Ayn Rand quote

[jgraham]

Considering the free exchange nature of BTC and the sort of "tipping" culture that's grown up around it.  I'm surprised I don't see more of the hardcore objectivist around (while the 'panhandling' nature of BTC communities isn't strictly Randian it's close in the idea that there appears to be an express of how even the smallest service is something people should pay for)

Just an observation, not a criticism.

This is a matter of semantics. There's no real argument here.

Are the concepts of life and death interchangeable with sentience and non-sentience?

[1715282962]

1715282962

[Anonymous]

express of how even the smallest service is something people should pay for

You don't even understand Rand's works. I doubt you have even read The Virtue of Selfishness.

Anyways, many of life's smallest services are inherently paid for through things other than money. Never, ever has Rand advocated that everything has a formal obligatory price.

[Anonymous]

Are the concepts of life and death interchangeable with sentience and non-sentience?

A being either ceases to exist or exists. I guess one could be mentally impaired but far from something one could consider a standard organism: one that can sustain. So, one could subjectively define life as something that can sustain as opposed to something that fully cannot. So, there is no denying that there are shades of grey which makes my original analogy imperfect.

So, I guess you win. You tore up my analogy, my play on words. Good show.

[tavi]

...still claimed Social Security and Medicare to her dying day.  Truly a case where her actions spoke louder than her words.

You'd be a cretin not to grab some C-notes whenever Tony Soprano drops a pile on the ground without noticing. 

[jgraham]

express of how even the smallest service is something people should pay for

You don't even understand Rand's works. I doubt you have even read The Virtue of Selfishness.

Anyways, many of life's smallest services are inherently paid for through things other than money. Never, ever has Rand advocated that everything has a formal obligatory price.

I suppose that's the difference.   I don't pretend to understand her works.  In the same way that I don't pretend to understand say the Koran.  Outside of it's importance as a religious work in it's time.

Anyway, you're getting far too worked up about a casual observation about it being reasonable to demand a price for any product of your labour.

(You are absolutely correct that while I've skimmed VoS I haven't 'read' it)

makes my original analogy imperfect.

The word is 'incorrect'.   It violates semantic realism.  It also invalidates your statement that you weren't making a false dichotomy.  Any statement which is given as "X or Y" when there are more choices than simply X and Y is by definition a false dichotomy and as you have mentioned there are "shades of grey".  QED

So, I guess you win. You tore up my analogy, my play on words. Good show.

Oh really?  Are we here now? So here, we have a statement which implies that there was something wrong with pointing out that you were wrong.  It's this kind of bullying that I think Objectivists are absolutely right to stand against.

Edit: For the record that kind of thing only works if we are dating...

[hugolp]

Precisely.

Rand and her self-centred sociopathy on one hand, and the murderous Statolatry of the nazi's and the Leninists on the other.

I reject them both. Balance between the individual and the collective is key, neither is anything without the other. They are in fact ultimately, two sides of the same coin. All extremists are basically egomaniacs, I can't stand the fuckers.

This is nonsense and contradictory. Its like saying you want to have fire and water together. It might serve you to keep your mind happy but its does not make sense. Its a contradiction.

[Sjalq]

"-" unless you are living in one of about 3 countries on earth I want to guarantee you that your government is also overreaching itself.

[YoYa]

Precisely.

Rand and her self-centred sociopathy on one hand, and the murderous Statolatry of the nazi's and the Leninists on the other.

I reject them both. Balance between the individual and the collective is key, neither is anything without the other. They are in fact ultimately, two sides of the same coin. All extremists are basically egomaniacs, I can't stand the fuckers.

There is no collective.

Er.....the free market? Ie, a collective of people all trading something of value. Even in the light of individual self-interest, the wider group still dictates supply and demand. Perhaps things are a little more complicated then binary, and dualities exist everywhere.

[shady financier]

Precisely.

Rand and her self-centred sociopathy on one hand, and the murderous Statolatry of the nazi's and the Leninists on the other.

I reject them both. Balance between the individual and the collective is key, neither is anything without the other. They are in fact ultimately, two sides of the same coin. All extremists are basically egomaniacs, I can't stand the fuckers.

This is nonsense and contradictory. Its like saying you want to have fire and water together. It might serve you to keep your mind happy but its does not make sense. Its a contradiction.

If you think Rand is great, it is understandable that you are simply unable to hold certain concepts in your mind.

[Raize]

Actually the best thing about Ann Rynd is that she made a fortune from selling her books and still claimed Social Security and Medicare to her dying day.  Truly a case where her actions spoke louder than her words.

I heard she used public roads too! zOMG!

EDIT: (3/11/2013) While I'm not really a fan of Ayn Rand, it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine to hear someone say a libertarian is a hypocrite for taking advantage of things their money was taken and used for. In fact, I think it tells me an awful lot about the person saying that. They really do think that wealth should be STOLEN from those that have it and GIVEN AWAY to those that do not, with absolutely no recourse nor toward any benefit of the person losing the wealth. As Penn from Penn & Teller has said, "There's great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint."

