1. The Ayn Rand Fan Club’s Scott Schiff has a way of getting under Yaron Brook’s skin. I thought it was standard Objectivism that philosophers rule the future, but I guess it’s just one guy with a YouTube channel.
2. The Ayn Rand Institute Press just published a collection of essays by Leonard Peikoff entitled Why Act on Principle? Among other works, it contains Peikoff’s October 2001 editorial in the New York Times called “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism” where Peikoff all but calls for the use of nuclear weapons against Saudi Arabia and Iran. He demands a full-scale invasion and years-long occupation of Iran to “de-Nazify” the nation. It also includes 1989’s “Fact and Value,” Peikoff’s excommunication of David Kelley for his advocacy of “Open Objectivism.” Left unmentioned, of course, is that Peikoff’s split with Kelley started when Kelley refused to denounce Barbara Branden’s 1986 biography of Rand. Peikoff insisted at the time that Branden’s report of Rand’s affair with Nathaniel Branden was an arbitrary assertion. I do find it interesting that so much Peikoff material (such as transcripts of his courses) has been published near the end of his life.
3. Frederick Cookinham will be publishing the first volume of a commentary on Atlas Shrugged entitled The Journey of Dagny Taggert. At 476 pages the commentary might well be longer than Atlas.
4. Kirkus Reviews has a brief review of the upcoming biography of Rand. It’s been a while since I read The Fountainhead, but it never occurred to me that Roark was a “new Jew” strengthening the Diaspora.
The video link doesn't start at the beginning.
ReplyDeleteBrook says: "Scott can form his coalitions with whoever he wants. He can sell out, he can compromise, and when the fascists come to power, we can thank Scott for them."
-NP
This should start at the beginning of the video:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUzwW5Vtls4
"Scott can form his coalitions with whoever he wants. He can sell out, he can compromise, and when the fascists come to power, we can thank Scott for them."
ReplyDeleteThese clowns really believe that their petty squabbles and silly posturing will determine the fate of the world, don’t they?
Narcissistic personality disorder writ large.
Well, I don't find Dagny Taggart's character all that interesting. Ayn Rand portrays Dagny as a sterile, high-IQ career woman who engages in sexual hedonism and who can't or won't form a stable relationship with a man to start a family with him. In other words, Rand uses Dagny to romanticize the sort of high time preference, dysfunctional female behavior which has caused the demographic collapse and IQ decline in the United States and in other developed countries. We've already seen enough of the damage the world's real-life Dagny Taggarts have wreaked, thank you, without writing unnecessary books to promote this dysfunction further.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny to me how Rand obsessives keep emphasizing that Rand's novels and philosophy appeal so strongly to youngsters, who by definition lack life experience and whose adult judgment doesn't fully mature until the age of 25 or so. This basically admits that Objectivism doesn't attract normal, competent adults who have had to survive in the real world.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, the revival of interest in Stoicism is happening among mostly middle-aged, worldly-experienced people, on their own initiative and without any astroturfing or central planning to promote the philosophy artificially. AFIK there is nothing analogous to the Ayn Rand Institute, the Atlas Society, the Objective Standard Institute and other organized Rand cults which is publishing and giving away Stoic media. Stoicism, unlike Objectivism, shows what an organic philosophical movement looks like.
"Well, I don't find Dagny's character that interesting.....
ReplyDeleteSo, do you want to keep her barefoot and pregnant?
"So, do you want to keep her barefoot and pregnant?"
ReplyDeleteI guess you haven't heard of the pro-natalist movement. Some young, higher-IQ women have come around to seeing that they need to marry and start making babies during their peak fertility to try to counter the ongoing population collapse.
BTW, given Rand's implicit anti-natalism and the massive die-off of America's population depicted as a good and necessarily thing in Atlas Shrugged, you have to wonder how Rand obsessives can get away with their false advertising that Rand's philosophy promotes "human flourishing." Family formation is "human flourishing" in the most literal and tangible sense.
"Family formation is "human flourishing" in the most literal and tangible sense."
ReplyDeleteI guess it depends whether you consider "human", in the Rand context, to be "an individual human" or "the whole human species".
Plus it depends on your criteria for "flourishing", as well. Some might argue that having less people means more resources to go around, for example. Less consumption means less strain on the environment, which might benefit humanity more than simply having more people of debatable value clogging up the Earth. (And I'm sure there are counter-points to these examples, but the point isn't to advocate for either side but to demonstrate that there very well could BE other sides that are reasonably arrived at, without saying essentially "I don't agree with this view therefore it is dumb".)
I agree that the quality of the people matters. The Portuguese people 500 years ago were more technologically competent than today's sub-Saharan Africans, for example, considering that the Portuguese used natural materials and peasants' hand tools to build sailing ships, called caravels, which they used to explore and trade around the world. The ship engineering, navigation, astronomy, map-making, logistics, finance and insurance must have put a huge cognitive demand on the Portuguese people, who were about the poorest people in Western Europe at the time. But somehow they managed to pull it off.
ReplyDeleteI don't know of any black African country which could do something similar, even though Africans have access to modern tools and materials, fossil fuels and the internet to show them how to build things and provide satellite navigation. Otherwise we would see competently made ships from, say, Nigeria, arriving in the New World's Atlantic ports.
That sounds somewhat racist, and not exactly germane to the point. Plus it leaves out a lot of other factors.
ReplyDeleteFor one thing, Nigeria does have a shipyard. Would you know a Nigerian-built or repaired ship if you saw it? Perhaps there are such ships arriving in Western ports all the time. Now, Nigeria may not be anywhere near the most prolific or productive ship-builder in the world, but why should they be? Their situation now is not the situation of Portugal half a millennium ago, nor was it then. Why go to the trouble of building ships when others are coming to you? You don't have to go to the expense of building ships if the US and others are sending tankers to fill with your oil... and if you don't have anything to trade, that's even more reason not to go to the trouble. Even if some poorer African country implemented old-world shipbuilding techniques to craft old-style sailing ships (presuming they had the proper materials on hand - not just any wood works for a mast. for example), what would they do with them in today's world, where there's precious little to explore and virtually no territory that is unclaimed? Why import expensive steel to build a modern ship that has nothing to do? I suppose they could just lease ships out to other countries, in the latter case. Perhaps they do - for all you know.
But that has nearly nothing to do with what sort of definition Rand was using for "human flourishing" and whether your own standards line up with hers.