Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Mr Dunmore, I don't do "questionnaires" created by people who don't understand how to use apostrophes properly. In any event, you know where I would most likely end up on either of those "scientific" bits of fluff.

 With Justin's last and the quote 'tis agreed.

From this, the nuance.

Rand could have meant, the person who does well without having to unnecessarily harm others. 

Or at least consciously trying to avoid harms.

But for a less-balanced individual it could mean, the person who does well, even, also trampling on others for the fun of it.

Context, here.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started

I'm starting to really love Rand now, iJustin has absolutely no need for money whatsoever (food, booze and shelter are another thing). It follows 'tis meek and humble moi who will inherit the Earth, and all its wealth, and virtue.

Narcissism, entitlement, isn't it glorious.

Seriously, DeBrabande's piece was written from the bias of a democrat it appears, fearful of Republican meanness. Yet it could be argued that democrats and republicans alike play the same game, manipulated (bribed) by the same club. Mr Jackoff would concur. US politics has reduced itself to pure theatre, entertaining the electorate with controversial clap trap engineered to keep them ignorant.

There ain't no left and there ain't no right anymore, just greedy bastards. But they try hard to keep the illusion alive.

It could be argued that the Tea Party is just a cynical movement engineered in the interests of selfishness and greed.

That said, a more informed Libertarian does make some very good points, when it comes to financial stupidity and foreign policy. 

It would be easy to suspect that Rand had, like the average Tea Party devotee, a very poor understanding of the nature of money, currency, banking and finance.

Now back to reality, if iJustin is not going to inherit the Earth, and all its wealth, then who do you think is?

The (rather pompous) motto of my Alma mater was "Neither to the right nor to the left"

It strikes me that the terms "Right" and "Left" capture a multitude of sins, and to have a meaningful discussion, we need to unpack the terms.

For example, I applaud Ayn Rand's championing of individual rights and responsibilities, while decrying the Left's inclination to think big brother knows best what is best for you, and little brother must be forced to eat his vegetables. The Right is more likely to treat the citizenry as adults, the Left as children

That is just my rather brief unpacking of one flavour, I'm sure others have other flavours and other interpretations.

Scott Dunmore, Justin Obodie, thank you. I shall seek my pillow with laughter on my mind.

Goodnight all.

Yes it's been a while now and in explanation all I can say is "lack of motivation". After all where's the satisfaction in preaching to the converted; zero impedance hence no feedback or butting my head against the brick wall of blind, mindless fanaticism?

Nevertheless I notice this thread has been hijacked by the usual suspect and hopefully, in my altruistic way, will try to bring it back on track for the benefit of those who would engage in relevant point, counterpoint.

Paul, if Geoff were on Master Chef he would introduce his signature dish as "The just cause of Israeli ethnic cleansing" and for desert, if it's sickly sweet, "Lefty wet dream" or if spicy, "The evil of Islam". (If I've got your attention Geoff your wrong on two counts, (well dozens but I don't have the time, to equate the likes of Assad, Hussein etc to islam is to equate Hitler with christianity or the terrorist Irgun and Stern to judaism and for your information old son, Wombats are the most intelligent of the genus Marsupial.)) Curious about my use of parenthesis? I'm a programmer.

Well, now that's over, back to the point.

I confess to having read both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in my callow youth and been impressed by the apparent logic reinforced by an attractive narrative style but (before simplistic became part of my lexicon,) realised something was missing. It beggars belief that so called "Objectivism" still has currency but then again, maybe not.

Even the most rudimentary student of Economic History, (I'm in that number and it should be compulsory material,) will have seen the pendulum swing from regulation (left?) to de-regulation many times over in industrial age economics. Nothing is ever in balance except for a brief period in the transition from "lunatic left" to "rabid right".

