Now I’m wondering who Joss Whendon is, but I refuse to click on your link.
Whew. For a minute there I thought I was going to have to throw away all of my Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Avengers* dvds.
*Yes multiple. I got the Blue-Ray/DVD combo. And that would have really pissed me off because I just bought it last week.
Easy for you to say! When the zombies start looking to eat brains, I got serious survival issues, here!
Luckily you’re on the Dope, where practically everyone is a zombie apocalypse survival expert!
All those Aggies wandering about, wondering where everybody went.
Thank you for providing the perfect response. In each of these judgements that you make, you take into account that which is valuable to you, according to you. You may consider her screed to be repulsive, but you live by the largest part of it.
But you have entirely failed to explain why a considered reckoning of its failings makes you find it repulsive. Your one sentence to that end was, if you pardon me saying so, rather silly and repudiated by your own statements to follow.
I have seen previous threads on the topic in GD. They consist of a lot of people foaming at the mouth about ideas that they have half understood, not understood, and, in one thread, not bothered to even acquaint themselves with! I can easily understand the point of view that Rand’s ideas are not deserving of veneration, but cannot understand what there is in them for you to find repulsive.
Perhaps it’s her adulation of a serial killer or her stance on homosexuality.
Which real form of socialism is this? Marx formulated the expression in the Critique of the Gotha Program for a communist society in one of its higher phases - namely where worker ownership of the means of production is already prevalent. Marx critiqued the “equalitarian” notion of Proudhon in Poverty of Philosophy that it’d be possible to ensure this while maintaining the anarchy of production (competition), as workers which’d perform in excess of their necessary labour would create a glut of products which workers working to subsistence would not consume (and since these products are superfluous to the worker’s own means of reproduction, they’d thus go to rot). At any rate we have sufficient scientific data to determine that humans are not rational actors seeking to maximise their own gains. If they were, wage labour would not be possible, as they’d recognise their conditions of existence would improve should they expropriate their own means of production (or, given incomplete understanding, they’d at least demand remuneration according to piece-rate). Mises claimed that the motivation to excel is not present when one does not reap the rewards of such an effort and that the effects of an increased effort on a community are too diffuse to be experienced personally, along with claiming that non-pecuniary rewards are not tangible enough for effort to be expended for them. However, it is trivial to demonstrate that the effect of increased effort on behalf of a given individual in wage labour is analogous to that of a worker in a communist society, in that they are unlikely to see any significant personal gains. There are investigations into the limits of the effect of fiscal reward on performance which seem to be quite reliable, particularly on the capacity of individuals for hyperbolic discounting. There are also numerous instances of non-pecuniary motivators, one tangible example being the prestige granted by achievements and the like in video games (not entirely fungible) or the Stakhanovite movement.
Which? In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny has to pay rent and work as a servant for one of her greatest comrades.
Tu quoque, chum.
Joss is kinda rocking the new look too. The half bald with long hair look was not flattering.
No, actually, I don’t, and I was thirteen when I last thought her viewpoint was interesting; I remember mowing the lawn one day when I saw the big giant hole in her philosophy. But as I said, if you really want to discuss this, take it to GD
In an era where the established cultural norm was to regard homosexuality as immoral? I don’t recall hearing about much revulsion regarding George Washington holding slaves. Also, your own link goes on to note that homosexuality is perfectly moral.
As for the serial killer admiration - What the 23-year-old Rand wrote in her journal, as notes for herself, was:
There were facets of his personality she admired. Specifically, the facet that allowed him to shrug off societal mores, one which she incorporates in her heroes. But again, given that one of the cardinal rules of her philosophy is to abjure the use of violence, the revulsion you feel is based on a half-understanding.
Thank you for that, but I didn’t quite get your point. Individuals may not work to maximise monetary gains, but they do maximise their personal utility functions. Rand recognises this. I don’t think Marxian systems of government as practised do that.
It’s been a while since I read her books. Off the top of my head? Roark pulls the sculptor guy out of his depression.
[/QUOTE]
Tu quoque, chum.
[/QUOTE]
I was hardly foaming at the mouth about socialism in that post. But you’re right and fair that I don’t know enough about the theory of socialism as laid out by Marx, and should have qualified my statement better. I do know more than enough about the practice of socialism though, which has failed spectacularly everywhere it has been tried as an economic system, and in my country left hundreds of millions of people in grinding, starvation levels of poverty for decades longer than they needed to be.
There IS a big giant hole in her philosophy. We both probably don’t even think it is the same one 
But there’s nothing to cause revulsion.
Ayn Rand generally causes revulsion because of the simple-minded folks who take her stuff seriously. Even after they finish high school.
They think they’ve found The Truth & go on & on, even after we suggest they go elsewhere. Where they might find somebody who finds their ideas interesting or novel.
I was hoping someone would get my subtle joke. 
It’s clear to me if you are joking here, and wishing death and harm on people is against the SDMB rules. Don’t do this again.
:smack: My apologies for my snark, then.
Did you mean it isn’t clear to you if I was serious or not? Are you serious? Did you miss the part where I say - “Not really, you’re a fine person I’m sure” ? Or the follow up response to LHOD where I make it even more clear it was a rhetorical device? Not that it could have been any clearer. For the record, no I was not wishing death or harm on anyone.
I did mean that it was not clear to me, and no, your other comments did not make it as clear as I would have liked. Please be careful making that kind of joke.
I feel sad that this thread really dropped the ball on the zombie apocalypse.
You’ll be sorry later.
Slowing down in your dotage, bro. It was so clear that it wasn’t a whoosh, it was a symptom. 
fwiw, and I know that’s very little, it was totally clear to me that it was just a lame and unjustifiably self-satisfied rhetorical device, not an actual wish for harm to me. It was on the level of people who say, “I support PETA–People Eating Tasty Animals! dur hur hur” Embarrassingly unclever, but harmless.
There is a great deal of crude, smug self satisfaction in our conversation, but I assure you, very little is coming from me. I have tried to be respectful and nice. Hopefully this is more clear to the people reading this than it is to you (and Marley)