@Cycloptichorn,
You really are a bore Cyclo.
Do you ever get tired of telling people what they think, what they should think, and what they will think if only they were as astute as you.?
@Finn dAbuzz,
Finn dAbuzz wrote:
You really are a bore Cyclo.
Do you ever get tired of telling people what they think, what they should think, and what they will think if only they were as astute as you.?
I'm not telling you what you do think or what to think, Finn. Just pointing out that you're totally ******* wrong on this one. It's as much to the others reading this thread as it is to you.
Cycloptichorn
@Cycloptichorn,
Cycloptichorn wrote:You can't ensure your food is free from poison or that your kids aren't kidnapped at school cheaper.
Economically speaking, there is an optimum nonzero amount of poison in one's food. Let's say that one can eat food that's 99.5% free of poison for $600 a month or one can eat food that's 99.9% free of poison for $60,000 a month. Is that difference worth the cost? Maybe, maybe not. It's for each of us to decide for ourselves. Most people will settle for some small risk if it can save them enough money. Only a free market can serve those individual needs. A central government is just going to force everyone to accept the same level of risk the mob demands, regardless of what any individual desires.
Even if I accept your premise that stealing money rather than trading honestly can provide a service at a lower price, is that worth it? I would rather do the moral thing and pay more for services.
I don't think Rand was necessarily a hypocrite for accepting Social Security but I think Phyllis Schlafly is, was and always will be:
Phyllis Schlafly, the longtime conservative activist and anti-feminist, spent much of her career railing against efforts to increase access to child care -- and even the very concept of parents (specifically mothers) using child care to allow them to pursue careers. But, according to a new report, Schlafly herself had "domestic help" to help raise her six children, a fact that she has either never mentioned or, at the least, not emphasized in her public rhetoric.
Schlafly is out with a new book co-written with her niece, called "The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know — and Men Can't Say." In writing about the book, the Los Angeles Times' Meghan Daum interviewed Schlafly's niece, Suzanne Venker. And when Daum asked Venker how Schlafly had managed it all, she surfaced a remarkable piece of information:
How did Schlafly manage to raise all those kids and pursue such a prominent career? Granted, at 25 Schlafly married an older, well- established lawyer, and granted, she herself didn't go to law school until she was in her 50s, but did she have help? If so, she never seemed to mention it.
Venker seemed to almost despair at the question: "I'm in a pickle because I haven't been asked this directly before," she said. "I'm going to say this the best way I can. She had domestic help.... She wouldn't have called them nannies, but she had people in her home. That's what she chose. Did she mention that fact enough to get her point across to young people about how she managed to do it? No, she did not."
Indeed, even a cursory search of Schlafly's public statements show an outright hostility to use of help or child care. In 1989, when the Senate was considering a Dodd-Kennedy bill to provide day care to poor families, Schlafly fired off an angry letter to one of its Republican sponsors, Orrin Hatch. In it, Schlafly blasts what she calls "stranger care":
We expected pro-family leadership from you, not surrender to the liberals who want to build a baby-sitting bureaucracy, penalize full-time mothers, and impose federal regulations that will drive low-cost daycare out of business.
The Dodd bill is unjust and discriminatory because it discriminates against mothers who take care of their own children and taxes them in order to subsidize those who use stranger care -- because it discriminates against employed mothers whose children are cared for by relatives -- and because it encourages and subsidizes institutional care of babies instead of encouraging the care of babies within the family home.
Here is Schlafly in 1980, quoted in Newsweek:
In 1971, Congress approved a $ 15 billion child-development program aimed at making "quality child care" available to all, according to ability to pay. But it was vetoed by President Richard Nixon, who declared that such government interference would threaten family life. That sentiment still prevails among conservatives. It has helped defeat every comprehensive day-care bill for the past nine years, and right-wing delegates promise to make day care a prominent target next month at the White House Conference on Families. Argues conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly: "There's no real substitute for the care of the real mother."
Testifying before Congress on another matter in 1981, Schlafly said (via Nexis): "It would be a tragic mistake for Congress ever to adopt any public or tax policy which encourages mothers to assign child care to others and enter the labor force."
And she's still not being candid about her own experience. Check out this exchange from an NPR interview this week, in which Schlafly was asked directly how she managed her career and her family:
MARTIN: How did you manage, though? As a mother of six, as your husband was -certainly had a busy career of his own, and being as significant a national figure as you have been, how did you manage?
Ms. SCHLAFLY: Well, politics was my hobby. And I really spent 25 years as a full-time homemaker before I did any particular traveling around. And by that time the children were well along in school or college. And they were very supportive. My husband was very supportive. I told the feminists the only person's permission I had to get was my husband's.
What about that domestic help?
(Hat tip: Right Wing Watch) With research assistance from Justin Spees
Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter.
@plainoldme,
Ayn Rand started this right wing trend.
@talk72000,
Surprisingly, her partner-in-crime was Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
@plainoldme,
Are you saying that she was a thief? I hope not because I thought that Laura Ingalls Wilder had always played a part on the side of morality!
@reasoning logic,
Partner-in-crime is a just a turn of phrase I have been using on my retail job to be charming. I say that to explain why I can not go into the stockroom which is located in the basement. "I'm sorry, but my partner-in-crime is having his lunch now. When he comes back and there is someone to cover the floor, I will get a case of wine for you."
I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books which I discovered as a bored tweenager but I would never say she "always played a part on the side of morality."
I was deeply disappointed to learn that her daughter was a key figure in the formulation of Rand's stand, which many mock as not a philosophy.
To me, there is nothing moral about the AMerican right.