That the rabid right has the ascendency in this day and age is not surprising; the natural order of things is hierarchical and the only force that changes it is entropy. Long overdue but the coming is inevitable and we will see the continuum until humanity self-destructs. The power of big business media to shape policy is self-evident but to quote James Thurber, " You can't fool all of the people all of the time." The "Occupy Wall Street" movement is evidence of that. My vision is bleak but not without foundation: the more complex a system the more vulnerable it becomes. We are all aboard Apollo XIII and more to the point, it is a curious trait of humanity not to abandon long-cherished beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Even among the intelligentsia, new discoveries that put accepted theory to flight are not initially analysed for potential veracity but immediately challenged and ridiculed. How could I have been so wrong? It's like a personal insult but only reflects the individual's personal insecurity, egotism if you like, that we are born with the sum of all knowledge and if you are wrong you're somehow diminished. How foolish.

At some point we will see a resurgence of the left because at this time it is virtually non-existent. It died in this country with the demise of the Whitlam administration, when old-school socialism was replaced with the realpolitik of the likes of Hawke, Keating, the fat fool Beasley and now Gillard with her ludicrous carbon tax paying homage to "The Gods of the Market Place".

Why is it that open-mindedness is such a rare commodity?

Well, my demons age as I age but occasionally will not be denied. Amen.

Just in case there is anyone in the CommonDreams Left that is still in the slightest doubt about exactly what they are supporting when they support the Palestinian cause. It is less than two minutes and it really should be all you need to know.

Remember Jack Abramoff (AKA Jackoff), recently released from gaol having been caught nocturnally emitting all over the show?

This what he had to say about the wet dream$ of both the left (sic) and the right (equally sic) US legislators.

No doubt Ms Rand would have embraced Jackoff as one of her heros, had he not been done in by his mob.

Jackoff on 60 minutes.

So, the thread has drifted from a consideration of Ayn Rand and her weird philosophy well co-opted by the capitalist Right. well thumb-nailed by Justin Obodie as to distilled essence, to another heartrending Leon Uris romance from Geoff over - you've guessed it - poor little Israel, again.

Fiona Reynolds: "...we are in the greatest danger of causing harm to others and damage to ourselves when we refuse to accept our own (and others') capacity for evil."

Except if a person is so inwardly dead as to not be able even to care.

Of course, Michael Talbot is right: the system breeds a pack mentality. In that sense Geoff Pahoff is right, although not in suggesting that his precious USA and Israel are exempt from the evil others are allegedly capable of. How could that be if we are all human?

The question is, do you just sit back and fatalistically, chthonically, glory in the evil, as some no doubt might be over twelve more killed at Tahrir Square, or, like others on this page, try to move beyond just mutely accepting history as chopping block, to a use of history to try for something better, as Jay suggested in one post?

Dear me, Fiona. Spoken with the passion of someone determined not to see the point.

I really do not think I need a lecture on what humans are capable of. Do you?

That's my point. We have a choice; as a species, as a nation and as individuals. We are forever at the crossroads and nowhere among the several hundred thousand words I have written on this blog will you find one that suggests we will necessarily choose smart.  On the contrary, I am driven by the fear that we are choosing dumb and that no one, at least on the wet dreams liberal/left, has the slightest inkling how dumb and dangerous their blind and cowardly choices are.

I am not about to talk about Iraq. It is a matter for the Iraqis whether they prefer their Iraq of today to that of Saddam Hussein's, and if so, whether it was worth the price. It is also a matter for the Americans; after all they have done most of the bleeding for the allies. Besides the era of the dangerous fascist Arab military dictators is nearly at an end. We kicked in the door that ended in the ugly demise of the first. The demise of the most recent was even uglier. Assad's might be the ugliest of all. 

Arabs in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and yes, Iraq,and across the Middle East, are just as much at the cross roads as the rest of us. Pretty much it is some form of democracy, or at least an arrangement that respects peace and human life, or it is one of the forms of Islamism each competing with one another in violence, outrageous compulsory superstitiion, the suppression and enslavement of women, xenophobia and the waging of war. There is nothing in the human condition that exempts them from the consequence of  bad choices. The same goes for the wet dreams liberal/left.

You know what it is that I particularly despise about the wet dreams liberal/left. It is because they have been so willing to accommodate Islamism and in extreme cases form alliances with it. They did the same with Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad ... It is because even in its mildest forms, it has bought the transparent and blatant lie that Israel is the problem in the Middle East lock stock and barrel when in fact Israel is so obviously  the brightest and most optimistic , in every sense, spark of humanity in the Middle East and its best hope of dragging it into some form of modernity.

