People already dismiss us as a cult out-of-hand. On the other hand, Fox News and the GPO seem to have a policy of using the Dark Arts, and while their opponents call them out on it, it doesn’t deter their supporters in the very least (something that amazes me to no end, I really just can’t comprehend it). Ayn Rand and her Objectivism are among the darkest mentalities there is (it’s basically Slytherin Frat, USA), and some have gone as far as kalling them Randroids, yet nobody seems to care and the movement is as healthy as ever!
Additionally, there’s an order in the darkness of the techniques Shopenhauer describes. The checkmates are for example entirely legitimate, what makes them dark is that they aren’t straightforward, assuming bad faith in the opponent. Declaring victory when you’re actually being defeated (““I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.””) or using an ad personam (“Your argument is invalid because you’re an immoral person”)
Ad hominem, on the other hand (“You say you’re a God-fearing good Christian, so how can you support Rand’s ideas about how weak people should be treated?”) is kind of on the fence: surely your opponent supporting opposing views simultaeously argues against their own sanity and their credibility, but it doesn’t make the specific position they’re arguing against you any less valid by itself. On the other hand it’s also a subtle case of appeal to consequences, in that you are forcing them against the wall in what regards their reputation, which may motivate them to abandon the debate. That still doesn’t prove you’re right though.
Ayn Rand and her Objectivism are among the darkest mentalities there is (it’s basically Slytherin Frat, USA)
This is flatly wrong. Their language might be of pure selfishness, but their actions are clearly ideological and not about maximizing personal wealth/power/sex. You’ll notice that Objectivists talk all the time about how Objectivists shouldn’t take handouts for one reason or another.
I refer you to this, You wanna defend the negative? Fine, start a discussion or share some links. [But one-liners like “this is flatly wrong” do not advance the debate one iota.] But I don’t see how the ideology itself isn’t entirely built on strawmen, bias, privilege blindness and just plain bad logic. You’ll also notice that Objectivists, like other people cheering and professing for other ideologies and religions, are very much known for not living up to their own brutally inhumane, lofty ideals, and simply summon them at their convenience, to justify acts of simple greed and selfishness. At least Rationalism is an ideal that by design acknowledges the difficulties in living up to it, and attempts to answer them with methods more subtle that “you’re just weak”. Again, if we want to expand on this, I suggest we open a discussion thread.
Perhaps I came across as too adversarial. I totally agree that Objectivism is wrong and useless and if implemented widely would be very bad. The point I was trying to convey is that in practice, neither Ayn Rand nor Objectivists have acted especially Slytherin.
Oh. I apologize and admit to my mistake: unlike the better sort of Slytherin their mentality isn’t exactly Machiavellian, though it is take-no-prisoners in its own, different way. I’d still like to hear a more detailed study of the difference between the two, for the sake of moral clarity (heh) since in my dislike for them I have unwisely lumped them together, which is a mistake, which needs to be corrected.
As a desperate save for the sake of fanfictionish silliness, I’d add that the same way conservatism has turned out very different in the USA and the UK, it’s fairly plausible that the USA offshots of the House Of Slytherin may have developed differently from their continental peers. You wouldn’t know of any fanfic that properly explored Potterverse Magical America, would you?
Heh, I somehow only read your first sentence when I responded. I was basing my comment off of my own experience with rand as a teenager and friends who influenced by Objectivism. I don’t know of an analysis of the two and I don’t read much fiction.
I read the presently existing part of MoR. I could read Shinji 40K. Why do you think it’s worthwhile? Should I read or watch Neon Genesis Evangelion first?
Hm, reading the original EVA is not compulsory, the story stands very well on its own… but since you ask, I heartily recommend you watch EVA and Gurren Lagann. They are both flawed, but they are still very good, and very memorable.
The story isn’t working for me. A boy or novice soldier, depending on how you define it, is inexplicably given the job of running a huge and difficult-to-use robot to fight with a sequence of powerful similarly huge aliens while trying not to do too much collateral damage to Tokyo in the process. In the original, I gather he was an unhappy boy. In this story, he’s a relatively well-adjusted boy who hallucinates conversations with his Warhammer figurines. I don’t see why I should care about this scenario or any similar scenarios, but maybe I’m missing something.
