Throwaway time! What politically incorrect beliefs do you hold?

Leap20 · 16 days

Every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen.. . . Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

douglasmacarthur · 18 days

I recommend watching his debate with Greenpeace. It's on youtube. Alex was pretty darn good.

douglasmacarthur · 19 days

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

woogoose · 20 days

No one called her a cunt. That is progress.

cyberdyno2 · 20 days

Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.

JakobVirgil · 3 months

Here is an article from The Objective Standard that would sum up the Ayn Rand Institute view on Islam.

Tl;DR: Philosophy runs the world. Islam is an evil philosophy and has a massive following.

Edit: I do not fully subscribe to the idea that Islam is an existential l threat to the West. We will destroy ourselves before they have a chance.

mamiyashooter · 3 months

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

-Ayn Rand Playboy, March 1964

JakobVirgil · 3 months

I agree with all of this.

bananosecond · 3 months

Great one! Many thanks.

JakobVirgil · 3 months

Note that there is no monolith of thought in the Objectivist world. That being said, there is a large portion of the movement, led by Leonard Peikoff and Yaron Brook, that see Islamic Totalitarianism as an existential threat to the United States and the freedom of the world. They advocate a regime change in Iran, Saudi Arabia, some other countries as the only way to protect the freedom of the western world.

Among this subreddit you will find people who side with Ron Paul on foreign policy and those that side with Peikoff and Brook. Both groups consider themselves Objectivists. Whether that is correct or not is always up for debate.

JakobVirgil · 3 months

No, but many Objectivists love his domestic policies with the exception of his stance on abortion.

Not all, but most Objectivists, also dislike his foreign policy for many different reasons.

mamiyashooter · 3 months

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

-Ayn Rand “Introduction,” The Virtue of Selfishness, vii

iamTimHeidecker · 3 months

I went to MHS and I also still get zits. I blame asbestos.

iamTimHeidecker · 3 months

MHS! School of excellence!

ParahSailin · 3 months

Word. I'm a blog hog so I subscribed to the feed and noticed it was rather obscure.

ParahSailin · 3 months

Did our moderator just out himself with the link in this post?

ParahSailin · 3 months

I just want to know if Agora was a good movie.

Calscifer · 3 months

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.

indecisivenerd · 3 months

Rand wasn't much of an economist and she didn't really ever go into specifics about it all too much. Her defense of capitalism dealt more with the morality of Capitalism.

The Austrian School of Economics is where you should look for specific answers to how a market would handle X. They are the best defenders of the free and unfettered market that I know of. They also spend a lot of time answering questions just like yours.

sagefox601 · 3 months

Cross-Post this to r/Objectivism

basksinthesun · 3 months

You're right about my use of the word grant. That was a mistake for sure.

hreiedv · 3 months

I would say you don't categorize a species by the marginal cases. I will however concede that this isn't as easy as I thought based on my current level of knowledge. Looks like I have some reading to do.

Thanks for keeping me on my toes.

basksinthesun · 3 months

You're right. It was a poorly constructed justification. I'll concede that. Thanks for keeping me on my toes.

logomancer · 3 months

Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both.

RandQuoter

TROPHY CASE

RandQuoter

TROPHY CASE

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