However, I have always distinguished between morality and ethics, labeling ethics as superior because it is taking morality -- which I define as the inherited body of law and philosophy and religion -- and applying reasoning/intellection and experience to it to produce an ethical system.
In part, Wilder's books persuaded me to be a leftist and a hippie. That her daughter was so far right disturbs me still.
@plainoldme,
I very well may be wrong but from my studies of psychology, neuroscience and Neuro -philosophy I have learned very little but what I have learned is that both you and I will have some very sick great grand children that may go against what you or I may define as logical or ethical!
My question to you is what should we do to protect our selves and our other grandchildren that are some what able to understand logical reasoning in it's simplest form from such immoralities?
@talk72000,
She lies in a publicly run graveyard where union labor cuts the grass over her head. You should hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth while that's going on.
@Thomas,
Quote: There's no claim that she took out more than she'd put in.
That would have no bearing anyway. If she took money from that system, then she accepted that system as it stood at the time. There is no payback to the early diers [spell check doesn't like that one], nor is there a demand for the long livers. [it's okay with that one because, I suspect, it's connected it to "onions"]
@failures art,
The happiest day of my life will be the day I go to cast a vote in an election and the choice is between Republicans and Libertarians, i.e. between a legitimate right/centrist party and a legitimate laissez-faire small-government party, and the demoKKKrats are just an ugly memory in history books.
@Finn dAbuzz,
I made a prediction on page 6, the one before this one; bet myself a nice steak dinner that Finn would come back with some vacuous "That's BS" type line.
I just won me a nice big juicy T-Bone!
@gungasnake,
The next day, when you're shipped off to a concentration camp, will be the saddest day of your life.
Salon wrote:How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood
My dad saw objectivism as a logical philosophy to live by, but it tore my family apart
My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn't mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn't need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn't the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father's one true love: Ayn Rand.
You might be familiar with Rand from a high school reading assignment. Perhaps a Tea Partyer acquaintance name-dropped her in a debate on individual rights. Or maybe you've heard the film adaptation of her magnum opus "Atlas Shrugged" is due out April 15. In short, she is a Russian-born American novelist who championed her self-taught philosophy of objectivism through her many works of fiction. Conservatives are known to praise her for her support of laissez-faire economics and meritocracy. Liberals tend to criticize her for being too simplistic. I know her more intimately as the woman whose philosophy dictates my father's every decision.
What is objectivism? If you'd asked me that question as a child, I could have trotted to the foyer of my father's home and referenced a framed quote by Rand that hung there like a cross. It read: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." As a little kid I interpreted this to mean: Love yourself. Nowadays, Rand's bit is best summed up by the rapper Drake, who sang: "Imma do me."
...
Read the
full article.
This is a sad story about a person who decided to apply objectivist principles to his life and even to his family. While it's fair to say this is an extreme case, I don't think that objectivists would claim that the man failed the philosophy.
Another excerpt:
Quote:Our objectivist education, however, was not confined to lectures and books. One time, at dinner, I complained that my brother was hogging all the food.
"He's being selfish!" I whined to my father.
"Being selfish is a good thing," he said. "To be selfless is to deny one's self. To be selfish is to embrace the self, and accept your wants and needs."
It was my dad's classic response -- a grandiose philosophical answer to a simple real-world problem. But who cared about logic? All I wanted was another serving of mashed potatoes.
A
R
T
@failures art,
failures art wrote:This is a sad story about a person who decided to apply objectivist principles to his life and even to his family.
If this guy ever was anything other than a sleazy, underhanded prick, his daughter sure doesn't give any evidence for it, or even claim it in this article. At the most, you can say that he used Objectivism to rationalize what he would have done anyway.
failures art wrote:I don't think that objectivists would claim that the man failed the philosophy.
If I remember correctly, a couple of your friends on Facebook are Objectivists. Why not just ask them?
@Thomas,
Quote:At the most, you can say that he used Objectivism to rationalize what he would have done anyway.
That's the entire point of Objectivism: to justify dickish moves you were already intending to make.
Cycloptichorn
@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
failures art wrote:This is a sad story about a person who decided to apply objectivist principles to his life and even to his family.
If this guy ever was anything other than a sleazy, underhanded prick, his daughter sure doesn't give any evidence for it, or even claim it in this article. At the most, you can say that he used Objectivism to rationalize what he would have done anyway.
I think
this was the point. As she wrote:
Quote:Ultimately, I suspect Dad was drawn to objectivism because, unlike so many altruistic faiths, it made him feel good about being selfish.
Her dad was already a selfish man. Objectivism's role was that it served absolve himself of any guilt and probably enabled him further.
Thomas wrote:
failures art wrote:I don't think that objectivists would claim that the man failed the philosophy.
If I remember correctly, a couple of your friends on Facebook are Objectivists. Why not just ask them?
I posted it up, but I think it got drowned in birthday messages. Poor timing on my part. I am curious to see if there is an
avocat avec no true scotsman. But I won't jump the gun. Honestly though, what would the the part of his actions that was not directly in line with objectivst principle. I certainly don't think that most people, even avid Rand defenders would do this kind of thing, but I think their inhibition would come from how far they were willing to take their views and what aspects of their lives they felt it had domain in.
A
R
T
@failures art,
Failures Art wrote:Honestly though, what would the the part of his actions that was not directly in line with objectivst principle.
The part where they reject force and fraud? When your brother takes away your food, and when your father tricks you into harming yourself by signing a disadvantageous legal document, that would be violations of Objectivist principles. But don't ask me, I'm not an Objectivist. I'm curious what your Objectivist friends have to say.