Can someone who read this or watched the original say something interesting that happens in it? Wikipedia mentions profound philosophical questions about the nature of reality, but it also mentions that the ending is widely regarded as incomprehensible. The quote about how every possible statement sounds profound if you get the rhetoric right seems to apply here. I don’t want to invest multiple hours to end up reading (or watching) some pseudo-profound nonsense.
It’s not pseudo profound, but, like The Matrix, it has a lot of window-dressing and pomous wanking around absolutely legitimate questions. It’s also frustrating in that many of the questions are asked, but few are resolved. And they’re mainly a framework for the character arcs to develop. Eva has a very simple plot, which it doses very carefully in order to make it more interesting, so that it comes off as a Jigsaw puzzle. The most interesting thing is how the characters evolve and… really, I don’t want to spoil anything, but you should definitely give it a try: it’s a character story where the characters are extremely human, layered, and rich, and their stories are extremely poignantes.
If you don’t want to watch the original, all I can tell you is, the “inexplicable” turns out to be “not explained yet”. Everything will be revealed in due time. As for why it is interesting… well, if you watch EVA, and especially the final movie, The End Of Evangelion, you might identify a lot with Shinji, put a lot of yourself into him. This is especially true if you watch it as a teenager of the same age. And then… well, stuff happens to him, and to you, by proxy. Seeing him well-adjusted, happy, strong, while still having the same fundamental character traits… it’s a very intense feeling.
You watched EoE without watching the series first? Instead you watched “Death And Rebirth”?
...
That’s probably the wrongest possible way to do it. It’s like watching 2001 a Space Odyssey starting from when Dave gets on the pod and into the Jupiter monolith. Like, there’s no point to EoE if you aren’t already very familiar with the characters AND very very invested in them and the plot.
If you want to open a dedicated discussion thread, I’m your man. But at least read this first. This might also be interesting reading. There were also severaldiscussionsaroundthat topic on TV Tropes (I’m not suggesting you read them all, but TV Tropes discussions are usually interesting, so you might actually enjoy them, and TV Tropes Useful Notes pages are usually quite enlightened, balanced and well-written: see the one for atheism).
If you’re going to start that discussion, then we might as well make another for someone to explain libertarianism to me, because it seems fairly popular on this site, and the superficial understanding of it I’ve had through the media has given me the first impression that it’s the dumbest, most dangerously stupid idea on how to run a country since, and even more impractical than, pure communism. The same way the first impression one could take of LW is “The Cult of the Leizer” (and damn I’m tired of being called a cultist, but no matter how much I disagree, I see where they’re coming from).
As a rationalist, when I have a prejudice, the first thing I need to do, is kill it: I must ask for a little guidance. If you decide to help me, first make me go through the beginner stuff. Same as here, my guess is that some of the more advanced writings of libertarians can be unintentionally infuriating to outsiders, the same way some of our posts here can be. If you come out of the blue and tell someone “if your children aren’t signed up for cryogenics, you’re a lousy parent, how do you expect them to react?)
I read it when Eliezer wrote it and remember more-or-less agreeing with it. I
am not an Objectivist, though I think I’m more sympathetic to Rand than the
typical LWer.
I just scanned it; it looks like a good summary. Note in particular the bit
about Comte and altruism. (You may not think this, but some people incorrectly
think that Rand advocated a “might makes right” or “I’m better than you
therefore I get to do whatever I want” ethic.)
Oh, and about Rand… the problem with her philosophy is that she made a mess of it and of presenting it, up to and including extensive use of the Dark Arts in her rhetoric. And many who present themselves as Randians are as bad at it as many alleged Christians are at Christianity. That there are many who attempt to claim for themselves the prestige of Randianism and of being Christian is a clear sign of lack of intellectual and moral health (Randianisms are great for bashing people!), and there’s probably a correlation between this and the oxymoron that is the Republican party’s existence as an unholy alliance between conservatives and classical liberals . Finally some of the stuff she presents, such as coercion being immoral and making one “subhuman” is just plain fallacious. Her notion of “choice” is very suspect, and sounds to me like Free Will, which has been debunked by quantum physics of all things, if I remember right.
