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Paradise Lost **potential mini spoiler if you intend to read Atlas Shrugged**

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    Paradise Lost **potential mini spoiler if you intend to read Atlas Shrugged**

    Last edited by SpontaneousOrder; 14 July 2014, 22:09.

    #2
    Read the first 25%. No intention of reading the rest. Undergraduate-level prolix tulip. Popular with the Tea Party, libertarians and other idiots ....

    ... this would be the Ayn Rand who championed individualism and self-reliance and derided all forms of collective provision - until her life-long exercise of her right to smoke tobacco gave her lung cancer, at which point she signed up for Medicaire and Social Security pronto? Puh-leeze.
    My subconscious is annoying. It's got a mind of its own.

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by pjclarke View Post
      Read the first 25%. No intention of reading the rest. Undergraduate-level prolix tulip. Popular with the Tea Party, libertarians and other idiots ....

      ... this would be the Ayn Rand who championed individualism and self-reliance and derided all forms of collective provision - until her life-long exercise of her right to smoke tobacco gave her lung cancer, at which point she signed up for Medicaire and Social Security pronto? Puh-leeze.
      Yes, that very same Ayn Rans.

      But then SO is the poster who sees all taxation as theft with the threat of violence by the state of individuals' property in violation of their natural property rights. But he declines to say whether he is director and shareholder of a Ltd company that collects VAT from clients and then hands it over to the state.

      Comment


        #4
        An early Rand love poem has been discovered by Stephen Colbert...

        Roses are red
        Violets are blue
        Finish this poem yourself
        You dependent parasite



        Before committing yourself to 1,000 pages of leaden prose, here's a plot summary ... Ayn Rand - RationalWiki
        My subconscious is annoying. It's got a mind of its own.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by pjclarke View Post
          Read the first 25%. No intention of reading the rest. Undergraduate-level prolix tulip. Popular with the Tea Party, libertarians and other idiots ....

          ... this would be the Ayn Rand who championed individualism and self-reliance and derided all forms of collective provision - until her life-long exercise of her right to smoke tobacco gave her lung cancer, at which point she signed up for Medicaire and Social Security pronto? Puh-leeze.
          Do you mean the same Ayn Rand who wrote, in 1966, this? :

          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.
          It's not clear what the point is that you're trying to make.

          And, are you sure it's not just prolix tulip because you have the reading age of a nine year old?

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by pjclarke View Post
            An early Rand love poem has been discovered by Stephen Colbert...

            Roses are red
            Violets are blue
            Finish this poem yourself
            You dependent parasite



            Before committing yourself to 1,000 pages of leaden prose, here's a plot summary ... Ayn Rand - RationalWiki

            Linking to irrational wiki tells me alot about you.

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by Old Greg View Post
              Yes, that very same Ayn Rans.

              But he declines to say whether he is director and shareholder of a Ltd company that collects VAT from clients and then hands it over to the state.
              Ignoratio elenchi. You can waste your own time.

              Comment


                #8
                It's not clear what the point is that you're trying to make.
                That the principles she espoused in her fiction and pseudo-philosophy were unworkable not to mention undesirable in the real world, as nicely illustrated by her depending on the very collective provision she despised when the exercise of her 'right' to damage her own health (she thought the concensus on smoking and lung cancer a conspiracy, and also took various types of speed, which may explain why many find her writing turgid) left her in need of treatment beyond her private means and so she turned to state aid, making her a hypocrite and, in her own characterisation, a 'parasite'.

                And, are you sure it's not just prolix tulip because you have the reading age of a nine year old?
                Yeah, me and Dorothy Parker:

                ”This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force
                or Flannery O Connor

                The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail
                Or William Connolly, not known for his liberal sympathies


                Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” [...] we cannot help feel at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline, and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.
                That last sentence assuming a peculiar irony given later events...

                My failure to finish this POS was more to do with me having better uses for my time - like worming the parrot.

                My subconscious is annoying. It's got a mind of its own.

                Comment


                  #9
                  You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to pjclarke again.
                  "I can put any old tat in my sig, put quotes around it and attribute to someone of whom I've heard, to make it sound true."
                  - Voltaire/Benjamin Franklin/Anne Frank...

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by SpontaneousOrder View Post
                    Ignoratio elenchi. You can waste your own time.
                    So let's assume you collect taxes for the state, because the state tells you to. Would you rape someone as part of your business practice if the state told you to?

                    After all, you have made a comparison between taxation and rape, when denying the right of a democratically elected Parliament to empower state collection of taxation.

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