "popular but good." I don't lump him together with the "popular but bad" crowd. I think he'll probably be remembered in the literary pantheon along with Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain. Very readable, great storytellers, popular in their day but with a lasting resonance.

I agree he's lost a step in recent years, though.

Re: Atlas Shrugged, I've never been able to get through it. Ditto Fountainhead. I'm actually quite receptive to the message of virtuous self-interest, but I can't slog through the boring-ass prose. Rand was a philosopher. She used the novel as a device for explicating her philosophy. Her books are probably gripping, page-turning works of philosophy (I don't know because I don't read philosophy books, either) but as novels they seem (to me) to me interminable.

Tony Peters | April 28, 2009
GOP takes another HIT

Aaron Shurtleff | April 30, 2009
...eh. Specter switching parties, and then admitting to the fact the he's unlikely to be re-elected as a Republican...I think it's pretty self-serving. He's not exactly been a super staunch party line voter anyway (as far as I am aware...I could be wrong). What my dad would call a RINO (Republican In Name Only). I understand the filibuster implications are huge (and I was not aware that the Al Franken election results are STILL contested?!), but I think he would have voted the way he would have voted regardless (or irregardless... :P ). It's just a word change, really.

I got part way through Atlas Shrugged. Never tried Fountainhead. Not very interesting to me. Also not a fan of the "romanticizing" (or is it humanizing...whichever) of vampires that one sees in Twilight (and other similar books (Anne Rice, anyone?), so haven't gone there either. Just not what appeals to me. *shrug* And I do know a couple people who tell me that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book, and that it changed their lives, so what do I know...

Samir Mehta | April 30, 2009
[hidden by request]

Tony Peters | April 30, 2009
My great problem is that the GOP is using Atlas Shrugged to say that they haven't lost the intelligencia of people like Buckley yet they also embraces things like this which even I as a second amendment supporter have problems with. Sadly walking around with a copy of Atlas Shrugged and listening to people like Glen Beck doesn't make up for the loss of WFB

Scott Hardie | May 2, 2009
The Democrats welcoming Specter was a mistake. He won't help with the filibuster-proofing, he won't vote with them, and he will prevent a genuine Democrat from being elected. They would have been much better off to deny him. I hope he loses anyway, because he deserves it.

If King is remembered for any one book, it might be On Writing. That seems to have spoken to many people and to have earned him rare critical acclaim. I don't know whether his recent books are still good, but for what it's worth, they are still relevant; Cell has a lot to say about modern culture, and Ur is about as current as it gets.

Jackie Mason | July 5, 2009
[hidden by request]

Amy Austin | July 5, 2009
I was wondering if/when someone would make mention of that...

Jackie Mason | July 5, 2009
[hidden by request]

Amy Austin | July 5, 2009
The resignation. I think the other was already mentioned or at least alluded to somewhere? Not sure, as I agree on the newsworthiness of the Palins... but the resignation was a surprise indeed. Doesn't appear to be a very smart move for anyone possibly aspiring to the Oval Office... but who knows what she's thinking or why -- and who really cares anymore? I read that it's possible she's thinking of a bid for Congress... that there have so far been 15 ethics investigations in Alaska, all but two of which have been dismissed/resolved... and that so far they come at a cost of $300,000 to the government and $500,000 to her in legal fees. If she is thinking about climbing any higher in politics, I do agree that she's probably made a fatal error in choosing to resign as governor. That isn't a rung on any politician's ladder that I know of.

Tony Peters | July 5, 2009
I read someplace that a likely reason is now that her popularity is waning and oil revenues are down (significantly) she doesn't have any power left to use. There was a very real chance that she wouldn't be re-elected and that would be a huge embarrassment

Scott Hardie | July 5, 2009
I think she's ramping up to run for president in 2012. I hope she does, because I want to see her get her ass handed to her. Run Sarah run!