It is because not even now do they have the guts to admit that the "Palestinian cause" has been a major blunder for those who profess so mightliy to be champions of peace. All we get is silence. The Australian Greens are a classic example. All of sudden the "human rights" of the Palestinians has gone from the top of the agenda of the Greens profile to a silence so deep they may as well be a party of mummies meeting in a museum at midnight.

Thanks to Condoleezza Rice and an unprecedented forced new age of honesty on the part of Fatah and the Palestinian "President", they don't even have the excuse that the Palestinians are in good faith about a two state solution. The situation is openly now the same as it has been all along right from 1917. The Jews position is that they don't care how many Arab states there are so long as there is a Jewish state. Like then; like now. That was the Zionist position then. That is the Zionist position now. It is also the Jewish position now for those who at this stage of this old and terrible game still want to argue the toss on the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

The funny thing is that was also the Arab position, or much of it, at the start. It is after all so reasonable. But it soon became what it is today. Never you mind how many Arabs states there are. It is none of the despised West's business.The Arabs will war that out for themselves or whatever. Just so long as there is no Jewish state and if there is we will gang up on it like a pack of wardogs from hell and hound it to the end of days. Oslo was pipedream. Dare I say it a wet pipedream. It wasn't even a distraction and it certainly wasn't a pause. The killngs went on even more relentlessly than before and Israel brought the condemnation of the world upon itself, largely mobilised by the disgustingly wet wetdreams left/liberals, to stop it.

If you have read this far Fiona then I will come to the point of why I have really grown to despise the global wetdreams liberal/left, and since Marrickville its Australian branch,  the Australian Greens, and it is not just because they have gone into a speechless, no media allowed, moral fugue since their flagship, "distinguishing it from the other parties", foreign affairs policy, has been exposed by the Palestinians themselves as nothing more than a demand for war. Indeed nothing more than a determined demand for the genocide of the Jews of "Palestine" and the submission of the survivors to a primitive violent superstitious political order run for the neverendiing neverchanging privilege of a tiny few.

Don't they really wish now everybody would shut up about Israel. Why is that?

As bad as that is, it gets worse and its not really about Israel or the Jews.   It's about the wetdreams liberal/left and how easy it was for them to abandon any concept of human rights for others and romanticise causes that are fired by the worst human pack instincts imaginable, including the packs you have described, and how they are behaving now.

It is about the choices they make at the crossroads and how easy it was for so many of the Wetdreams to choose the path that ends, and can end quickly, in a new dark age so frozen and miserable that it will take a thousand years of global warming to thaw. As if there would be anybody around to care.  

Geoff Pahoff, although both Justin Obodie and Paul Walter have covered – with considerable eloquence – the points that I should have made a couple of days ago, I will make a brief comment on packs, and dogs.

Yes, I do like dogs – provided that (a) they have been properly brought up, and (b) accept that I am much higher in the pack than they are. And sure, empathy is something that comes from our social relationships with each other. That said, it is foolish beyond permission to dismiss the malice of which packs are capable, not only with respect to other packs of the same species, but also when packs turn on one of their own. Such malice may not be “cold dead”, but it sure can be damaging, even lethal. Ever been bullied, Geoff? Ever been raped? Both these little escapades can happen when one or more members of the pack turns on one of their own – let alone when members of a pack turn on other packs.

With the greatest respect to Jay’s psychology, and to your own (somewhat surprising) optimism, we are in the greatest danger of harming others and damage to ourselves when we refuse to accept our own (and others’) capacity for evil.

Now, to other, related, matters. You might find this of interest:

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?

Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to the morgue.” I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. For the past half-dozen years, I have been arguing that we conservatives need to follow a different course. And it is this argument that has led so many of my friends to demand, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes angrily, “What the hell happened to you?” I could fire the same question back: “Never mind me—what happened to you?”

So what did happen? The first decade of the 21st century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression. These shocks radicalized the political system, damaging hawkish Democrats like Hillary Clinton in the Bush years and then driving Republicans to dust off the economics of Ayn Rand.

