My bolds. Maybe you should read her stuff before promoting her philosophies?
Oh, it has happened before. It went about as well as to be expected. It just went as well as could be expected.
I’m sorry, but there are probably hundreds of thousands of self-published novels from unknowns floating around on the internet. Unless you happen to be an established novelist (which you may be, for all I know) the very most likely situation is that nobody will read your novel at all.
Try The Prince (and then read it again while keeping in mind that Machiavelo intended all of it as sarcasm), or The Art of War. Both of them are pretty plain language. You may also try your hand at some of Orwell’s books: Animal Farm is easier on the brain than 1984, although both of them are specifically intended to make it hurt. Having Orwell and Rand in the same room might cause matter-antimatter explosions.
To be fair I wasn’t promoting her. I was looking for opinions on her. She got my interest based on quotes of hers that I read. I saw several parallels in our views at first glance. I spent several hours reading reviews on her and her work and it became obvious how controversial she was. This was a good thread for me and gave me a much better look at what she really stood for. Upon looking at her closer I don’t feel her work will be worth pursuing for me.
OP ought to consider signing up for Philosophy 101, at any university. Not only is it taught, it is routinely, thoroughly amd entirely debunked. Usually in the first semester.
Plus it’s fun to watch the kids, who drank it up in high school, sputter and spin trying to claim it actually has some merit. By homecoming even they have abandoned her, not surprisingly!
(If you’re really interested you can probably even audit the course and avoid the fees. OP could def learn some stuff though, and I think, really enjoy the process! Something to consider!)
I have joined several philosophy groups and 5% of it I really enjoy. 95% I think is garbage. I am hooked on the concept of achieving happiness through our ability to add value to something. How we do it does not necessarily have to be creative it could be through adding money, it might be through various forms of advocacy, recognizing talent etc.
I see social media as the ideal medium for those of us who feel we lack value to contribute and be appreciated and recognized. I also see a great potential for social media collaborations simply because the potential for vast amounts of resources exists. I see the challenge as creating a mode of communication that could facilitate these free source open ended collaborations.
A uni course will be a very different experience, from being part of some groups. Just sayin’, it’s a good place to start if your interest is sincere.
It fits a lot of stereotypes that you discount the very real problems that black peoples face in American society in favor of diagnosing their problem as having insufficient opportunities to “find things they can add value to enhancing their own value.”
I can’t even begin to decide where to start digging through that conveniently vague pile of horse hockey.
Black students are discriminated against by teachers who disproportionately discipline them and disproportionately criminalize their behavior.
Black patients are discriminated against by doctors, who disproportionately disbelieve their claims of feeling pain.
Black people on the street are discriminated against by police, who treat them as being inherently more dangerous than white people.
Black people are discriminated against by the justice system, which charges them and punishes them more readily for crimes at younger ages thus giving them criminal records and harming their future earning potential.
And then there are the list of crimes I mentioned that have actually been used over the last couple of centuries to oppress black people.
And that’s not just history. Look at the way Ferguson, Missouri, has used its justice system to systematically criminalize the lives of its black population.
Work on those issues and I will think you will find that a significant proportion of the problem of “adding value” will take care of itself.
Well, except of course the fact that our entire society is on the road to devaluing human labor itself for both blue collar and white collar jobs.
Our capitalistic system that largely relies on people selling their labor is becoming obsolete and then what? Then we are going to have a huge “adding value” problem that Rand offers no solution for.
That’s where you’re wrong. She absolutely does. The makers get to go to fantasy island. Everybody else stays behind to rot. It’s Rand’s Eschatology solution. Highly original thinker that she was.
There is a lot of truth to what you are saying but I don’t think there is a conscious effort at discriminating against blacks. The prejudice is there no doubt but a lot of it has to do with the preponderance of bad experiences people are having with blacks. All blacks end up paying a price for what the more visible minority of them are doing. Blacks are more easily identifiable and there is more of a tendency to lump them together. The blacks themselves will have to negate the effects of the stereo typing. More solid roll models like president Obama are a very important step in this process. I don’t think it is a fault thing as much as it is a human nature thing. Tough problem that has really been under addressed.
How about, start here: “value” is an extrinsic property, always dependent on what someone else thinks. If the social estimate of your value starts out from 1.4, whilst many others begin from 7.8, it is a massive undertaking to make up the difference. For many of the 1.4s, it is more than they can handle.
ust read the books like they are really long comic books. Like comic books everything is over the top. The hero’s are perfect. The bad guys are terrible. The situations are extreme. Like a comic book, there can be some interesting ideas and arguments loosely tied together by sex and violence.
A lot of things in life are 3 steps forward and 2 steps back making it hard to recognize the overall trend. Her work is like 9000 steps forward 0 steps back. It can be helpful in evaluating why you do the things you do but comes with some basic problems. The first is that in the time it takes to go 9000 steps, the issues have changed. The second is the fluidity of the scales. Societal trends change at different speeds then governments, laws, personal philosophies ect. and in many cases they seem to swing like pendulums. Her books don’t really take that into account.
Don’t worry about the conservative, liberal thing. Her work gets bandies back and forth by both sides depending on and the decade and the issue.
Assuming facts not in evidence. You’re basically saying “Assuming the stereotype is true, is it any surprise that people respond as if it’s true?”
I think blacks are misrepresented by a significant portion of the black community. There still is a very significant portion of the black community that operates outside the bounds of what is considered socially acceptable. They are simply more visible than blacks doing the right thing which no one notices. I also believe that most of this is based in low self esteem which is very understandable.
I wish we had a like button here, I agree with you.
This is the impression I am getting. I still have some interest in her books because anytime someone is trying to inject a new concept the structure of a book changes. The concepts being introduced need to be understood as it progresses. This can get real tricky in maintaining interest.
Also in 2008…to the entire world.
Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was a big time Ayn Rand disciple. His low interest rates and long-standing disdain for regulation are considered one of the leading contributors to the financial crisis. Even Greenspan himself now says he was mistaken in believing banks could regulate themselves.
I think that is second most likely situation, the most likely is that it will never be finished or published.
The same is true for every ethnic and socio-economic group. Do you not think that a significant portion of poor whites operate outside the bounds of what is considered socially acceptable? If you’re going to throw around these claims the least you can do is provide some evidence to back up your opinion. Why do you attribute the problems in the African-American community to low self esteem rather than institutionalized racism as pointed to earlier in the thread?