paragon1 posted:

I mean I'm not, but it really isn't good to assume mean things about strangers!

Nessus posted:

Wasn't one of the Ayn Rand heroes a pirate who sunk foreign aid shipments?

Nessus posted:

Wasn't one of the Ayn Rand heroes a pirate who sunk foreign aid shipments?

Nessus posted:

Wasn't one of the Ayn Rand heroes a pirate who sunk foreign aid shipments?

Wanamingo posted:

Probably! She did have the hots for that one serial killer.

GunnerJ posted:

The other is that Rand is insistent that the only things government-funded science is good for is inventing new weapons and methods of destruction. So it's kind of interesting to think about how a single former philosophy student (!) can take on the worlds' navies with one ship, given how his closest pal is apparently a super-genius scientist inventor.

CommieGIR posted:

Apparently the Gulch is Area 51 and they have alien technology. I always loved how deus ex machina it was, pulling unbelievable technology and energy systems out of thin air and then proclaiming it a product of the genius of the objectivist movement.

CommieGIR posted:

She also loved cheating on her husband repeatedly right in front of him. She claimed they had an open relationship, but when her husband started seeing someone else she went nuts on him.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/60120/index1.html

CommieGIR posted:

She also loved cheating on her husband repeatedly right in front of him. She claimed they had an open relationship, but when her husband started seeing someone else she went nuts on him.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/60120/index1.html

Nonsense posted:

Glad she died.

Literally The Worst posted:

wasnt her husband schtuppin someone good-looking too

Nonsense posted:

A blogger made a quip about charity and Rand, implying that she wouldn't approve of his donating, and then a crapload of randroids swooped on his facebook post correcting him that Rand was a massive contributor to charitable causes.

jrodefeld posted:

Do you accept the principle that people ought to have the final say in the use of their physical bodies so long as they don't harm others?

1337JiveTurkey posted:

Do they ever say which charities?

Alhazred posted:

What about people who might hurt themselves? Are you against involuntary commitment?

CommieGIR posted:

A model, Ayn demanded that he be impotent for the rest of his life.

SedanChair posted:

I don't see why he wouldn't be. I kind of am myself.

GunnerJ posted:

Oh hey that reminded me: http://eviltwincomics.tumblr.com/post/72771087448/action-philosopher-ayn-rand-from-action

CommieGIR posted:

She also loved cheating on her husband repeatedly right in front of him. She claimed they had an open relationship, but when her husband started seeing someone else she went nuts on him.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/60120/index1.html

Literally The Worst posted:

wasnt her husband schtuppin someone good-looking too

CommieGIR posted:

A model, Ayn demanded that he be impotent for the rest of his life.

Nolanar posted:

God dammit JRod get back here and say something stupid so people stop posting about Ayn Rand having sex.

Caros posted:

I am very confused.

VitalSigns posted:

Ayn Rand Fun Fact #75 posted:

Marcella Rabwin, Rand’s next-door neighbor in the 1930’s, remembers her this way: “[She dressed] like a dowd. She was the worst-dressed woman I have ever known in my life.”

Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 61 posted:

Rand’s favorite fragrance was Edwardian Bouquet by the perfume house Floris of London. Olfactory scholars Lucca Turin and Tania Sanchez describe the scent thusly: “On paper, this handsome chypre has a classic galbanum profile: fresh, bitter green, slightly musky. On skin, it turns peculiarly and distinctly urinous with curdled milk smell, and would invite speculations on one’s continence.”

Norah Ephron, "Fountainhead Revisited" posted:

Ayn Rand is not easy to write about - and not just because she doesn’t cooperate. One example will suffice. When I was interviewing her editor Ed Kuhn he told me that she was furious because an article in Life magazine had described her as wearing a tricornered hat and a cape.

“She has never worn a tricornered hat and a cape,” said Kuhn.

“I don’t know about the cape,” I told him, “but Hiram Haydn, who used to be her editor, told me that whenever he met her for lunch, she wore a tricornered hat.”

“Oh,” said Kuhn. “Well, it must have been the cape that bothered her.”

I went home to my bookshelf, where Miss Rand’s works were in temporary residence, pulled out a recent paperback of hers, and there on the cover was a picture of her wearing a cape.

I decided not to bother Kuhn with the information. It would just have confused him.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

It's also worth noting that the guy kept drilling her far longer than he wanted to. Like he just didn't want to anymore but kept doing it because he knew what would happen. When he finally did quit she destroyed everything they had built together, ended his career, and deliberately turned him into a nobody.

I could be wrong but that isn't something that a person endeavoring to create a rational, just society should be doing. She was literally holding his career hostage for sex and ended it when he turned off the sex faucet.

