I think that the real answer is to be found between the lines of this statement: they recognized her as a self-important cult leader, and that pissed her off.
That’s really good! Except I always heard that LaRouchians were more into putting snakes into people sock drawers and killing their pets.
She considered them a bunch of hippies.
There is a small but not insignificant subset of the gay male community who are actively and noisily misogynistic (in the same way that some lesbians are active man-haters). The presumption here is that Mr Theil is a member of this subset.
It should be added that (in my limited experience) this subset is not representative of, nor generally liked by, the other members of the gay community, who wish they would STFU.
It’s the science fiction fans who have the creepy dead gaze of a psycho killer. Have you been going to science fiction conventions instead of gay bars by mistake?
Hippies? This David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Pary and this is John Hospers, the first Libertarian Presidential candidate. These guys are not flying their freak flags. These were the guys who in 1971 - the year of Vietnamization, the Weather Underground, My Lai, Helter Skelter, Attica, and Jim Morrison - thought the biggest things going on were price controls and the abandonment of the Bretton Woods accord.
I think he was saying that by Ayn Rand’s rather fringe standards that lot were a bunch of hippies in her view (not that she ever said such a thing). It’s all relative.
Rand called Libertarians “hippies of the right,” to distinguish them from “regular” hippies. She actually had three major disagreements with them:
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They stole her ideas, often verbatim, without giving her credit.
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They refused to denounce the anarchists in their ranks.
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They were pushing for immediate political changes without first establishing the necessary ethical system to back them up.
The irony is that “Libertarianism” was one of the words she had considered, and rejected, when coming up with a name for her philosophy.
Imagine a group called panaches. Some of them are fairly reasonable, and some are batshit insane like in the OP’s link.
Wouldn’t you feel emberessed for the reasonable panaches when the insane ones run their mouth in the panache name?
And Rand was such a statist?!
Of course, active and noisy misogyny is unknown among straight males.:rolleyes:
No, but it does tend to have a distinctly different tenor.
Hmm . . . Is this really something we should discourage?
Only to the extent that they might rely on the benefits of America’s oppressive democratic regime, like the protection of our tax-supported military.
Yes. She said the state was neccesary to safeguard rights. Without the power of the state actively preventing it, she argued, the family, or community, or whoever, would be free to limit individual rights.
That’s… perverse. The state should use its power to restrict people from having their rights restricted by other people?
Yes, that’s perverse. Except that she never said that.
According to Rand, “The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others.” Obviously, she was opposed to anarchy, since there would be no government to protect people’s rights in these three respects.
I’m thinking Rand’s main objection to anarchists might have been the fact that the anarchist political tradition is distinctly leftist and communalist.
No, she was opposed to anarchy on philosophical grounds. It would have been unlike her to care about “political tradition;” she just didn’t think that way.