Quitting halfway through her first and only term as governor would strike a sane person as fatal to her chances as a presidential candidate, but she doesn't see it that way. If she's going to run for president, she has to start collecting funds and making party alliances now. Simply waiting for her term to end and not seeking re-election wouldn't leave her enough time.

She had scarcely less experience when she became the Republican party candidate for vice-president last year, so what's the harm in quitting now with only a little experience? Sure, being appointed VP candidate by John McCain is different from winning the presidential candidacy through a series of primaries, but that's sane-person thinking.

Also, it would be impossible to campaign in the lower 48 states while flying back and forth to Alaska all the time. She got that part right.

Amy Austin | July 5, 2009
I seriously hope that there isn't as much delusional thinking going on among the voting populace on the matter.

Kris Weberg | July 18, 2009
Having studied a great many philosophers, from John Rawls to Jacques Derrida, I feel quite comfortable in saying that Ayn Rand is a poor, poor philosopher. She's a better philosopher than a novelist, granted, but her explication of "virtuous self-interest" is tied up with not only seriously incompetent readings of the philosophers she cites, but also with Rand's notion of "the heroic spirit of man" and a sort of bizarre Romanticism. Not only that, but she had little understanding of the history of philosophy -- her use of the term "objective" seems to have missed the hundred or so years of debate that established a meaning for that term among working philosophers, a meaning incompossible with her own. Her misreading of Kant is one of the first complaints you're likely to encounter about her on the Web, but far from the last. (She seems to have badly misunderstood the classification of Kant as an idealist thinker, and evinces a partial and rather unaccomplished reading of Kant's work when she tries to quote and then disparage him.)

This is the big problem with Rand -- it is, in her own terms and anyone else's, an effort to make egoism a founding virtue. The problem here is that the sort of enlightened self-interest advocated by classical liberalism ends up, in many regards, at odds with Rand's curious notions of capitalist supermen. (She seems to have absorbed a version of Plato's Republic and tried to fuse it with a modern liberal account of equality of opportunity, which doesn't work for all sorts of reasons.)

Similarly, her insistence on an absolute duality of the ethical order -- there is good, there is evil, and there is no grey area. "Compromise" is next to "collectivity" as one of the great sins in Objectivism, but this of course requires that one's judgement -- facts available as they are -- be infallible.

Only what she termed "errors of knowledge" can serve as excuses for problematic ethical judgments; otherwise, only deliberate evil or what she termed "evasion" -- a fully conscious bad faith, as it were -- could explain violations of her notion of virtuous selfishness. Basically, in Rand, human reason given unfettered access to reality is infallible, and where it is fallible either reality is obscured or deliberate wickedness has been done. And wickedness was to be condemned, full stop. In another nonfiction work, she propounded, "Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent." Nor was selfishness meant to avert ones' eyes from the acts of others: "The moral precept to adopt...is: Judge, and be prepared to be judged."

She says quite a lot about "reason" being the ultimate value of her philosophy, but the reason she formulates is really not what is usually meant by rationalism or Enlightenment reason. Rather, it starts from premises it cannot defend or derive, and makes statements about identity and existence, most problematically about the necessity of forming concepts that exactly represent reality, that are not particularly reasonable, in the end, when tested against reality.

She displayed a neoclassical adoration of the sort one might associate with the Enlightenment -- "Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind." -- but without any particularly good knowledge of, say, Aristotle. (A modern reader of Aristotle is as likely to be struck by how culturally-conditioned his ideas are, and that leaves aside the well-known peculiarities of his Poetics and Physics.)

Rand is as far from John Locke as she is from Karl Marx, essentially a reactionary whose reaction was as extreme and ultimately as philosophically problematic as the Soviet system she escaped from and started out critiquing.

I'm not a classical liberal in my own thinking, mind you, but I find it odd that Rand is sometimes championed by people as part of the arc of classical liberalism. I find her thought strikingly illiberal in most respects.

Jackie Mason | July 20, 2009
[hidden by request]