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  • Posted by mhubb 2 years, 4 months ago
    sorry
    no, it is not that simple

    they KNOW they are better and smarter than all the rest of us
    they KNOW they are better and smarter than all those that failed before them

    and some of them are guided by unreasoned hate, so they want the result of the United States falling
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    • Posted by lrshultis 2 years, 3 months ago
      I have found over the last 50 years that AS is read with an opposite meaning than that of Objectivists. As an example, my youngest brother( now 75) consider the heroes of the novel as badly considering themselves as being better than those whom they were fighting, with, for example, James Taggart being abused by Dagny. There seems to be different understanding of language between those who love Rand's work and those who find it evil. That is understandable because selves are self made, not born. They can develop rationally without trying to cheat on objective reality or as my 80 year old brother has done irrationally with many jail times and rehabs, one of which he just completed for alcohol and cocaine abuse.
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      • Posted by freedomforall 2 years, 3 months ago
        I have seen that with another writer's work, too.
        When I lived overseas, some Europeans have told me that based on his writing, Heinlein was a fascist.
        Complete misunderstanding. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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        • Posted by lrshultis 2 years, 3 months ago
          Here is an article dealing with Heinlein which gives some info for Heinlein on how he changed over the decades. Might be somewhat questionable being published in The New Republic which kept changing its political position over the years.
          What I have never been able to understand is how so many intelligent men and women got on the socialist band wagon after the soviets took over and who eventually saw the horror of socialism, such as Arthur Koestler, Rose Wilder Lane, Christoper Hitchens, Whittaker Chambers, and many others.
          Perhaps it is as simple as the guy in my senior seminar class for Chemistry who kept at me saying "How can you be a capitalist if you don't eat steak every day". I guess I couldn't do that because I came from a poor large family. I started college in 1959 with $600 and a two semester scholarship of $89 per semester. Inflation sure has increased the tuition since then.

          https://newrepublic.com/article/11804...
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          • Posted by $ Markus_Katabri 2 years, 3 months ago
            I got to here “ His career, as a new biography inadvertently proves, is a case study in the literary perils of political extremism.” and I was like “PROVES”? Says who?
            And then this,” Starship Troopers (1959), a gung-ho shout-out for organized belligerence as the key to human survival.” Replace “organized belligerence” with medical coercion and we’re looking at a story ripped from today’s headlines.
            What a biased piece. This is actually a quote from a Rockefeller: “The real problem of the Far East is not that so many of them are communists, but simply that there are so many of them,” being attributed to Heinlein. He then goes on to call him a eugenicist. Hello Pot. Meet Kettle.
            Propaganda like this makes me long for an invasion and occupation of the coasts by REAL Authoritarians just so Jeet Heer can lick some boot leather and decide if he really likes the taste. Even the font magazine name is in, is blatantly statist. I’d buy this just to line a birdcage with it if it didn’t help them financially.
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          • Posted by freedomforall 2 years, 3 months ago
            Article is a biased propaganda piece. This 'reviewer' would likely have panned everything that Ayn Rand wrote, too. (He's a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, one of the most left-biased steaming piles of statist vomit in existence.)

            Read Heinlein's books and use rational thought to decide for yourself as Rand and as the founders of the original Republic would have.
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  • Posted by $ splumb 2 years, 3 months ago
    I think a lot of them know it isn't going to work long-term.
    What they're counting on is that it will work short-term, just for their lifetimes.
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  • Posted by $ Abaco 2 years, 4 months ago
    I keep telling friends to read this book, I emphasize that the book is coming true and it's a real trip to experience what we're experiencing after reading this book. But....people don't like to read.

