J;

I've no idea what Ayn Rand considered reality. As I said, I've read her fiction but gave up on her philosophical works because they, as with most philosophical works, are useless in the real world. When the shooting starts you won't strive to understand the good, the noble or the ideal, you'll strive to press your nose as far into the dirt as you can or you'll strive to kill the people who are striving to kill you.

I do know Ayn Rand lived in the same world as do we, so if she knew reality, she knew the world in which the majority of humans awake each day and take up unseen chains, and she knew they could only be freed by force, as did my favorite black American:

“Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Frederick Douglass

Check your premises Wanderer. Are you sure that your definition of "reality" is the same as Ayn Rand's?

BTW you are at least as articulate as I am.

Mike:
It will do everyone well to review the AMERICAN contribution to the founding of our American Civilization in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
It will do everyone well to review William Penn's Constitution in the founding of his Colony in the early 1680s. including most of those Freedoms/Rights. See Wikipedia's article abut him.
After that, read Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" (Jan, 1776) which was printed a few blocks away from Independence Hall. Diagonally, behind Independence Hall is Washington Square. The site of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution. Washington stands guard over thousands of those Soldiers buried underneath the square. I sit with the spirits of all those who have made the same sacrifice since then, and wonder where we are, and are going. I pass by Independence Hall several times a week.
In the 1960s, Ayn Rand and N Branden came to Phila., Pa and gave lectures, which I attended.

from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Harry M

I said much the same thing in a different Ayn Rand quote on a different thread earlier today!

J;

Not to flog a horse happily minding its own business, but I couldn't resist this:

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”
Ayn Rand

Don't worry, j_lR1776wg. I'll keep Wanderer sufficiently busy doing what he does best ... finding energy like Ellis Wyatt. I'll be keeping him busy because I will be paying him handsomely for it as part of our energy business in Atlantis.

J;

"...endless wars, bloody conflicts, devoid of any values save survival of the fittest..." This is the world in which I live, and so do you.

You're probably intelligent. You express yourself well. I'll defend you to the best of my ability until you come to your senses or until I can no longer, because when the knives come out and the lead flies you can't save everyone, so you save the ones who understand and are willing to fight.

As an example, let's take an issue much in the news lately, a few hundred Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped, likely into slavery. They likely cannot be saved. It would have been a terrible hardship for them to not be in their home village, but they should not have been there. Most of their men will already have fled the almost institutionalized murder and enslavement.

I spent 6 years in Nigeria. This event is unusual only in that the press is paying attention. I have, in a backlit cabinet, a small collection of old, old gin bottles, dredged up from a Nigerian river, where they were tossed during drunken bacchanals celebrating the sale of boat loads of slaves, celebrating the sale of humans they chased down, killed if they could not be captured, tortured and forced into local slavery before they were sold into the world of international slavery. The folks doing the chasing, killing, capturing, torturing and enslaving were black, Africans, before there was a Nigeria, enslaving other Africans, as they had been doing for centuries, perhaps millenia.

Slavery has a long history in Africa and the rest of the world and, as much as the world wants not to know, that history goes on. Most Africans cannot prosper for the very reasons you quote: the only secure intellectual property is between their ears, the only secure financial property is in their pockets, an improved piece of land will be confiscated by whomever pays the judge the largest bribe to rewrite the deed. I have witnessed massacres of entire villages by other villages envious of a plot of land. There are perhaps as many slaves in Africa now as ever in America, all with black masters. Why, you wonder does the Nigerian government not respond to this event? Why, I wondered, were the people attacking us in Navy boats, firing heavy weapons? African nations have constitutions too, pieces of paper, much like ours.

That is the world in which you live. For the last few hundred years great men and modest, brave and fearful, have manned ships and barricades to protect you from the real world, and you have lived in an island of unreality, floating on a sea of prosperity that paid for those ships and barricades. We are running out of great men, men with the wisdom to understand the world. We are becoming modest and fearful and far less prosperous. The real world will come to meet you. From whence will it come, from without, or within, and will you be ready?

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams

May I add something Mr. Adams thought unnecessary: "It is wholly inadequate to the defense of us from any other."

I see by the zero next to your post that someone gave you a thumbs down. I wish they hadn't. Your remark isn't just polite and appropriate, it's important and you shouldn't be shunned for posting it. You deserve that point and more. Thank you for stating the fear others are afraid to face.

hear hear

Wanderer you are describing a world of endless wars, bloody conflicts, devoid of any values save survival of the fittest, Why would anyone set out to raise cattle or plant trees when they can be taken at a moments notice by a larger gang employing greater might? I would not want to live in your world and hope you never have to either.

J;

Ms. Rand fled Russia, her home because the might of the Bolsheviks was real, while moral right endowed her with no means of opposing them.