[my emphasis]

This is David Frum writing, Geoff, not someone from the “wet dreams/liberal/left”.

Oh, by the way, have you read this tsunami-like and very public orgasm about Andrew Bolt? Truly the “left” can never hope to emulate the “right”...

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature. Voltaire.

Fancy that coming from an argumenative shit stirer like Voltaire; far too idealistic don't you think?

But this about the nicest (and realisticest) thing iWinne has to quote about homo-sapiens:

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink. C.C. Cummings

Cheers

Here's to the mange - thanks very much!

Yes, Geoff, I agree with much of what you say.

We need to understand how we are constructed, and we have the genes of pack animals. And we also have the genes of the crocodiles, the selfish loner, the cold-blooded killing machine.

But we are more than that, we have the social genes and intellect that allowed us to come together to work for the greater good, and build great civilisations.

And yes, it is easy to follow the path of least resistance, like the crocodile. But, we have a higher degree of consciousness and will. We have the ability to feel the rich sensuousness of a triple layered chocolate cake and resist it.

Yes, leaders such as Obama and Gillard are mere mortals. They are selfish and are willing to debase their morals to get reelected. But equally, in many ways, they also strive for the greater good. None of us are simply black or white. 

Why settle for less than we could be, Geoff? 

I have to admit I found both those two brick novels too boring to finish back in 1973 but on the basis someone hated so much by the wet dream left can't be all bad, I did a little checking.

She's seems a remarkably thoughtful, resourceful and gutsy person to me. I suspect that as is so often the case with the wet dream left, it is not Ayn Rand or her writiing they hate, it's some warped wicked image of their own creation, a kind of mirror image Marx, or Trotsky, that they have trained one another to hate -- true pack style.

Firstly, Geoff Pahoff and his infatuation with pack animals - too many  Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger moves, Geoff!

Don't forget the role of "pack animals", pack mentality and valorisation of self and ego in the rise and operation of the Third Reich, or have you developed a sudden taste for Nazism?

He talks the language of fascism, but doesn't know it..

My views - surprise, surprise are more in sync with others here and the term psychopath so describes the US Right and here: Koch Bros (John Birch), Murdoch, Goldman-Sachs and so forth.

Aynn Rand is sanitised Mein Kampf. After the failure of the Third Reich, Western elitists lost their poster boy, Hitler and the script/warrant had to be rewritten after the horrible truth about Nazism in ww2 came out.

It's taken nearly a lifetime for the lesson of fascism to be forgotten, including by Geoff Pahoff, of all people.

But it survived at least partly due to Rand and thrived the last decade: even governing centrist politicians like Gillard and Obama quail at its power.

But Rand's rubbish is the same rubbish, "self-will run riot", paranoia insecurity and subjectivity, valorisation of self, narcissism, denialism and urge to control, with its SocDarwinist power hunger, as Hitler wrote. And it is a lovely excuse also for opportunist scum ( as with the nazis) on the margins after a quick buck, regardless of harm done to anyone else.

But we needn't worry about concentration camps, why, the Third World is a giant open-air concentration camp! After all, it's not US who suffer, no sign of anyone coming after us yet. Like Niemoller back in the 'thirties, I guess we'd just better keep "mum" about events across the rest of the world, including the lunacy from the T-partiers and Republicans in the US. Doesn't affect us yet!

Yet!

Ayn Rand claimed she was the greatest philosopher since Aristotle, whom she admired. The funny thing is you will have a hard time finding anything she says, or I suspect pens, that is Aristotelian in the empirical scientific manner; rather, she lives in the world of ideas (fantasy) in relationship with a screwed up (narcissistic) intellectualism that gave birth to this bastard child called individualism.

I'm alright Jack

And yet time soon or later makes hypocrites of us all. Rand, a heavy smoker, paid the penalty, and spent the latter years of her life accepting social security, albeit begrudgingly, her supporters claim, but nevertheless the self-proclaimed greatest philosopher since Aristotle, that great individual who hated collectivism, socialism and handouts, accepted the goodwill and cash of those individuals she held in disdain, all in her own selfish interests.

At least she was consistent to her very selfish miserable end.