Now, look, I can respect someone reading her work and extracting the stuff that makes sense and presenting that as Objectivism, then stating that dismissing the package because of how it was handled by its creator is fallacious via ad hominem and ad personam. But Rand defined Objectivism as basically “whatever I say it is, and, whatever I say, it is”. If you want to salvage bits of it that have some merit, that’s fine, but you’re not an objectivist anymore. Many of those bits are areas of overlap with other ideologies that developed them more soundly and consistently.
I still think you could call the more ethically thorough users of moral Objectivism “Slytherins” in the sense of the purer form of the ideology: the pursuit of Enlightened Self Interest and the rejection of Rules and Sacrificial Altruism. The difference being that Pure Slytherism doesn’t have anything against initiation of coertion, accepting it as part of the mechanics of real human interaction, nor does it assume that in a Free Market system of consenting and informed adults all agreements will necessarily be by mutual agreement and benefit: it instead supports the administration of information as carefull and sparesly as any other element that may give the user an edge. As a whole, I’d argue that Slytherism is the more consistent and practical of the two, and therefore the more morally valuable.
To the last question: definitely! Is it at all funny? After I wrote it my mind wandered without my permission and coughed up something even worse: “Imma chargin Eleizer” and “Allstar Leizer and Robin the Man Handsom” but I told it those just sounded dumb and the latter would only amuse Frank Miller haters, while the former wouldn’t amuse anyone… I have a habit of doing that: the nickname I gave JoshuaZ was (based on JoshuaZ’s Judaism, Biblical!Joshua’s “badass” status… and the Z at the end...) “The Super Scion of Zion”.
Yes, I know, but since jokes, no matter how affectionate, are about irrationality in the first place, I think those sacrificies are necessary. Plus, the only puns I can think up on “Eliezer” pronounced right are in French and Spanish.
People already dismiss us as a cult out-of-hand. On the other hand, Fox News and the GPO seem to have a policy of using the Dark Arts, and while their opponents call them out on it, it doesn’t deter their supporters in the very least (something that amazes me to no end, I really just can’t comprehend it). Ayn Rand and her Objectivism are among the darkest mentalities there is (it’s basically Slytherin Frat, USA), and some have gone as far as kalling them Randroids, yet nobody seems to care and the movement is as healthy as ever!
Additionally, there’s an order in the darkness of the techniques Shopenhauer describes. The checkmates are for example entirely legitimate, what makes them dark is that they aren’t straightforward, assuming bad faith in the opponent. Declaring victory when you’re actually being defeated (““I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.””) or using an ad personam (“Your argument is invalid because you’re an immoral person”)
Ad hominem, on the other hand (“You say you’re a God-fearing good Christian, so how can you support Rand’s ideas about how weak people should be treated?”) is kind of on the fence: surely your opponent supporting opposing views simultaeously argues against their own sanity and their credibility, but it doesn’t make the specific position they’re arguing against you any less valid by itself. On the other hand it’s also a subtle case of appeal to consequences, in that you are forcing them against the wall in what regards their reputation, which may motivate them to abandon the debate. That still doesn’t prove you’re right though.
This is flatly wrong. Their language might be of pure selfishness, but their actions are clearly ideological and not about maximizing personal wealth/power/sex. You’ll notice that Objectivists talk all the time about how Objectivists shouldn’t take handouts for one reason or another.
I refer you to this, You wanna defend the negative? Fine, start a discussion or share some links. [But one-liners like “this is flatly wrong” do not advance the debate one iota.] But I don’t see how the ideology itself isn’t entirely built on strawmen, bias, privilege blindness and just plain bad logic. You’ll also notice that Objectivists, like other people cheering and professing for other ideologies and religions, are very much known for not living up to their own brutally inhumane, lofty ideals, and simply summon them at their convenience, to justify acts of simple greed and selfishness. At least Rationalism is an ideal that by design acknowledges the difficulties in living up to it, and attempts to answer them with methods more subtle that “you’re just weak”. Again, if we want to expand on this, I suggest we open a discussion thread.
