Was that Serenity I just heard whoooshing by Sam Stone?
The Alliance always struck me as a plutocracy. Persephone has sparkly high society parties a stone’s throw away from crowded slums, the Blue Sun Corporation would make an antitrust lawyer’s head explode, access to education seems to be mostly a matter of being able to afford to pay for it, and health and safety regulations (e.g. for miners) appear to be nonexistent.
Let’s just say that a Randroid is not the sort of person you would want to have in the same hideout with you during a Zombie Apocalypse.
Good thing that, one, there has never been a proposal for the government to bring enlightenment to anyone, seeing as that would violate the first amendment’s protection of freedom of religion, and that, two, we are our government, and thus there is no one telling us what to do, despite your libertarian delusions that say otherwise.
BTW, you are aware that River Tam was not supposed to be sane a lot of the time, right? (I’m not saying she was here, but you should hardly take advice from her.)
Who is Joss Whedon ?
What a great question to ask, in 1980, of a friend, when there’s no Internet where you can find the answer more easily than you can respond to a thread.
“Enlightement” isn’t only about religion… those countries which consider themselves democratic are all hell-bent on converting everybody else to brands of democracy they consider acceptable, for example, although that changes fuckall depending on who is in charge (what changes somewhat is the tactics used, but not the goal).
That said, for a moment I wondered whether Whedon had brain cancer. I’m not his biggest fan, but it’s nice to know he appears to be in good health.
Which has nothing to do with the Democratic Party or liberals. Sam has a portrayal of evil overbearing liberals trying to oppress honest working folk that has fuckall to do with reality.
Pretty much the entire plot of Serenity is the Alliance trying to silence a whistleblower that knows what they did on Miranda. Doesn’t that remind you of someone? Someone who has used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute twice as many whistleblowers as every other President put together, and whose administration saw merely speaking favourably of Wikileaks as grounds to repeatedly look for an excuse to have an analyst charged with a capital crime?
I am not wholly conversant with political discourse in the USA. I am aware that Ayn Rand provokes a knee jerk revulsion from a number of people, which confuses me. She was an average philosopher and writer who held personal happiness (attained, in her words, without ‘leeching’ off others) as her highest good. To help someone because it brought you happiness would be fine in her book. In fact, there’re a number of such examples in her book. That doesn’t seem like something that should attract revulsion.
Eh? I don’t know how you get that interpretation from what you quoted. She didn’t think anyone should be duty-bound to be charitable. She considered sacrifice for something you don’t value as evil. Why’s that wrong?
That is a caricature, and a bad one. In her own words on the topic
Creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and the guy who wrote and directed Marvel’s Avengers and also a movie called Serenity.
He’s kind of funny and quirky and popular on the internet.
What may confuse you is that among many people, Rand provokes well-considered and reasoned revulsion. Many of us consider the valuation of ones own desires over those of other people to be irrational and ultimately counterproductive. There’s a current of political belief in the US that idolizes Rand’s valuation of selfishness but combines it with a sanctimonious Christianity, despite the utter opposition of Gospel teachings to Rand’s teachings.
A dig at Rand may be based either upon a reasoned contempt for her self-serving shallow philosophy, or upon her religious followers who bowdlerize the philosophy.
I desire for you to jump off a cliff. (Not really, you’re a fine person I’m sure).
Not John Galt.
And yet we keep doing it – not because of any philosophy, just human nature.
I took it the way the Bushes would deliberately mangle the pronunciation of foreign leaders’ names if they didn’t like them.
Aye, and to expect otherwise and design systems (Socialism - the real one - from each according to ability and to each according to need) that expect us to do otherwise, is, I think, irrational and ultimately counter productive.
Great. Your desire for me to do that gets weighed against my desire to continue living, to watch my daughter grow up, to avoid pain, and so on. It also gets weighed against my desire to live in a world in which frivolous desires don’t kill people. Your desire loses, based on a wholly rational calculus.
In any case, if you want to discuss this issue further, open a thread in GD, and I’ll participate as I can. The main point here is that many people, either for the reasons I’ve given or for other reasons (inherent rights philosophy, utilitarianism, etc.) consider Rand’s philosophy to be repulsive, not based on a shallow understanding of it, but based on a considered reckoning of its failings.