COMMENT OF THE DAY: EXTREMISM IN DEFENSE AGAINST EXTREMISM IS NO VICE “Although I agree some of Ayn Rand concepts are a tad to the extreme, it is a necessary tool to combat the concepts on the opposite side which are even more extreme such as Carl Marx and the Occupy Movement. These days you cannot persuade people to your side by simply being centrist and laying out facts and figures, you HAVE to have a certain level of Theatrics and Overly Dramatized Dramatizations.” [commonsense, commenting on Comment of the Day: A Rand Retort]
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Like calling our president “Odumbo?” Yep, very persuasive.
This person thinks the Occupy Movement is “more extreme” than a lady who wrote glowing praise for a serial killer.
Ayn Rand wrote a book on theoretical concepts, Occupy Wallstreet destroyed property, disrupted business, blew millions of tax dollars on security and cleanup…. not to mention the rapes and murders at OWS camps. OWS main stated goal is to destroy the current Anerican way of life, they have nothing to lose, and they’re devoted to their beliefs beyond reason. There’s another organization that operates just like that, Al Qaeda.
@commonsense…you forgot the obligatory Hitler reference. Can’t forget Hitler.
You know what rand’s radical solution to stop her enemies was in her books? It was simple, just to LEAVE, QUIT, find someplace else. My god, how millions could die with such a philosophy….which is why the rand hate is so bizarre. She did not advocate violent revolution or overthrow, just simple non-cooperation. Tell me Marx was so circumspect about solving people’s ills. The anger towards rand is so misplaced. People hate those who use her name to promote awful things against her philosophy, but hating her for her basis of beliefs, its laughable. She promotes the most benign solutions and is loathed. Marx promoted violent struggle and is revered. What a messed up world we live in.
@commonsense – i think you seriously overestimate the coherence and organization of OWS.
What’s kind of funny, to those with some historical perspective, is the thing that’s got people worried about creeping statism and the death of freedom is a president proposing policies a bit more centrist than Nixon’s, with accompanying tax policy straight outta Reaganville.
But one thing that commonsense and the Rand acolytes have in common with OWS is a serious addition to melodrama.
How many Occupy protests did you attend, commonsense? Tell me about all the rapes and murders you saw. Tell me about the horrible messes that you had to help clean up. Tell me about the horrible, extremist speeches that so offended your sensitive ears. Tell me everything that formed your personal opinion that you didn’t hear on an extremist cable news network. Anything? No?
Ian, I haven’t witnessed the moon landing in person and I didn’t attend the presidential inauguration but the fact remains that hey did happen. OWS events were covered be EVERY news network and there are recorded facts of all of those things happening at them.
Ayn Rand’s two most popular novels contain remarkable insight on the one hand as to a process of political and social entropy. It is remarkably easy to see her dystopian scenarios as a plausible near-term future. (Or if you’re really cynical, like I am, then you see the dystopia as our present condition, obscured from most peoples’ perception by petty bickering over tidbits of partisan nothingness.)
Her solutions are unrealistic, and I was especially disappointed at the implausibly violent ending of Atlas Shrugged. OTOH, she was writing science fiction and not a literal history of the future.
She does give permission for principled freedom-loving people to murder for the sake of their beliefs. But that’s not so extreme. Wars have been waged more recently and for far more petty reasons. If a war can be justified and fought on an organized basis by a state, then surely it can be justified and fought by individuals against a state. It’s not like Americans haven’t done so (many times) before.
As for myself, I know that it isn’t practical to fight the state. My countrymen have waxed sheepish. I’ve instead moved to a post-Marxist country where the government is highly corrupt and wholly incapable of delivering basic protection or social services. Its more free here on a day-to-day basis than America is. My life expectancy is probably seriously reduced (it’s no Galt’s Gulch), but that is a tradeoff that I’m happy to make.
You heard about the moon landing on TV, and it happened, ergo everything you heard about on TV has happened?
The real reason that you’re scared of Occupy, and I’m sure illegal immigrants, liberals, welfare recipients, and muslims is because you’ll buy whatever boogeyman Rupert Murdoch and company want to sell you. A diverse array of people that you don’t identify with that you can file away in your head under a neat little category called “Them”. Better watch Fox News every night for the latest update on Them, or They might sneak up and get you!
There is no monster under the bed, there are a diverse selection of people in this world, and I would wager that 99.999% of them are not trying to destroy your way of life. You can either snap out of it and embrace humanity, or go back to your tiny fear-bubble and listen to Sean Hannity tell you about all the terrible people that may or may not (likely not) be accurately portayed, and who certainly do not in any way affect you. Stop being a sucker.
While I agree with Ian that MSNBC is an extremist cable news network, I think OWS was pretty well covered by most in the media, no?
Nice rant, Ian, it sounds like you believe Rupert Murdoch is out to get you in your sleep like Freddy Kruger, you should take off your foil hat. A picture is worth a thousands words and there are pictures from ALL of the news outlets depicting the nonsense of OWS.
I also like how lefties keep throwing the 99% around anywhere they can. Bolsheviks also called themselves the majority to sound more important, in reality they were a fringe minority who gained power through violence, deceit, and treason.
Yep, Ol’ Rupie is about as evil as it gets, and if anyone was spreading as much hate, fear, and ignorance as he was without a media empire to reinforce their message in a format compelling to xenophobic rubes, they would be about as well received as Westboro Church.
You hate OWS, because Fox and Co. hate OWS. It’s that simple. They tell you what to think, and you think it.
A bunch of people are out protesting for workers’ rights. We have the least worker protection of any first-world country, the fewest vacation hours, the most expensive health care (hurr durr Odumbo), the fewest unions, largest income inequality.. people are out in the streets fighting for your rights as a worker, and the only opinion you can form, is the one the man the TV told you to. Murdoch doesn’t want workers to organize and stand up for themselves, because that’s bad for his business.
It’s good for you personally, but you and a generation of gullible, terrified idiots are going to stand around screaming LIBRALS and calling the president unimaginative grade-school names, because you have completely bought into a false reality that only exists on TV. I’m sure this will fall on deaf ears, but turn off the TV and talk radio, and go read a book.
You keep running around the fact that OWS was covered by ALL… Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, PBS,Comedy Central, and a huge number of online news outlets. They all show that OWS movement was a joke and an embarrassment.
They didn’t fight for worker’s rights, they whined for Less Work for More Money and Someone Else’s Stuff. I guess the Art History and English Literature degrees did not allow them the upward mobility in the competitive career of a Barista as they expected.
P.S. If you think the world of print books is not guided by politics and censorship you are sorely mistaken.
Anybody could have wandered into the Occupy protests in New York and had their way with the people involved; they were in a public park, and so to say that these acts of violence were directly linked to the protests is stretching it considerably. But this is not a new tact from rightwingers. Remember all the stories about horrible violence in the Superdome after Katrina? People getting their throats cut at night, rapes in the bathrooms, etc? Almost none of it was true. But that doesn’t stop them from repeating it ad nauseum.
Actually, no I don’t remember any of those. Did you just make them up? So typical of leftwingers.
Really, Ayn Rand’s stuff “has become the Bible for so many”?
Wasn’t her name just stirred up by one narcissistic, sophomoric vice-prez candidate?
When the powerful and/or the rich are left to themselves, in their vacuum, and operate without limits, crazy stuff can happen. To paraphrase John LeCarre – spy, mole and writer – the breezes of common sense rarely blow through the room.