Ayn Rand nailed it. The Republican shirked their duty in protecting the 2nd Amendment, they let the Democrat majority in the House pass HR8 Gun Control Bill. They could have filibustered that piece of legislation to death and that would be the end of it. Now they are relying on the Republican Senate to stop and or the President to veto it. Unfortunately, I sent 3 emails to the do nothing representative Tom O'Halleran (D. Az) from my district to vote "No" on HR8. Last night I checked on the internet to see how he voted, he followed the party line for the Bill. I don't understand how O'Halleran could betray the citizens in his district. The Republicans are letting the Dimms have their way. I'm going to say it again if this continues there very well could be a Civil War.

“We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live.”
-Howard Roark

Helping others whom we regard as worthy of helping and for which we can afford to do is in support of one's own individual values, not "connection to the universe", "being one", and the purpose of "enhancing self esteem" through a "gratifying experience".

Self esteem as a value is a consequence of successful pursuit of one's own rational values, not taking emotionally gratifying actions in the hope of feeling self esteem. Whatever Branden may have said to the contrary was well after he was thrown out for his contradictory behavior.

No, Galt did not "live for Dagny". "Factoring in her existence" as a value to himself is not "living for" another person.

The cowards who are bulk downloading my posts, with no attempt at response, will not tell you. There are a couple of religious militants here who are exploiting Ayn Rand's popularity for their own contradictory purposes and cannot tolerate my responses, even when they don't read or understand them. Judging from what they used to write, they are filled with an irrational personal hatred based on their own emotional imagination and no understanding of who and what they are attacking.

What I just wrote is factual. Emotionally 'downvoting' it with no comment is cowardly. This is an Ayn Rand forum, not an echo chamber for cowardly militant religionists.

Why did this get downvoted?

It is not yet too late. Don't let it go. (She wrote an article with that title. I recall its being in 1971.

Well, she was right. But it is because of studying her that I came to understand these things. I am so glad that I discovered her when I was 15. Things were all tangled up for me, but when I discovered her writings, she made the rough smooth, and the crooked straight, and made things so intelligible.
But I don't think that Harvard and Yale are going, in themselves, to change soon enough to do us any good. Perhaps some people should get together and start an Objectivist college or university.

Helping others is different from living for others.

When we help someone, we exercise our connection to the universe. Being one, by reaching out. It is almost always a gratifying experience as it enhances our self esteem (Nathaniel Branden, Rand's disciple and lover practiced enhancing self esteem).

By living for others, on the other hand, we compromise our integrity and independence. In most cases we also give up a substantial part of our reasoning power because we want to justify that it is all right to do it even if evidence indicates otherwise.

The novel emphasized that the cause of the problems was philosophical, not communist slogans, and that the means of correction had to be the content of philosophical influence. It is not enough to reject bad philosophy of unreason, altruism and collectivism, as if any traditional conventional ideas are enough. The crucial proper philosophy was illustrated by the actions of the heroes, and summarized by dialogue.

The heroes in Atlas Shrugged did not "escape", and Dagny did not join the others in the Valley at all until the very end when it was no longer needed. They all continued to work to change the culture. The Valley was a private estate originally used as a place for invited individuals to be together one month each year as a vacation, then as a place to exchange ideas. Later in the plot it became a place for progressively more to stay permanently for safety, until they were almost all there at the end, just before the collapse. But it was never an escape from reality, always a strategy for change as part of the plot.

We do not have the "luxury" of any kind of Valley, which was a fictional device intended to show Ayn Rand's vision of how the best people should live and should relate to each other under proper circumstances.

The corruption of language serves to corrupt the concepts that are essential for thinking. Ayn Rand put a lot of emphasis on correct concepts and definitions, then properly used them in her analysis.

Ayn Rand did not ignore them and did think of their ideas. She spoke with those open to reason and did not waste time trying to convince the others. But she did address their ideas, constantly, in discussing cultural and political trends.

