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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (181292)	2/4/2012 3:18:35 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542197

Zealots who betray their own preachings in practice are the worst. Everyone else in the universe is supposed to do what they say - which is ridiculously arrogant to begin with - and not what they do, which is just batshit hypocrisy. But don't point that out to the acolytes, heaven forbid, their whole philosophical universe would come undone then.

To: epicure who wrote (181292)	2/4/2012 4:20:13 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 542197

I am of course no fan of Rand, but I have to put in a word for Steve. He gets dumped on here for Rand and Ron Paul, then he goes over to Paul Smith's thread and gets dumped on for being an ultra-liberal. They hate Ron Paul there, too. Steve mostly advocates this Austrian School Economics thing. Which I understand to be pretty conservative, but conservative in the old pre-Reagan fiscal conservative sense, not the current voodoo economics sense. Which is, in turn, no sense at all, but that's another story. I wouldn't make that much of Rand taking Social Security, lots of people fall into the do as I say, not as I do class some time or other. I'm a little confused as to if she actually needed it, she presumably had a pretty good income from royalties, but philosophical consistency isn't a legal requirement. The name thing seems no big deal, it was apparently her married name. The main problem with Rand is that way too many people take her seriously. This little blurb from wikipedia seems a good counterpoint: On the 100th anniversary of Rand's birth in 2005, Edward Rothstein, writing for The New York Times, referred to her fictional writing as quaint utopian "retro fantasy" and programmatic neo-Romanticism of the misunderstood artist, while criticizing her characters' "isolated rejection of democratic society". [138] In 2007, book critic Leslie Clark described her fiction as "romance novels with a patina of pseudo-philosophy". [139] In 2009, GQ's critic columnist Tom Carson described her books as "capitalism's version of middlebrow religious novels" such as Ben-Hur and the Left Behind series. [140] Rand's acolytes have their own problems with philosophical consistency, of course. Once more from wiki: Despite Rand's untraditionally Republican stance as a pro-choice atheist, [161] the political figures who cite Rand as an influence are most often conservative or libertarian members of the United States Republican Party. [162] A 1987 article in The New York Times referred to her as the Reagan administration's "novelist laureate". [163] Republican Congressmen and conservative pundits have acknowledged her influence on their lives and recommended her novels. [164] Which leads us to the alleged leading intellectual light of the current Congress, or the Republican House, anyway, local guy Paul Ryan. One conservative making that point was Ryan. His citation of Rand was not casual. He’s a Rand nut. In the days before his star turn as America’s Accountant, Ryan once appeared at a gathering to honor her philosophy, where he announced, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” He continues to view Rand as a lodestar, requiring his staffers to digest her creepy tracts. thedailybeast.com Don't quite know how Ryan reconciles the pro-choice atheism of Rand with his own Roman Catholicism, but I do know that he requires his staff to read Rand, and not scripture. Catholics were never that into scripture, but I don't think the mother church is in any danger of endorsing Rand any time soon. Meanwhile, near as I can tell, all the Republican presidential field is on board with Ryan's budget plan, including the privatization of Medicare, though that last part seems to be one of Willlard's "quietly in private rooms" things.