Perhaps I came across as too adversarial. I totally agree that Objectivism is wrong and useless and if implemented widely would be very bad. The point I was trying to convey is that in practice, neither Ayn Rand nor Objectivists have acted especially Slytherin.
Unfortunately, your link is broken.
Oh. I apologize and admit to my mistake: unlike the better sort of Slytherin their mentality isn’t exactly Machiavellian, though it is take-no-prisoners in its own, different way. I’d still like to hear a more detailed study of the difference between the two, for the sake of moral clarity (heh) since in my dislike for them I have unwisely lumped them together, which is a mistake, which needs to be corrected.
As a desperate save for the sake of fanfictionish silliness, I’d add that the same way conservatism has turned out very different in the USA and the UK, it’s fairly plausible that the USA offshots of the House Of Slytherin may have developed differently from their continental peers. You wouldn’t know of any fanfic that properly explored Potterverse Magical America, would you?
...Now I’m really far off-topic.
Heh, I somehow only read your first sentence when I responded. I was basing my comment off of my own experience with rand as a teenager and friends who influenced by Objectivism. I don’t know of an analysis of the two and I don’t read much fiction.
Please tell me you’ve at least read Methods Of Rationality and Shinji and Warhammer 40K.
I’ve read MoR and started Shinji.
I hope you enjoy the ride.
I read the presently existing part of MoR. I could read Shinji 40K. Why do you think it’s worthwhile? Should I read or watch Neon Genesis Evangelion first?
Hm, reading the original EVA is not compulsory, the story stands very well on its own… but since you ask, I heartily recommend you watch EVA and Gurren Lagann. They are both flawed, but they are still very good, and very memorable.
The story isn’t working for me. A boy or novice soldier, depending on how you define it, is inexplicably given the job of running a huge and difficult-to-use robot to fight with a sequence of powerful similarly huge aliens while trying not to do too much collateral damage to Tokyo in the process. In the original, I gather he was an unhappy boy. In this story, he’s a relatively well-adjusted boy who hallucinates conversations with his Warhammer figurines. I don’t see why I should care about this scenario or any similar scenarios, but maybe I’m missing something.
Can someone who read this or watched the original say something interesting that happens in it? Wikipedia mentions profound philosophical questions about the nature of reality, but it also mentions that the ending is widely regarded as incomprehensible. The quote about how every possible statement sounds profound if you get the rhetoric right seems to apply here. I don’t want to invest multiple hours to end up reading (or watching) some pseudo-profound nonsense.
It’s not pseudo profound, but, like The Matrix, it has a lot of window-dressing and pomous wanking around absolutely legitimate questions. It’s also frustrating in that many of the questions are asked, but few are resolved. And they’re mainly a framework for the character arcs to develop. Eva has a very simple plot, which it doses very carefully in order to make it more interesting, so that it comes off as a Jigsaw puzzle. The most interesting thing is how the characters evolve and… really, I don’t want to spoil anything, but you should definitely give it a try: it’s a character story where the characters are extremely human, layered, and rich, and their stories are extremely poignantes.
If you don’t want to watch the original, all I can tell you is, the “inexplicable” turns out to be “not explained yet”. Everything will be revealed in due time. As for why it is interesting… well, if you watch EVA, and especially the final movie, The End Of Evangelion, you might identify a lot with Shinji, put a lot of yourself into him. This is especially true if you watch it as a teenager of the same age. And then… well, stuff happens to him, and to you, by proxy. Seeing him well-adjusted, happy, strong, while still having the same fundamental character traits… it’s a very intense feeling.
Okay, I watched End of Evangelion and a variety of the materials leading up to it. I want my time back. I don’t recommend it.
You watched EoE without watching the series first? Instead you watched “Death And Rebirth”?
...
That’s probably the wrongest possible way to do it. It’s like watching 2001 a Space Odyssey starting from when Dave gets on the pod and into the Jupiter monolith. Like, there’s no point to EoE if you aren’t already very familiar with the characters AND very very invested in them and the plot.
Sure.
What do you mean by this?
