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Post 0

Tuesday, September 27 - 1:20am

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Excellent post, Adam.

I've often made the point over the years that for a house to stand true & well it must be built upon solid foundations. This was central to Rand's thinking re the proper philosophical basis upon which to defend capitalism. She also struck a chord in me when she painted the picture of a wave rising & hitting the beach. We are the crest of the wave and the beach is the bankruptcy of our age.

Ross

Post 1

Tuesday, September 27 - 4:00am

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Thankyou Adam. Ideas matter. I love this history stuff.

Al-Qaeda didn’t launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but it relies on them for political cover.

Lets see...

and Paul Baran, who developed the thesis that capitalism depended on the immiseration of the Third World after Marx’s immiseration of the proletariat failed to materialize.

Well Lenin had that one all sewed up long ago. Not to mention the whole Rhodesia thing earlier still. But it isn't clear to me that anybody has been using Imperialism to score points for Al Qaeda. Have they? Is this a fair cop?

successfully building on the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even self-loathing) are the primary indicators of virtue. In this way of thinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we store up grace in Heaven that is far more important than the momentary discomfort of submitting to criminals, predatory governments, and terrorists.

Well that's the sort of dubious stuff Ayn Rand would tend to say. But the self-loathing jive seems to have been only for one spell of time and over-rated. Christianity is more than that, and this was a long time ago and the meme has surely been long since dispersed.

Is this really where the cult of self-sacrifice was transmitted from? After all, it was alive and well in pre-Christian and heathen tribalism, and ancient Sparta. Where did it reside between late C18th and early C20th? How did it manage to pop up again when your Roosevelt and your capitalism "needed" it?
I'm not quite sold on this one.

At any rate, it's good stuff for all that.

Post 2

Tuesday, September 27 - 9:07am

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Definitely a good article.

I don't think there's much use in dragging major religion names into things. Where it comes from is radical fundamentalism (any flavor) and anti-capitalism philosophies, for wont of a better description. Fundamentalist anything. Fundamentalist environmentalists (the most non-pragmatic people on the planet, and often, the most non-producing).

I can deal with confused, benevolent people. I cannot deal with confused, malevolent people. Stupid and nice is one thing, stupid and mean is a whole 'nother shootin' match.

r

Post 3

Wednesday, September 28 - 3:34am

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Oh yeah?

I don't think there's much use in dragging major religion names into things

Lots of use. Heaps of use. Mountains of use!
To trace back the thought patterns of today to their origions permits us to better understand where we find ourselves in this age and in this time. That's the whole theme of the article. If you're complaining about that how do you manage to consider this a good article?

Where it comes from is radical fundamentalism

Nothing so simple as that mate, not by a long shot!
"It" comes from all the little doctrines we have woven into our culture, our conception of life. It is wonderful to see any of them- the good memes and the bad- articulated and traced back to their fountianhead this way.

Stupid and nice is one thing, stupid and mean is a whole 'nother shootin' match.

It's all one to me. Joe Blogs German during WW2 was 'stupid and nice' to let the Third Reich go to town, 'stupid and nice' while the Red Sea Pedestrians were rotated about the carbon cycle. Any merit in being 'nice' is as a flea to a Zeppelin compared to 'stupid'.

These fallacies of benevolence Raymond writes about are evil and deadly. The memes may fall into the heads of 'nice' people. Okay, but how is a 'nice' or 'mean' person to be judged if not by the ideas about life they choose to subscribe to?

Post 4

Wednesday, September 28 - 11:13am

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The reason I find the article halfway decent is because it spends a good deal of time concerning itself with the maniacs.

But, like most articles that even get within a football field of religion on Objectivist boards, there always seems to be a deeper purpose, which is to bash religion in general. Assigning evil to a group that incredibly broad is not just unrealistic. What it is is good, old fashioned prejudice, which comes in many forms. It emanates from labels. From the pigeonhole to the vast indictments, it's all the same by root to me.

Because of the increased pace and pressures of modern life, people are pressed more than ever to make rapid assessments of people. He is an atheist, he is a liberal, he is a what have you. It is quickly assessed, and incorporated within the big schema. It does not nearly address who an individual actually is on the whole.

Heinlein once wrote "specialization is for insects". Well, so is half-cocked categorization. Divisiveness kills things.

Post 5

Wednesday, September 28 - 12:11pm

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So is refusing to face reality and the nature of things, and insisting on viewing thru rose-colored lens - and thick ones at that... that creamy view of religion is nothing but the poisoned sugar crap given ignorant children when entering sunday school - most emphatically it is not the real nature of religion, not Christianity any more than Islam, both vile fundamentally human-hating doctrinizating gaggle of obfuscating illiteratti...
(Edited by robert malcom on 9/28, 12:14pm)

Post 6

Wednesday, September 28 - 12:29pm

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I think I agree with you.

My point is that Objectivism has the habit of making blanket statements about religion, as if it were one thing, which it is not. I'm not even sure some of them look at, say, Christianity with a sufficient level of sophistication. Here you have something that started out in the middle east as a religion, got taken to Rome and turned into a legal system, and spread throughout Europe as a culture. I'll just leave the part about what it did in America alone for the moment- it is too wide ranging, it runs from what you mention all the way to me being a Unitarian Universalist.

There are many elements in the article that interest me outside of any of this. This is in the area of radical fundamentalism-meets-radical-philosophy-meets-radical politics. Not a good room to be in.

(Edited by Rich Engle on 9/28, 12:32pm)

(Edited by Rich Engle on 9/28, 12:38pm)

Post 7

Thursday, September 29 - 2:36pm

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The reason I find the article halfway decent is because it spends a good deal of time concerning itself with the maniacs.

That's all the utility that registers wit'chya? Where's you're historian's spirit man?

But, like most articles that even get within a football field of religion on Objectivist boards, there always seems to be a deeper purpose, which is to bash religion in general.

I'm first to agree with you about this habit to take a swing at religion but I don't think that's what the author was up to.

Our philosophy, Objectivism, includes many component attributes. We've commonalities like self-interest, virtue ethics, logic, pride, heroism, man as an end in himself, universal suffrage, work-ethic, political equality, honesty, efficaciousness of art,....you know Ayn Rand didn't invent them don't you? To trace these back to where they came from...lots of fun and lots to be learned from the connections. Well, Mr Author is rightly trying to do that with said 'suicidalism' vices and has pinned self sacrifice on Christianity.
I don't think that's a fair cop, but I admire what he's trying to do.

Heinlein once wrote "specialization is for insects". Well, so is half-cocked categorization. Divisiveness kills things.

Nothing is ever gained without loosing/"killing" something else. We live in a fragmented world, there's too much for one mind to keep up with unless you apply stereotypes- much much too much. Categorisation, conceptualisation, is something we need to do to survive. It's legitimate and necesasary- we only have so much mental RAM so some things have to go overboard even though some of those castaway details might be the ones we should have kept. You can and should use stereotypes, but just remember that they're only stereotypes. It's when you start treating your categorisations/representations as if they were the whole of the world when you come undone. No?