Bitcoin Forum

I'm flabbergasted by the amount of political extremism associated with Atlas Shrugged here. Some of the things I've been reading here are mind boggling:
Ideas like: People paying for green lights and the "free market" handling traffic.
Opinions like: If you can't pay for a private security service yt ou deserve to die.
Statements like: What have the people in Africa ever done for us?

But let's pretend for a minute Ayn Rand never existed, I think people would have a hard time coming up with such idiocy without that kind of idealistic support.

There will always be trolls. Don't feed them.

Trashing Ayn Rand has a long and illustrious history.

It's a curious one, because inevitably the trashers are ill informed of her ideas and concepts, and really are trashing some in-their-own mind fantasy creation of unworkable stupidity.  Postings like yours are more like feeble wails from the darkness, than actual logical assertions.

Just saying.

Rand's objectivism actually describes the most natural human behaviour patterns and instincts, so I think nothing wrong with that. Her followers might concentrate exclusively on the economic aspects of her views and take it to the extremes. Probably that's why you can hear some "mind boggling" ideas. "I'm an objectivist." sounds better than "I'm a sefish greedy pig without moral and ethics." Isn't it?

It's not that, you can be an egotistical maniac all you like.
The problem I have is that you should stop trying to come up with a way where everybody else would have that attitude without society collapsing. Which gets me to my point: Without Rand you would just be considered oddly anti-social and not claim that your option is part of some greater scheme.

If Rand had realized it during her lifetime she could even had become some figure similar to L. Ron Hubbard and live of the followers of the cult, not social security.

She was an awful sci-fi writer, boring, without any vision whatsoever, even L. Ron Hubbard was better than her.

Probably one of Rand's best points had to do with getting the objective idea of selfishness out into the open.

Selfishness is something that we are (at least have been in the past) taught is wrong. Share, is the idea.

Community/commune/communism(?) and collectivism is part of what all governments are made of. We all help each other, as well as ourselves, of course. Rand brought it out into the open what it is (or might be?). It is selfishness.

Is there a difference between pure selflessness and pure selfishness? If there is, it is only in the spirit or soul of the person. On the outside they both look the same.

Selflessness gives and helps people out of the desire for the good of the other people.

Selfishness gives and helps people out so that the people will return in kind, so that the selfish person is benefited.

The results are the same. Only the spiritual feelings are different. Rand brought this out into the open, so that we can recognize that we may not be the philanthropists that we think that we are, or that the philanthropists of the world may not have been what we thought they were.

She did it to show that communist leaders - she was from Russia - were not there to divide everything evenly among the people, so that everyone would benefit, and so that nobody would be poor. They were there to control everything for said dividing, so that they could steal out of the pot and enrich themselves.

:)

"There is nothing new except what has been forgotten" was just as true when Ayn Rand 'thought up' her stuff, as when Marie Antoinette said it.

In smaller societies that attribute will be always balanced and counteracted by selfishness itself. I do a favour to you and expect that you will do the same when I need it. I think this is one of the most ancient and most basic human behaviour patterns. Those who break the circle will be soon outcasts, thus the circle will "repair" itself. Same thing applies to cooperation between these small communities. All of them are selfish but in many cases they overrule their selfishness for future gains. However generalizing this schema to bigger communities is IMO a mistake. That never worked very well.


Well, IMO that's not Rand's fault. Without Marx many ppl would be would just be considered a thief :).

Except that Ayn Rand knew fuck all about human nature, and neither do you. How the hell is Ayn Rand still a thing, anyway? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSk-C7W0L28) If you want to learn about real human nature, read these three books:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51unPZ0Xj0L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fc/Ggas_human_soc.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41siA8snIiL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Isn't more idiotic to spend close to 60% of your posting time in the speculation sub to make bitcoin more bearable? Some of the things I've been reading over there are mind boggling...


 8)

Actually, there is a direct relation between bitcoin and some of Rand's germinal ideas.

Micropayments, through bitcoin, can make things like paying for green lights and the free market handling traffic, roads, etc, totally plausible.