If you want to open a dedicated discussion thread, I’m your man. But at least read this first. This might also be interesting reading. There were also several discussions around that topic on TV Tropes (I’m not suggesting you read them all, but TV Tropes discussions are usually interesting, so you might actually enjoy them, and TV Tropes Useful Notes pages are usually quite enlightened, balanced and well-written: see the one for atheism).
If you’re going to start that discussion, then we might as well make another for someone to explain libertarianism to me, because it seems fairly popular on this site, and the superficial understanding of it I’ve had through the media has given me the first impression that it’s the dumbest, most dangerously stupid idea on how to run a country since, and even more impractical than, pure communism. The same way the first impression one could take of LW is “The Cult of the Leizer” (and damn I’m tired of being called a cultist, but no matter how much I disagree, I see where they’re coming from).
As a rationalist, when I have a prejudice, the first thing I need to do, is kill it: I must ask for a little guidance. If you decide to help me, first make me go through the beginner stuff. Same as here, my guess is that some of the more advanced writings of libertarians can be unintentionally infuriating to outsiders, the same way some of our posts here can be. If you come out of the blue and tell someone “if your children aren’t signed up for cryogenics, you’re a lousy parent, how do you expect them to react?)
I read it when Eliezer wrote it and remember more-or-less agreeing with it. I am not an Objectivist, though I think I’m more sympathetic to Rand than the typical LWer.
I just scanned it; it looks like a good summary. Note in particular the bit about Comte and altruism. (You may not think this, but some people incorrectly think that Rand advocated a “might makes right” or “I’m better than you therefore I get to do whatever I want” ethic.)
Is this a pun on Eliezer’s name?
Oh, and about Rand… the problem with her philosophy is that she made a mess of it and of presenting it, up to and including extensive use of the Dark Arts in her rhetoric. And many who present themselves as Randians are as bad at it as many alleged Christians are at Christianity. That there are many who attempt to claim for themselves the prestige of Randianism and of being Christian is a clear sign of lack of intellectual and moral health (Randianisms are great for bashing people!), and there’s probably a correlation between this and the oxymoron that is the Republican party’s existence as an unholy alliance between conservatives and classical liberals . Finally some of the stuff she presents, such as coercion being immoral and making one “subhuman” is just plain fallacious. Her notion of “choice” is very suspect, and sounds to me like Free Will, which has been debunked by quantum physics of all things, if I remember right.
Now, look, I can respect someone reading her work and extracting the stuff that makes sense and presenting that as Objectivism, then stating that dismissing the package because of how it was handled by its creator is fallacious via ad hominem and ad personam. But Rand defined Objectivism as basically “whatever I say it is, and, whatever I say, it is”. If you want to salvage bits of it that have some merit, that’s fine, but you’re not an objectivist anymore. Many of those bits are areas of overlap with other ideologies that developed them more soundly and consistently.
I still think you could call the more ethically thorough users of moral Objectivism “Slytherins” in the sense of the purer form of the ideology: the pursuit of Enlightened Self Interest and the rejection of Rules and Sacrificial Altruism. The difference being that Pure Slytherism doesn’t have anything against initiation of coertion, accepting it as part of the mechanics of real human interaction, nor does it assume that in a Free Market system of consenting and informed adults all agreements will necessarily be by mutual agreement and benefit: it instead supports the administration of information as carefull and sparesly as any other element that may give the user an edge. As a whole, I’d argue that Slytherism is the more consistent and practical of the two, and therefore the more morally valuable.
To the last question: definitely! Is it at all funny? After I wrote it my mind wandered without my permission and coughed up something even worse: “Imma chargin Eleizer” and “Allstar Leizer and Robin the Man Handsom” but I told it those just sounded dumb and the latter would only amuse Frank Miller haters, while the former wouldn’t amuse anyone… I have a habit of doing that: the nickname I gave JoshuaZ was (based on JoshuaZ’s Judaism, Biblical!Joshua’s “badass” status… and the Z at the end...) “The Super Scion of Zion”.
He liked it, or so he told me.
Check the spelling, though, and note that he pronounces it “el-ee-EHZ-er”.
Yes, I know, but since jokes, no matter how affectionate, are about irrationality in the first place, I think those sacrificies are necessary. Plus, the only puns I can think up on “Eliezer” pronounced right are in French and Spanish.