    Therein lies our problem...
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  • Posted by shaifferg 2 years, 3 months ago
    “Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    “If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    “We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    “The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

    “In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    “It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    “We must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    “The result of this kind of influence is twofold: one is a skepticism and cynicism towards everything which is said or printed, while the other is a childish belief in anything that a person is told with authority. This combination of cynicism and naïveté is very typical of the modern individual. Its essential result is to discourage him from doing his own thinking and deciding.” — Erich Fromm
    “The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society.” — Erich Fromm in “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”
    “The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.” — Neal Stephenson in “Fall or, Dodge in Hell”
    “But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.” — Friedrich Bonhoeffer
    “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested and sent to a concentration camp where he was executed for expressing his thoughts 1943?
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  • Posted by $ AJAshinoff 2 years, 4 months ago
    Politicians don't read. Their aides read and tell them what they want to know. Who pays the aides?
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    • Posted by $ 2 years, 3 months ago
      You've got it right. When I was a federal lobbyist I much preferred speaking to the aide than the elected one. The aide knew more about the Bills than the 'elected one' who hadn't even read the proposed Bill.
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  • Posted by $ pixelate 2 years, 3 months ago
    Instead of reading the entire book or listening to the audio version -- just read / listen to the speech by Jeff Allen regarding the fate of the 20th Century Motor Company -- it's only a dozen pages -- and it's written with the kind of clarity that, quite frankly, anyone can comprehend. Start with that part of the book -- then move on to the Money Speech.

    I have met people who claim to have ready AS -- and then they sniff, disapprovingly, indicating that it is lousy literature, that Rand was a hack, that the philosophy presented was for totalitarian rule by the producers, etc... When I ask for one specific detail -- one item about which they can find disagreement, I am met with "it was long ago that I read it and do not care to demean myself by recalling it." These folks, by their disdain for AS, place themselves above it. They will not be convinced that collectivism is a failure -- by virtue of their compassion and higher intellect, they are above it -- they will rule -- after all, someone needs to be the instrument of redistribution, yes?

    I think that AS resonates with those individuals who are independent-minded producers and achievers -- who choose freedom and responsibility -- who voluntarily interact with others in a mutually beneficial system of exchanging value for value. AS makes as much sense as declaring that 2 + 2 = 4.

    We will never get through to the chronically stupid, even if they have seriously high IQs (lots of "idiots" can also be "IQ smart"). Even when the walls are tumbling down, they will continue to torture John Galt, if only to satisfy their need to hear him in pain. It is the exercised hatred of the good for being the good. There will no path of reasoning that can be implemented to remove the chronically stupid who control the levers of power.
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  • Posted by $ blarman 2 years, 3 months ago
    The "idiots" in DC don't care in the slightest. They haven't used any of the now-atrophied grey matter for decades, being too dependent on political ideology and sense of personal outrage. I doubt they are even capable of rational thought at this point.
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  • Posted by $ Markus_Katabri 2 years, 3 months ago
    They’ve read it. And they’ve found the work around. Ayn never counted on them making it all about race. She lived in an era of white primacy. (Not supremacy. There’s a difference.) The thought that society could be divided based on skin color alone was unthinkable in the 50s. The Demographics were so different then it might as well have been another world.
    This is classic Marxism using race instead of wealth as a class delineator. Marxism needs a Two tiered society to take root. The peasants vs the nobles. A thriving middle class is how you stop Marxism. So they changed the definition. Now it’s whites against everyone else. I’m not trying to be offensive. I’m just calling it like it is.
    That’s how you can have a millionaire black man with several mansions calling himself oppressed and saying a white West Virginia coal miner living in a single wide is his oppressor. And everyone takes the assertion seriously.
    They are actively stoking a race war. Marxism replaced Class with Race.
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  • Posted by $ Stormi 2 years, 3 months ago
    Most of the morons in Congress could not make it throuch "Anthem" much less AS! They are not readers. Harris has her degree, but could not stay with AS. Rand Paul, yes, but he is an exception. They would read the HOllywood version and completely misinterpret the meaning. Sad but True. Sinatra was a bigger reader than most in Congress.
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  • Posted by $ TomB666 2 years, 3 months ago
    I wonder if they read it and decided to use it as a playbook of what actions to avoid hoping they could out maneuver us. While Biden's approval number are low, there are still over 30% of the population thinking he's doing a good job. You can't fix stupid, so perhaps Biden's puppet master (s) are managing enough of the stupids to get what they want. Isn't this a disgusting thought?
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