I've read Rand's fiction, songs to man's abilities, but gave up on her philosophical treatises (as have I on all other philosophers) because I found them valueless in the real world. (I'm a mathematician by education. "Cogito ergo sum" doesn't make it in the world of mathematical logic, nor do most philosophical systems.)

Man forced his will on the earth and created irrigation; man forced his will on the earth and created dams; man engaged in bloody conflict and forced his will on the British Army and gave birth to the United States.

The Constitution of the United States is a piece of paper. Wave it in front of a Syrian RPG and you'll find out how powerless it is without the force of arms and willingness to use that force.

I make no pretenses about what I am, try to state my positions clearly, without equivocation or subterfuge. I would call myself a compassionate realist. I would call those who do not believe might makes right naïve and unbloodied.

Even Sherman showed class and generosity at the end of the war, just not during his march to the sea.

From Wikipedia about Gen. Joseph Johnston of the Confederacy:

After the surrender, Sherman issued ten days' rations to the hungry Confederate soldiers, as well as horses and mules for them to "insure a crop." He also ordered distribution of corn, meal, and flour to civilians throughout the South. This was an act of generosity that Johnston would never forget; he wrote to Sherman that his attitude "reconciles me to what I have previously regarded as the misfortune of my life, that of having you to encounter in the field."[33]

"I know it sounds like might makes right, but be honest; might does make right, always and in all things..." Is that why Ayn Rand wrote...“If a drought strikes them, animals perish--man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish--man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish--man writes the Constitution of the United States.” ? If you truly believed that might makes right, why are you on this site?. This site exists not only to promote the Atlas Shrugged trilogy but also her idea that the only proper way for men to live is one in which he who initiates physical force is wrong. And yes revolution is sometimes necessary, but revolution is not the initiation of physical force, it is the reaction to it.

Evil;

In that one group of us decided no group may have an exit? In that narrow interpretation I think you are right. Since it appears there is no exit, it's up to us, as much as we can, to relieve ourselves of this subjugation and along with us, relieve from their self imposed moral prison those of our fellows who strive to enslave us.

Nice words, right? But I've been so many places and came back thinking this country is our last, best hope. The world is small. There is no country, no island so remote that a slave crazed America could not and would not consume and subjugate it. It's as though we are locked in a cage with a terrible beast, we cannot escape the beast and at most one of us can survive.

Some might not agree that met General Sherman.

Another name which it also is never referred to would be "the Confederate War for Independence" It was called this in a book called Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence by Heros von Borcke . After all the Civil war was not a civil war. In a civil war one side is trying to conquer the other side, the south, was not trying to conquer the north, merely get free of it.

Out of Camelot also came the end of magic.

Out of Camelot came Arthur's
not "might makes right"
but "might for right"

Harry M

Down south, we refer to that as the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression. The most civil thing about that war was the generosity and class shown by the Northern generals.

"We got out of being "subjects" ".....I am afraid we became subjects as a result of the Civil war.

To add to Wanderer's "might makes right" argument, fortune favors the brave, the bold – and the well-armed and well-endowed... (Terence, c. 190-159 B.C.)

DB;

People in The Gulch are probably tired of me saying so, but power belongs to he who is most willing to use it. Barack Obama's "power of suspending" isn't pretended because he's actually using it. At the moment I'd say "the public's power to force its elected representatives to obey the law of the land" is a pretended power, because we are unwilling to use it. Pelosi, Reid, Shulman, Holder, and Obama have all broken numerous Federal statutes. I won't claim Miss Lube Rack knew she was breaking laws because I'm not sure how aware she is, but Reid, Shulman, Holder and Obama all knew they were breaking laws, carefully gauged the public, and decided - naw, they won't do anything. And we don't.

Obama's power isn't pretended, because he's willing to use it. Our power is pretended, because we're not willing to use it.

I know it sounds like might makes right, but be honest; might does make right, always and in all things, whether human events or physics, force prevails. The Western World clings tenaciously to the hope that moral right makes might, a thought that would open third world eyes wide with disbelief, although third worlders wouldn't laugh at the thought, because their daily life and death struggle doesn't leave room for humor. We see almost daily the contradictions to "moral right makes might" around the world, perpetrated by militant Islamists, teapot dictators and the (probably perpetual) ruler of the world's largest nation by land mass and mineral wealth.

So, the fact that pen and ink say Barack Obama may not do these things is meaningless without the power and willingness to use that power to stop him.

"...can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.[1] The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." Thomas Jefferson

I would add to Jefferson's calculation below, another rebellion, the one we call the Civil War. In (now) fifty states, we've suffered two rebellions in over 200 years, far fewer than Jefferson seemed to think probable, or perhaps necessary.

Here is one for Obama:
"That the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal;"
and
"That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal"