Can Ayn Rand fans please qualify this quote?

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27 May 2014, 1:10 pm

Surely by Laissez faire logic the idea that you possess something trumps whatever utility someone else may be able to draw from this? What i draw from this is is that Rand supports the idea of 'might is right'. The white men were able to forcibly take America, therefore it became 'theirs'. So if i do a home invasion of a rich man's mansion, kill him and his family, somehow it and his fortune becomes mine?

Help me out, libertarians.

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Stannis
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27 May 2014, 1:53 pm

thomas81 wrote:

She's ignorant. Many native american civilizations were as advanced or more advanced in many areas than the europeans were at that time. If the indians hadn't had 90+% of their population wiped out in a plague, the europeans likely would have been repelled just as they had for millenia. This ignorant **** wouldn't even know that the Great Law and Peace was a major influence on the U.S constitution! I can't stand this kind of racism that assumes that anything that is not european must be backward.

For anyone who has not read it, check out Thomas Frank's: Pity the Billionaire. There's a neat chapter about how the works of Ayn Rand are inverted proletarian literature.

sonofghandi
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27 May 2014, 2:25 pm

thomas81 wrote:

Her philosophy wasn't so much might makes right as it was I know how to make money better than you, therefor I am a more deserving human being who should feel no obligation to help anyone else for any reason.

There is a difference.

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Jacoby
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27 May 2014, 2:36 pm

if you're actually interested in the context with what's shes saying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivis ... _primitive

I don't believe what she believes, she was not a libertarian and by all accounts not a very nice person.

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27 May 2014, 2:42 pm

I don't even pay attention to idealistic quotes attributed to this woman> She was a good writer even though I disagree with her ideology.

mezzanotte
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27 May 2014, 3:02 pm

How can that even be a real quote? Is this from The Onion?? It's not even insulting, it's just embarrassingly stupid.

Last edited by mezzanotte on 27 May 2014, 3:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

luanqibazao
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27 May 2014, 3:03 pm

I try not to get involved in discussions with non-Objectivists concerning:

1. Ayn Rand's personal life;
2. Things Rand said or wrote decades before developing Objectivism;
3. Rand's personal opinions as distinct from precepts of Objectivism.

These topics interest me, because Rand was an interesting person and of great importance to my life. However, when non-Objectivists bring them up, it is usually in the belief that such things discredit or disprove Objectivism. This is incorrect.

The above "quote" ? actually a heavily edited paraphrase ? falls into category 3. So I'll just say that this is an issue on which many Objectivists, myself included, disagree with Rand.

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27 May 2014, 4:30 pm

Stannis wrote:

It's been a while since I was down there, but I recall that the prevailing theory was that the pueblo Indians died out because of over-farming. That was said to have happened before Europeans came.

The South and Central American cultures were still around when the Spanish landed, so you have a point there.

Last edited by NobodyKnows on 27 May 2014, 4:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

thomas81
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27 May 2014, 4:37 pm

luanqibazao wrote:

I'm not necessarilly saying it disproves Objectivism, I'm saying it disproves 'Randism'

Often communists are asked to defend their ideology based on the percieved [lack of] consistency or moral authority of Marx for reasons ranging from how he treated his wife to his reliance on handouts from his friends. I don't see how this is any different.

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27 May 2014, 4:41 pm

sonofghandi wrote:

thomas81 wrote:

ok, but square that with the context of the quote.

Depending on the context, it seems that Rand valued posession more than utility. However she makes a unique exception here because of her own chauvinism that regards the native americans posession as 'less valid' than that of the mega-corporations that went on to be the basis of modern american society.

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27 May 2014, 4:50 pm

http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6- ... erica.html

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27 May 2014, 5:05 pm

luanqibazao wrote:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Objectivism

TvTropes wrote:

Since empiricists like Rand base all knowledge on sensory information, the question of the reliability of perception is important to her case. This argument, "are we all just seeing one giant illusion?" became really popular in the aftermath of The Matrix. However, there are basically two theories about perception that empiricists like Rand are torn between.

The first is direct realism, which states that we perceive objects directly. If you see a soda can before you, it is actually the soda can outside your head that you are seeing.

The second is indirect or representational realism, which argues that the world we experience with our senses is our own consciousness's representation of things outside our head. In short, the sensory inputs get 'processed' through a series of mental 'sorting devices' that make sense of things before they hit our perception. Basically, the world we experience is a movie playing inside our own heads, based on what our senses pick up. This position may seem needlessly complicated, but is actually very common; philosophers like Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant accepted it, and Kant's own version of representational realism was incredibly influential on his own intellectual successors (who in turn were amazingly influential on various political and philosophical movements).

Rand was a direct realist. Objectivism argues we do perceive reality itself, but we use a specific means to do it. This takes into account that our senses do indeed have a specific nature and thus they do operate in a specific way (this being the fact that motivated many representational realists in the first place). This is no place for a full treatment of Rand's account; a comprehensive review (for those who are willing to let the Mind Screw get into full on Mind Rape territory) can be found in Dr. David Kelley's The Evidence of the Senses (Cognition and Brain Theory, Summer/Fall (1984), 7(3, 4) 329-357).

This is at least a point where objectivism is proved wrong by science. Optical illusions prove that senses inputs are processed by the brain before it reach our consciousness.

Also:

John Rogers wrote:

?There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old?s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves Orcs.?

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27 May 2014, 7:21 pm

thomas81 wrote:

Help me out, libertarians.

Ayn Rand =/= libertarians, for at least the 15th time.

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27 May 2014, 7:25 pm

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28 May 2014, 5:16 am

Actually, her position is one of the angles embraced when dealing with the law on adverse possession of property.

Does land belong to the person who "owns" it or the person who puts it to the best use?

Adverse possession is when you go onto another person's land and start using it in a notorious and open fashion (e.g., put up a fence line, place animals to graze, build structures). If the proper owner says and does nothing, do they retain ownership when the trespasser asks for conversion under the law of adverse possession because they are the de facto owner of the land or should the trespasser get the land because he's putting it to a superior use AND the de facto owner showed no interest in defending their property rights against the trespasser?

The Native Americans did not value property as the Europeans did. We now understand this and say what was done was wrong, but would the NAs have changed their viewpoint if we taught them how to effectively farm and raise livestock so that they didn't need to move from place to place because they hunted/polluted their current spot so that they had to move? That's what nomads do....they stay in one place until either they can't deal with the environment (e.g., winter migration) or they consume the resources until they need more plentiful land and where they now are needs time to repair and regenerate. Europeans were nomadic until they learned to compensate and settle in one spot.

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28 May 2014, 6:49 am

zer0netgain wrote:

The Native Americans did not value property as the Europeans did.

^While this is true . . .

zer0netgain wrote:

We now understand this and say what was done was wrong, but would the NAs have changed their viewpoint if we taught them how to effectively farm and raise livestock so that they didn't need to move from place to place because they hunted/polluted their current spot so that they had to move?

^ . . . This displays a woeful lacking in historical knowledge. For starters, you do realize that there wasn't just one homogenous tribe, don't you?

There were plenty of well established tribes with sustainable agriculture, and your assumptions that the migratory patterns were because of pollution are simply absurd. Most of the groups that migrated did so because they followed the movement patterns of the animals that they hunted, not because the animals were hunted out. This seems to me to be a way to use the land fairly effectively. Staying in one spot is not what makes one civilized.

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