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I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...t-ayn-rand-marx

What a cunt.

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[Rand's] heroes were hearty, happily formed, and didn't have brats. In fact there were no brats at all in The Fountainhead, or in what little I read of Atlas Shrugged. The heroic life apparently left no time for children, or domestic cares, or the exertions of ordinary sympathy...I couldn't imagine Ayn Rand driving eight minutes, let alone eight hours, to nurse a sick relative. The same went for Dominique and Roark, who seemed to have no relatives, no friends -- only inferiors. For several weeks I'd measured other people against them, and other people had always come up short. Now I couldn't read the novel without trying to imagine the two of them changing my sour sheets, walking me to the can. No dice. They wouldn't have lasted five minutes in that sickroom. They wouldn't have shown up at all. ...It had dawned on me that I didn't really know anyone like Roark or Dominique. Though Ayn Rand insisted that such people existed and that she herself was one, my own experience of them was purely literary. Everyone I knew, even in the most privileged families, was beset by unheroic worries. A brilliant daughter made pregnant by her piano teacher, a sweet-tempered son gone surly and secretive, flunking out of school and shedding his friends and wrecking one car after another as if with a will; nervous breakdowns and squabbles over money. ...The people I knew, and the families I knew, were all more or less beset. And none of them -- not one -- seeemed capable of the perfect rationality and indomitable exercise of will that Ayn Rand demanded as a condition of respect. Nor, I had to admit, was I. Everyone was troubled, nobody measured up, and I began to think that the true failure lay in Ayn Rand's grasp of human reality. ...You can't read [Hemingway's] "Indian Camp" and then go back to The Fountainhead. Everything seems bloated and cheesy -- the swollen sentences, the hysterical partisanship of the author, the crassly symbolic, uninflected characters, the impossible things they think and say and do. Really, you can't believe a word of it. "Indian Camp" ruined The Fountainhead for me, even as the novel helped me to see the patience and delicacy and adamant reality of the story. - Tobias Wolff, Old School

Only a complete idiot would see a contradiction in that, or a refutation of her ideas.
Opportunism is an essential part of selfishness.
PKC, you stupid leftist twat.

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Then stop coloring and visit Meat187's mix archive!

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Originally posted by Meat187 Only a complete idiot would see a contradiction in that, or a refutation of her ideas. Opportunism is an essential part of selfishness. PKC, you stupid leftist twat.

Yeah sure. Spends her whole “career” (and I use the term loosely) railing against things like social security, and then jumps at the chance to get on the gravy train. No contradictions there at all!

Only (ignorant) partisan hacks would ever call me left wing.

Yep, no contradiction indeed. She wanted people to be selfish: the capable shall not pay for the worthless scum. But if you can get free money from society only a fool would not take it.

Do you think the government should pay everyone 1000$? No. Would you take it if they did? Yes.

Edit: Note that I have not read Ayn Rand. If she was against double standards in your own favour and opportunism then she's a stupid cow.

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Then stop coloring and visit Meat187's mix archive!

She objected to such social programs as unethical, so by her own standards she would have been behaving unethically. Like a preacher who rants against the evil hellbound gays and then has sex with male prostitutes.

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Originally posted by Meat187 Yep, no contradiction indeed. She wanted people to be selfish: the capable shall not pay for the worthless scum. But if you can get free money from society only a fool would not take it.

Well again, she railed against anything that could be termed “collectivist” for her entire life. Her entire philosophy revolved around individual self interest. How is it not a contradiction for her to then put her hand up for the social welfare programs she hated?

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Originally posted by Meat187 Do you think the government should pay everyone 1000$? No. Would you take it if they did? Yes.

It would still make me a hypocrite. Also note that the government didn’t offer her the “$1000”, she went and applied to get it. it’s not enough that she acted “selfishly”, that alone doesn’t dismiss her obvious hypocrisy.

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Originally posted by Meat187 Edit: Note that I have not read Ayn Rand. If she was against double standards in your own favour and opportunism then she's a stupid cow.

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Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull… … Morally, the promise of an impossible 'right' to economic security is an infamous attempt to abrogate the concept of rights. It can and does mean only one thing: a promise to enslave the men who produce, for the benefit of those who don't. If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. … The recipient of a public scholarshi_p is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships, have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims. "The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

I'm one of the people that agreed with this Moonbot guy.

I find Ayn Rand's "philosophy" so painful it makes me believe this is the kind of thinker Meat187 so ardently fights against, and it's no wonder academic philosophers cringe when they hear her name being uttered.

As for the comparison, at least Marx had his heart in the right place... and made some insightful observations (even if he turned out to be mistaken about maybe most of it).

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Originally posted by Meat187 Yep, no contradiction indeed. She wanted people to be selfish: the capable shall not pay for the worthless scum. But if you can get free money from society only a fool would not take it. Do you think the government should pay everyone 1000$? No. Would you take it if they did? Yes. Edit: Note that I have not read Ayn Rand. If she was against double standards in your own favour and opportunism then she's a stupid cow.

Please tell me you're trolling. I mean, someone who lectures her entire life on the evils of socialist hand outs, only to take them when it suits her?

Sounds just like those cuntservatives in the car industry. It's only evil socialism when you're not in need of it.

Cunt is by far my favourite word in the English language. Its too bad I live in the wrong country for dropping the cunt bomb..all I would do is cunt the cunt, out of every cunt until I'm so cunted that I couldn't cunt no more if i lived in the UK. viva la cunt.

Fuck Ayn Rand. I really enjoyed that article.