She also made her husband wear a bell so she could hear him coming if he was writing.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Sex can be sold as a commodity, discuss Ayn Rand in terms of marginal utility.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Sex can be sold as a commodity, discuss Ayn Rand in terms of marginal utility.

Caros posted:

Its a long story that you can find in the libertarian thread, but the short answer is that I had a very good friend who lived in the US who found out she had cancer. Considering her age and the stage at which it was discovered her survival rate with treatment was something like 95% over five years, 90% over 10 years and so on. It was the type of cancer you get better from. The problem is that she lived in the US and wasn't wealthy.

As a Canadian I'd taken my healthcare for granted and never really looked at the US system. I'd just figured up to that point that if we got rid of our UHC we could just take the money I spent in taxes on that and use it to pay for the care I'd need just like the US does. This instance however was eye opening. She found out she was sick, but simply couldn't pay. She received some treatment as she scraped together funds through charity projects but it wasn't enough to pay for what she needed and I had to watch a good friend of mine waste away from a preventable disease. If she were in Canada she would have received treatment almost immediately (in fact it would have been discovered sooner since she wouldn't have been worried about paying for a checkup) and I'd probably still have my friend here today.

Once I came to realize that private medical care was disgustingly immoral and inefficient it wasn't hard to make the jump to realizing that maybe having certain things as public goods is not a bad idea after all.

Edit: Incidentally to the discussion above, I've been pondering doing a let's read of Atlas Shrugged for laughs for a while now as a warm up exercise before I start work on a given day. Would anyone be interested in reading that?


What qualifies as a abstract or vague assertion? We know that prior to the introduction of Europeans to North America the land was owned in its entirety by native americans. While it is impossible (due to genocide and the passage of time) to determine who specifically is descended from the tribe that might have owned this particular spot it seems to me remarkably simple to figure out who has Native American heritage and who does not. Since most modern people can agree that the entire conquest of North America was essentially one giant theft it seems remarkably simple to say that we should all get the gently caress out and let them sort out the property rights amongst themselves.

And before I go on lets be clear about the bolded part. What you're talking about is impossible. Even you would agree (I should hope) that trading freely with someone who doesn't understand the concept of what is being traded is impossible. This is a fundamental aspect of our current contract law, that a contract simply cannot be valid if it is not properly understood by one side. Likewise a total lack of consideration on one side (say... trading the island of manhattan for $700 worth of beads) is also valid grounds for getting rid of a contract.

Native American groups by and large didn't make any sorts of fair trades for land. They made trades they didn't understand for things that were utterly worthless by comparison to what they were giving up and in many cases these trades were made under duress of being killed by disease or straight up genocide.

Even if you exclude all that, do you think it would be fair to say the US should give up on large sections of land in the deep south?



The dark green lands are lands that were treaty signed as tribal land that were then stolen outright from native americans as part of a forced relocation that killed thousands. There is absolutely no question that this was theft and we know exactly which tribes the land was stolen from.


Lets suppose a group of people, say... white men, systematically murder you and everyone like you while stealing up your land for themselves. Jrodefeld you're making our point for us here, the land was stolen and every single person living in north america is party to the theft and genocide of native american peoples. I know that is hard to accept as truth but it is. The difference is that we don't have a social and economic system that says that if something is provably taken by force that it must be returned, we have a society that acknowledges the lovely things that it has done but that also realizes it is incredibly impractical to reverse them at this point in time.

If you are sticking by your morality instead of trying to worm your way out on a technicality you have to admit that Native Americans should have a claim to some or all of North America.


Assumes facts not found in evidence. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you haven't read my post before you wrote this, but you might want to seriously consider going to do that before you post anymore because I've already talked about this with you. As I discussed earlier, property owned by the state is only legitimate if we accept your premise that homesteading is the way property rights should be developed, something no one in this thread has acquiesced as fact. Until such time that you have people agreeing on the subject it might behoove you to stop stating such things as fact and instead couch your statements in more vague language such as "I believe" so that you don't come off as quite so pompous and insufferable.

Incidentally your arguments that individuals need to meet the burden of proof to claim their property rights is yet another example of how your view of property rights is specifically designed as one that exists to be most advantageous to you. Native Americans had their own view of property rights, one that was largely communal in nature, and one that was inconsistent with the property rights as viewed by europeans. What you are doing here is framing the argument in such a way that you know it will be impossible for them to provide evidence that they were stolen from, despite the blatantly well understood fact that native americans were stolen from.