The other two opinions...
Opinions like: If you can't pay for a private security service yt ou deserve to die.
Statements like: What have the people in Africa ever done for us?

Have little or nothing to do with Rand's ideas.  Rand accepted and encouraged a minimal degree of State responsibilities.  And people in Africa have done a lot for us, so that statement doesn't even make sense.

Most of anything the people of Africa did for us came about by various business people - some from the U.S. - extracting it out of Africa, often to the harm of the African people.

Rand was the same way. Most of what she did was useless, and would have been detrimental if it had been applied. Among her best ideals was the idea of almost no state involvement in the lives of the people.

In honor of the little good that Ayn Rand did, should we rename Bitcoin to Bitchcoin?

:)

You have obviously never personally been to various places in Africa.  Neither have you read or understood Rand's work.  Troll on.

I have never been to Africa.

For example, Lagos, Nigeria, probably the largest metropolitan "city" in Africa, and one of the 10 largest in the world, was named by the Portuguese for their city of Lagos. Throughout its recent history, say 500 years, if there hadn't been Europeans (and later Americans) virtually "raping" Africa through the Lagos "lakes," Lagos wouldn't have anything at all. As it is, they are black European, just like all the other major industrial cities in Africa.

Ayn Rand is a little like all the rest of us. We complain about the way things should be because of our oppression. But if we were dropped into the control seat, except for the very few of us, we would become just like our oppressors.

Rand was the same. Because of her oppression, and because there was no way for her to get into the control seat, she continued a finely detailed examination of all the things wherein she had been oppressed. What other than the things she examined could she become if she took over? It was her life. She didn't know how to implement the "cures" for her oppression.

Nothing new. Only a slightly different way of saying what she said.

:)

Then STFU about it.

You clearly do not know anything about Rand.  There is no need to try to throw comments out about her.  Hell, they might be right every now and then (stopped clocks are).  But why bother?

Rand was a philosopher.  Same as Marx, Engles, Adam Smith.

Maybe you are right, but I'd be grateful if you could point out my mistakes. I haven't read the first one but I've read the Guns Germs and Steel and it's  actually full of factual errors and misinterpretations. From Rifkin I've read The Hydrogen Economy. After that book I can't take him seriously. As I heard his newer books are more likely environmentalist and commie propaganda then anything about real human nature :).

What's the matter? Obviously you know about the Internet. Or does somebody else do your posting for you?

Information abounds all over the place. Never heard of libraries?



That's right. And the Russian implementation of the things she examined, the things that oppressed her, collapsed. Neither she nor many others who philosophized about the stuff that should correct the oppression, knew how to implement that stuff. Russia failed on account of not knowing how to make those philosophies work. What it is really called is human nature.

The only reason that Russia is working now is because it adopted the freedom of the United States (at least on the practical outside). The only reason the United States is failing now is that they are throwing away the freedom.

The only reason that Rand talked about it was that she was a talker. Many have talked way better. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson implemented philosophy that worked. Rand couldn't implement anything.

:)

As an Anarchist I have no objections to you gathering people together to solve any of these problems, if people think they have a solution then they should go and do it, the problem is the majority of the time whenever I hear people talk about how to solve our greatest challenges in society it always involves shooting somebody or throwing them in jail.

When you find a solution to one of these problems you care about so much that doesn't involve exortion or emotional blackmail feel free to post it and I'd be happy to support you.

Really, I am suggesting that if you don't know the people of Africa, maybe you shouldn't talk so much about them?  NO, books are not anything close to the same....

Well, Rand predicted fracking, but she didn't know how to implement it.

She predicted micropayments for service (as in roads and other things now done by government) but pre-internet and pre-bitcoin, certainly didn't know how to implement it.

How do you feel about eating the rich? Not shooting them, just feeding them alive to the millions of starving poor (http://www.ted.com/talks/tristram_stuart_the_global_food_waste_scandal?language=en) created by their greed.

Fresh meat. More enzymes. Do you get to wash them first?    ;D

Look, if your business model was barbecue sauce...