Maybe having children would have done her the world of good. It just might have afforded her the experience of loving somebody else more than she loved herself.

I was disappointed to read the 1967 quote. I read a couple of her novels way back and liked them. But what you can admire in the drastically simplistic world of her novels, a simple personal independence and self-reliance does look pretty nasty when it becomes hatred of the starving and the dying.

And what you could say in 1967 when the world's population was 3 billion you could not say today when it is 7 billion.

Perhaps. But then, perhaps there is an urgent and immediate need to reduce the world's population to a tenth of its present number and Ayn Rand is showing us how.

But I suspect that the real villain is free trade, which our Prime Minister, our local Ayn Rand, has loudly embraced in recent days. In other words, globalization. In the name of full employment for us and starvation for them.

What is wrong with protectionism? Well, it prevents powerful friends from selling us their pharmaceuticals for ten times the price we currently pay, for starters. So it is bad.

And means huge areas of marginal Australian arid lands would not be turned into desert by being raped for export, gouging crops that we don't need. So it is bad.

Free trade is predation. Protection is protection. The first is good, the second is bad.

Glad we've got this one settled, boys. So - given that we are pack animals, and the slaves of contagious emotions - we should just lie back and enjoy it.

Thank goodness for that: I was getting terriby tired of trying to be a better person.

I believe that most psychological theories see the move from selfishness to the recognition and care for others as a maturational process, stages of development. Even after reaching a maturity level, people can regress, and the emotions of fear and anger.

There is also increasing awareness that emotions are contagious. And being with people who are fearful or angry makes one more inclined to be more fearful or angry 

One of my favourite books is Enders Game. It's a science fiction story in which a young strategic genius annihilates a race of alien invaders. One of its many gems is that it takes the principle that to defeat an enemy, one must know the enemy, learn to think like them. And by learning to think like them, one learns to understand and love them, and he ultimately ends up destroying those he loved. 

… from the POV of the 0.1% (the graph in particular).

Dear Geoff, I'm so pleased that you managed to get "quaint" and "old-fashioned" into the one post.

I have no shame about being either. They both sit rather well, in my opinion, with other old-time notions like compassion, considerateness, and charity.

"As such, psychopathy may be characterized ... as involving a tendency towards both dominance and coldness. Wiggins (1995) in summarizing numerous previous findings... indicates that such individuals are prone to anger and irritation and are willing to exploit others. They are arrogant, manipulative, cynical, exhibitionistic, sensation -seeking, Machiavellian, vindictive, and out for their own gain. With respect to their patterns of social exchange (Foa & Foa, 1974), they attribute love and status to themselves, seeing themselves as highly worthy and important, but prescribe neither love nor status to others, seeing them as unworthy and insignificant. This characterization is clearly consistent with the essence of psychopathy as commonly described.

It seems psychopathic behaviour is quite common. To live in a world without empathy must be soul destroying.

One can only feel sorry for Ayn Rand and her followers.

 "To the contrary, she declares, when civilized man “discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions” he should not feel pity, but “a burning stab of pride” for “the achievements of his nations and his culture…” Amazingly, Rand fails to acknowledge how much the civilized nations have prospered at the expense of the global poor thanks to imperialism. Would she have us applaud the imperialists for their opportunism and exploitation?" [my emphasis]

I'm not sure that Ayn Rand actually said this, especially if by 'pity' Firmin DeBrabander meant "compassion" or "empathy". Pity, with its hint of superciliousness and contempt, is not the most noble of human instincts even if it inspires religions and some hare brained political parties.

Whatever; because either way Ayn Rand is far closer to the truth  than Firmin DeBrabander ever will be as he just demonstrated.  Some systems and cultures, especially political cultures but take as you like, are better than others, sometimes a lot better. The wet dreams/liberal/left can stay in denial if it wants to, or it can move on to anger and bargaining and then depression. That's progress.

There's something quaint and old fashioned about this piece; like a Trotskyist blog. I remember Ayn Rand enjoyed a brief period as arch villian of the wet dream liberal/left in the seventies and that whine about "imperialism" being the cause of the failure of  most post-Imperial states across Africa and the Middle East is almost a comical parody of 1970's thought. It is almost funny.