No one in this thread, even you I would hope, is going to seriously argue that the Native Americans weren't systematically robbed and largely exterminated in the European conquest of North America. By putting the burden of proof at a level that amounts to "Well do you have a deed for the land?" You are setting a bar that is impossible for Native Americans with their alternate view of property rights to meet. To circle back to Mongol Based Economics, this is like a Russian Prince going to the Kublai Khan a generation after his father's death and saying "Well we know that Subutai raped and pillaged our land for a number of years, could we have that back?" Its not like they have a reciept, and even if they did the two peoples have vastly different views on property rights and it is absurd to expect them to have common ground on that front.


Or you could... you know, give it back to the Native Americans who were clearly and unashamedly robbed of their land.

Also just going to reiterate this in case anyone missed Jack of Heart's post on the issue. The factory owners aren't the ones working the factory you loving weirdo.

jrodefeld posted:

In the first place, as I'm sure you are now aware, the "factories to the factory owners" phrase was a typo and I meant to write "factories to the factory workers". Given the context of the quote, and the fact that I mentioned its relationship to Marxist rhetoric, you probably could have assumed that it was a typo.

Syndicalism is a second best option for returning public property to private ownership. In the absence of proof of who held the original just property claims, the closest standard by which individuals could be considered to have homesteaded the land are the government employees and/or individual contractors who worked on the lands. Assuming the original homesteaders or their descendants cannot be found, dividing the land up among the individuals who worked on the lands is a second best option.

Some public lands might be simply made open to individual homesteading. That is, the State declares the lands unowned and announces a date by which individuals can travel and homestead the land by building homes, farms, etc. What the State should NOT be permitted to do in my view is to sell the land or to choose arbitrarily which people to grant property titles to. If the State cannot legitimately own property, then they cannot legitimately sell that which they don't own.


Your objection to the homesteading principle vis a vis the Native Americans strikes me as odd. There is no question that early European settlers disregarded any legitimate property rights of the native peoples, repeatedly broke treaties they signed with them and proceeded to wipe out vast numbers in a genocide while herding the rest of them onto State appointed reservations as if they were livestock, dehumanizing them.

The narrative you are bending over backwards to create is that the homestead principle is some elitist European idea that was designed to allow white people to colonize and steal land and resources from darker skinned people.

The genocide of the American Indians ran contrary to every tenet of Enlightenment-Era liberalism and Natural Rights Theory. The legacy of white supremacy and patriarchy unfortunately carried over into the new world, despite the pretty words written into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

You are wrong to believe that Native Americans had no concept of private property or that it wasn't possible to reasonably respect the rights that they did have.

There is one thing that is clear though. Not even the most liberal and generous notion of property rights conceivable would grant the American Indians exclusive control over the entire continent of North America. Yet this seems to be what you are implying. Are you suggesting that European settlers had no right to step onto the beaches of Plymouth, Massachusetts because they were trespassing on the property of the native peoples?!

Let's suppose that the American Indians did have either a concept of private property that granted them "ownership" over the entire continent or they didn't recognize private property rights at all. Stipulating that this is true, I would say that they had an incorrect understanding of property rights, which we are not bound to respect.

However, the crucial point that must be made is that the early European colonists indeed DID steal an enormous amount of land from the native peoples according to libertarian property rights theory and, more fundamentally, the theory of Natural Rights and the non-aggression principle.

Superior ideas should win out. And I contend that the first user principle of original appropriation is the only coherent theory of private property rights that exists.

None of us can undo the atrocities committed by people in the past. The best we can do is provide a consistent theoretical framework for understanding what constitutes just property and which constitutes stolen property. This of course means that some of us will be the unfair beneficiaries of past theft that cannot be proven or completely overturned. There isn't any perfect solution to this problem no matter what ideology you subscribe to.

Some past land theft can be proven. Whether it is to provide reparations to descendants of black slaves or descendants of Native Americans who were murdered, libertarian justice would compel us to provide restitution for past damages if sufficient evidence is provided.

It is patently unfair to criticize libertarianism for not having a perfect solution to a difficult problem when no competing ideology has any better of a solution.

Is it any more "just" to take money ad hoc from white people, whether they or their ancestors had anything to do with slavery and give it to black people, whether or not their ancestors were enslaved? Furthermore, is it "just" to kick tons of European-Americans out of their homes and give them to descendants of Native Americans even if there is not the slightest evidence that the redistributed property belonged to their ancestors?


The best we can hope to do is reallocate stolen goods and property to their rightful owners, to the extent that it can be proven, and sustain a coherent system of property rights based on original appropriation into the future. The further into the future we get with genuine equality of rights and property rights based on libertarian theory, the less important property theft in the distant past will matter.

jrodefeld posted:

Some public lands might be simply made open to individual homesteading. That is, the State declares the lands unowned and announces a date by which individuals can travel and homestead the land by building homes, farms, etc.