Ayn Rand was well aware of the "intellectual leadership" of the religious right and rejected it. At the time it was the Buckleyites. There have been conservatives and "classical liberals" opposing the collectivists for nearly a century, some of them making cogent political and economic arguments and whom Ayn Rand knew and in the 1930s and 1940s collaborated with. But she realized they were not making the required philosophical arguments for reason and morality, which they often undermined, that drives politics. That is the lack of intellectual leadership that she referred to. It became much worse with Buckley and the rise of the religious right. It is no better today.

Sometimes free (public education) is extremely costly.

I find often that helping others is in my long term self-interest, and drawing the line between that and "living for another" is sometimes blurry for me.

Yes, that thought crossed my mind as well.

Take Dagny and John Galt.

Didn't John live for Dagny for a long period of time, even before the two met? Yes, he was living for his own objectives, but at the same time he factored in Dagny's existence.

So good!

There is no intellectual leadership on the right, and there still isn't. The ideas are painted with the brush of obsolesce and patted on the head by the left, where much superior (but wrong and misleading) messaging is used.

To change this course we need some group to clarify the value of individualism and work ethic. Like Mike Rowe, but much bigger.

Take away the food, and they go away on their own. Maybe the same thing will work with collectivists. They feed on the wealth WE producers are providing. Remove that and they will die out on their own.

The power of propaganda and emotional manipulation is definitely strong, and ignoring them allows the manipulation to go unopposed.

On the other hand, combatting emotional manipulation with reason doesnt work either.. I am not sure what would work particularly after a person is already controlled by emotion from childhood- to the exclusion of reason. This choice is probably made at a very early age by how they are raised.

I think the two political parties are just marketing organizations which are each looking for combinations of policies they will promote to get 50.1% of the voters during elections.

They are not ideologically based organizations, but simply take advantage of what the voters seem to want.

There is no "right", there are only individuals who hold various combinations of premises at this point. The right isnt a monolithic group, with some holding mystical beliefs, others going for more rational explanations of the world.

The leftists are , IMHO, totally engulfed by emotion, to the exclusion of reason. Therefore, its easier for them to be united together on an emotional basis. They are 'stronger together' as Hillary was claiming.

Its emotion vs thinking. Its easier to succumb to emotion than to think about things.

Some individuals may be worth saving, but it is not my duty to save them.

John Galt said,
“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” The hard part of this for me was to understand the full extent of how much of my life was spent living for the sake of another men and women.

I don't associate the Republican Party with the Right and haven't for 30 years. Reagan was the last gasp - and an outlier.

The intellectual leadership of the Right is coming from places like Prager University, Hillsdale College, the Heritage Foundation, and others like them and (I will actually disagree with Rand here) is quite vigorous and active and effective. One can also add in such talk show hosts as Rush, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Lars Larsen, and other editors and commentators such as Andrew Klavan, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder and the Right is far from devoid of ideas.

If you want to talk about more libertarian outposts, you have the Cato Institute and John Stossel, among others.

Is it too little, too late? Perhaps. There is certainly an ideological war being waged all around us. The question is if (or when) it actually becomes a physical contest.

Yes. There is another Leninism I cannot put my finger on but it went something like-
to destroy a nation and its culture, first destroy their language.

Today's examples:
antifa = fascist thugs
progressivism = going back to the stone-age
fair share = my gang wants more

Dagny and the other Gulchers had a place to escape. We don't have that luxury.

The world is worth saving, at least the component that is still thinking, working, and productive which is about half of the population.

The other half is destined for extinction by their own hands.

Here are quotes attributed to Lenin, the father of Soviet communism:

"The goal of socialism is communism."
"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."
"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
"Any cook should be able to run the country."
"You cannot make a revolution in white gloves."
"No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses."
"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency."
"Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever."

Do they sound familiar? Do you recognize the left's direction in this country?