Saturday, October 18, 2008

Objectivist Quote of the Day 18/10/08

"This is about Ayn Rand winning, her ideas winning, so that the next centenary will include not an address by me, but by the president of the United States, as well as fireworks over Manhattan and over the capital...Victory is ours! Victory is ours! Because truth is on our side."- The Ayn Rand Institute's Yaron Brook becomes somewhat excitable at Rand's centenary event in New York, 2005
Incidentally, despite Brook invoking the typical fanatical cliche that "truth is on our side", one notes the appearance yet again of the Ayn Rand Institute's most regularly repeated fake tale: the notorious 1991 Library of Congress/Book of the Month Club survey.

4 comments:

Kassandra Troy said...

Dear ARCHN ... truth is fanatical? Quite the relativist, are you ... thought for a moment you had a few legitimate points. Now it appears you are pushing an agenda. Pity.

Daniel Barnes said...

Hi Cassandra,

The cry "truth is on our side" is a fanatic cliche, like "God is on our side". It shows the basic temper of Objectivism has the same tendencies of all other absolutist/fundamentalist philosophies.

Here at the ARCHNblog we are not relativists,but skeptics. They are not the same thing, and that Objectivists and others confuse the two is the result of historical (and verbal) confusion over two different things. In their simplest form they are:

1) Reality
2) Our knowledge of reality.

The fact that they are two different things is extremely important to grasp, as from there a number of logical consequences follow. David Miller outlines the situation in detail here:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/staff/miller/miller_pli_9.pdf

Absorb these consequences and get back to me.

Anonymous said...

As usual the objectivists are coming here and trying to dicredit ARCHN with tricksy language.

Anonymous said...

One should note that the bit about the Book of the Month club survey is something that the reporter mentions, but not something he quotes Yaron Brook as talking about. Also, what little the article says about the survey is accurate, unlike some claims made about it elsewhere. So you really aren't making a good contrast against Brook's claim that the truth is on Objectivists' side.