:)

That's even worse, nice work, you're saying to the poor they should essentially become cannabals? Nah, also, blaming the rich is a tired old tactic used by anti-capitalists to create a scapegoat rather than actually fix the problem and frankly, everyone knows what's causing the huge cap between the rich and the poor, it's hyperinflation. However everybody's too happy with the current system at the moment of screwing over their children in order to get a fancy house to care.

I know a couple of rich people who was working really hard for decades to get rich. Some of them was even working at night too just to get some job done for the deadline, some of them kept working almost all day on some designs or inventions. In the same time "the poor" was hanging around the pub and kept joking on these blokes. Finally these guys got (sometimes extremely) rich and now "the poor" in the pub condemning them for being bloodsucking capitalist.

That is precisely why I'm getting fed up of the anti-capitalist rhetoric, not all rich people are con-artists, some are just either incredibly lucky or have worked very hard to get where they are, adding to that, to try and get rid of capitalism you're trying to get rid of basic mathematics and that's about as impossible as trying to defy the laws of physics.

As I grown up in one of the so called commie states I've seen how the economy felt apart from the very bottom to the top because of the lack of the very basic maths and psychology. The marxist economy is destined to fail by design. IMO those hard working first and second generation "capitalists" used to move the world forward.

Exactly, you can't just dismiss mathematics, I learned this a long time ago, when Marxists and Communists have a mathematical solution to the problems they perceive with Capitalism I'll gladly listen to them, because until then they're just whining. That said, I do think that anti-austerity protestors and the like are worse because they just want this bullshit to continue and only care about themselves, they're the most selfish ones of all because even if they economy is destroyed as long as they get their pensions and pay they're happy, but mainly, it's just the pensions they give a fuck about.

Very true. I think every sensible housewife could tell to the politicians what to do when the family income isn't enough. Yes, get a better job, or get a second work, but until that's done immediate austerity measures are needed to keep things floating. (Of course banksters are offering an alternative by using credit cards and keep spending happily, but everyone with some minimal common sense knows how that will end.) According to my past experience only the kids used to make anti-austerity protests and supporting the use of credit cards... :)

Ayn Rand has been deprecated by contemporary philosophers and thinkers such as Sam Harris, more worth reading than A.R.

Kids know that they're the ones who are going to have to pay for everything if the anti-austerity protestors have their way, that's why most of the protestors out there are all old or middle-aged, the rest are Anarchists etc. who are pissed off that they're being shafted so the older generation doesn't have to deal with the consequences. This kind of thing is precisely why I support cryptocurrencies, any money I get is not going to get robbed by people who want it now so they can spend it on whatever the hell they like, when these guys are going to honestly pay for the healthcare and pensions that they want then they'll get my money.

Not at all.  Harris focuses on different things.  Some of his ideas are totally wacko.

Columnist Madeleine Bunting quotes Harris from his book The End of Faith: "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris

Almost everything is more worth reading than Ayn Rand, and comparing one delusional bullshit to another isn't helping either.





Not everybody who dismisses Anarcho-Capitalism or even Randroids is a communist. It's more like that very few people actually don't get the difference between idealogical extremism and practical politics. In particular the difference is people who payed attention in school during political education classes and ones who get their ideology from fringe books.  

Well, you started off saying things that although opposite from my opinions, seemed reasonably rational, and then I hit the bolded part....

What propositions were those? That anyone without blue eyes and blonde hair should be disarmed & exterminated? That anyone who isn't Caucasian should be disarmed & enslaved?

yeah I'm a pretty evil statist troll, continue to think of schools as indoctrination centers and go stock up on green tip ammo, just in case.

He seems to got quite close to some of those dangerous propositions :). Ironic...

I guess "paying attention" could be interpreted a variety of ways....

>>have worked very hard to get where they are

Any examples of people who got rich without manipulating/scamming/controlling others? Without doing illegal/immoral things?

As for the mathematics, i dont know man, mathematics clearly show that debts cant be paid back ;)
Mathematics also pretty clearly point out that in order for someone to have gains others will need to have a loss.

And please define the "not all rich people are con-artists". Because if 90% of them are, then you can pretty much show a nice correlation...