[YoYa]

Actually the best thing about Ann Rynd is that she made a fortune from selling her books and still claimed Social Security and Medicare to her dying day.  Truly a case where her actions spoke louder than her words.

I heard she used public roads too! zOMG!

But those roads were a manifestation of the collective seeking to move her towards one destination that would crush her individualist desire to off-road!

[MatthewLM]

If you are forced to pay taxes then claiming some money back is only rational. The problem starts with taxation.

I agree that Ayn Rand was quite hypocritical as it seems to me.

[jgraham]

If you are forced to pay taxes then claiming some money back is only rational. The problem starts with taxation.

I agree that Ayn Rand was quite hypocritical as it seems to me.

As I mentioned earlier a problem with looking at Objectivism is that while there are a few tenets laid down (i.e. A is A - which is the foundation for semantic realism and the reason I was easily able to take down Atlas - also because he is seventeen  ) they are often incomplete and vague.  For example, do any of you have a problem with relativity? or quantum mechanics?

Some objectivists do...it's not hard to find them online twisting and turning to try and either find a way to reject relativity or quantum physics or shoehorn it into their philosophical framework.  Yet the evidence for these things while took considerable work to produce is well-established.    It's like watching creationists.  When your philosophical system becomes a barrier to learning.   It's time to look for a new philosophical system.

[niemivh]

Ayn rand was a pile of garbage.

That's a bit harsh.

She managed to piss of every collectivism based philosopher on the planet.   

While most had imagined a Utopian future based on mutual wants/needs, Rand told them to shove it and placed individual capital as the back bone for the future.

If she's so individualistic she should have wrote it in her own language.

[niemivh]

There is no collective.

There is when a group of people decide they share a common interest and want to work together to achieve it, which they quite often do.

A group of people never decide. A group is not a single organism nor a singular sentient being. It's consent can never be unilateral. Only an individual is capable of choice and consent.

This is like saying that emergent behavior of any social group can't be understood or classified.  Unfortunately it's not that simple.  A person behaves differently than a group of people and it's simply not a sum of its parts.  The quote that "there is no such thing as society there is just you and I" that Ayn Rand and Margret Thatcher liked to throw around is complete bunk.  It doesn't mean we are all a Borg like creature, but the idea that we are each our own island is devoid of reason and rings of a familiar tune similar to those that deny the theory of evolution and the piles of evidence that support it.

[J180]

(And as a second aside, I finally just started reading Atlas Shrugged since I figured I should, and politics and ideologies aside, I think it's just a darn good book.)

I haven't tried Atlas shrugged but I feel the same way about The Fountainhead.

If you're starting to consider Anarchy I want to preach David Friedman's book. Three things which make it my favorite are 1. He analyses it as an economist, and rejects the ethics of Rand/Rothbard. 2. He devotes a lot of time to attempting to solve the Mad Max problem. 3. He's the perfect example of being self-critical and listening to contrary evidence. Some of his conclusions are 'If this is true, then a government would be preferable'.

[niemivh]

Precisely.

Rand and her self-centred sociopathy on one hand, and the murderous Statolatry of the nazi's and the Leninists on the other.

I reject them both. Balance between the individual and the collective is key, neither is anything without the other. They are in fact ultimately, two sides of the same coin. All extremists are basically egomaniacs, I can't stand the fuckers.

This is nonsense and contradictory. Its like saying you want to have fire and water together. It might serve you to keep your mind happy but its does not make sense. Its a contradiction.

If you think Rand is great, it is understandable that you are simply unable to hold certain concepts in your mind.

To be fair, I loved The Fountainhead, is was great and hugely inspiring.  But then when she tried and take her romantic ideas into even the outskirts of the realm of economics her world imploded.

[Timo Y]

All extremists are basically egomaniacs, I can't stand the fuckers.

Everyone is an extremist from somebody's point of view.

[Dhomochevsky]

I find some posters' patience with Atlas and willingness to reply with sane arguments to his dipshittery highly commendable. The Bitcoin forums are filled with ridiculous and paranoid arguments, and grand plans about destroying the status quo - this is really setting us back. No sane entrepeneur would take something backed by such a community seriously. We need more posters making sane - not strawman - arguments and standing up for them. Good thing Bitcoin is still in its infancy, hopefully the users will grow up along with it.

[kiba]

I find some posters' patience with Atlas and willingness to reply with sane arguments to his dipshittery highly commendable. The Bitcoin forums are filled with ridiculous and paranoid arguments, and grand plans about destroying the status quo - this is really setting us back. No sane entrepeneur would take something backed by such a community seriously. We need more posters making sane - not strawman - arguments and standing up for them. Good thing Bitcoin is still in its infancy, hopefully the users will grow up along with it.

Moderation is not necessarily sanity.

Bitcoin Weekly is a good example of rational insanity, which turns out to be sane after all. Bitcoin Weekly commits to an economic premises:

We think copyright is completely unnecessary and highly detrimental to our existence. To prove it, we publish everything under the public domain.

Most people would call us insane and idiotic. As far as I am concerned, I finally proved to myself that a copyfree world is nothing to worry about.

I am in the same political ideology as Atlas, but I am not as loud as him.