I am indeed compassionless under your definition, and I am not ashamed of that (proud in fact). I have given to charity on occassion, but I usually feel bad afterwards. It is stupid and wrong to say that an action is good if it benefits others and bad if it benefits oneself (ie, altruism), and the opposite is wrong too (ie egoism). Google up a speech by the Aynster called sometinh like Objectivist ethics for some good reading on the subject.
As far as me being a conservative, I’m an atheist fiscal conservative social liberal, so if that all works out to “conservative” in your puny mind, then so be it.
If I understand this correctly, Bricker posted some concerns about RandRover and expressed disapproval of RR’s stance in another thread-classic Pitting behavior. Other Dopers jump on board. Some come in to defend RR. And now this board is gone to hell because someone posted 0-1?
This place gets weirder all the time.
RR–you may, of course, do what you choose with your money. May you never need a Good Samaritan and may karma actually work.
While browsing a list on wikipedia of people executed in San Quentin the other day (oh, like I’m the only one), I found this little tidbit regarding a child murderer:
I don’t believe that that’s the case here. Had it been anyone else, I may not have even opened the thread. But RR has a history of derailing threads in the most disruptive way possible. Repeatedly. The guy truly deserves a smackdown, and I, for one, am more then happy to assist in the smacking.
I’m assuming that at some point in the course of this thread, he’s added you to his ignore list. Or, I suppose he could be ignoring your questions the old-fashioned way.
Or possibly he’s been overwhelmed by the fact that twenty people are posting at him, and he’s only one person. It’s hard to keep up under those circumstances, a fact that I’m keenly aware of – and, sadly, it’s not a purely theoretical awareness.
But I was hoping in light of the fact that I was the OP, he’d choose to concentrate on answering my points, because I’m quite curious to see how he would respond.
Wow, that’s interesting. I googled "Ayn Rand William Edward Hickman and came up with this excerpt from her journals describing Renahan, the character she supposedly based on Hickman: “[He] is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness – [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
I’m not sure I even disagree with your post. I only popped in to see what this week’s Rand Rover thread was. But there is often a tone of disbelief and an immediate jump to baseless (and just plain unimaginative) ad hominems in threads like this.
For example, Rand Rover is apparently a terrible father, who is also a racist sociopath, Fox News junkie, and scientologist. Did I miss anything? (Of course, you are all tree-hugging hippies who throw blood on fur coats and get all their news from The Daily Show as they cry into their overpriced white guilt Navajo blankets and eat hemp-flavored danactive)
Everyone should take Bricker’s example, and logically address the points made. Except do it with a bit of fucking panache, a touch of vitriol, and some rhetorical flourish, blended with a dash of humor, and get busy entertaining the rest of us while you spew your masturbatory recriminations across the thread like an aging underendowed porn star trying to stay in the biz long enough to make it to the bigtime.
I mean, for Christ’s sake, if you can’t take apart the philosophy of Ayn Rand with a few logical observations, you need more help (consensus?) than is available here.
P.S. When Rand Rover makes a logical, if wrong, argument, and your response is “OMGZ U R SOCIOPATH!”, it isn’t him that looks stupid…
Doesn’t that describe a psychopath? Or do I mean sociopath? The “no organ for understanding the neccessity, meaning or importance of other people…” bit.
Rand says that she believes that egoism (ie, the idea that an action is right just because it benefits one’s self) is every bit as wrong as altruism (ie, the idea that an action is right just because it benefits others). See the “Objectivist Ethics” speech I referred to above.
I wasn’t applying my definition to you, but rather Bricker asked me if it applied to him. I don’t know enough about him to know whether it applies. Those of us who read the posts here had long ago concluded that you were compassionless by most definitions and proud of it. We get it, you are proud of it. I also gather that you are a follower of Ayn Rand, author of self-proclaimed philosophy works, which are rather fascist fiction. That’s why people (not me) think you are lying about being a lawyer: real lawyers are supposedly versed enough in classical philosophy to not mistake the charlatan Ayn Rand as a philosopher in the same league with Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel or even Adam Smith. The only way a tenured professor of philosophy at a major institution would agree with such a sentiment is if cornered by a sophomore undergraduate who wouldn’t let him/her go otherwise. Ayn Rand was a sociopath who pretended to be a philosopher, but was not recognized as such (and still is not) in accepted academies. I’ve met homeless people who knew more about the traditions of philosophy than she did.
“Fiscal conservative” is a phrase bandied about by the likes of Reagan and Bush and their toadies. I do not think it means what they think it means. They were utterly irresponsible fiscally by any measure other than opposing that the poor and middle class be included in their reckless largess. At least Obama has a doctrine of Keynesianism to spend in a crisis economic downturn to argue that he is doing the responsible thing.
Nor do I think that “social liberalism” means what you think it means. It means helping those who need help. When you say you want the government to leave the woman who wants an abortion alone (and her doctor) that is not social liberalism by itself, it is libertarianism.
Being compassionless is nothing to be proud of, compassionlessness makes a person less human. Being proud of something one is normally ashamed of is a sign of sociopathy, as is a lack of empathy. Sociopathy is no longer a DSM IV diagnosis (at least that is my understanding), but narcissistic personality disorder is. Such a dx can only be correctly made by a qualified mental health care provider in the correct setting. But if you have children, you might want to see if you are dx’ed with NPD and what measures can be taken to lessen any harm that might come to them from it. It is an intractable disease that causes terrible damage. And whether or not you suffer from it (no true sufferer will admit it to him/her self that he/she has the disease) but everyone would benefit from knowing how not to treat children as though they had the disease.
Well, I wouldn’t want to put words in her mouth; it was something she wrote when she was only 23 and we don’t have any broader context for what she meant by the statement, but just at face value she does seem to be talking about a complete absence of empathy, which is one of the hallmarks of what we now call antisocial personality disorder.
