Quote from: Doc Sammy;1121487And what stock do you hail from?

Keep in mind that Ayn Rand was Russian...

He's saying she was Jewish, and as she never criticised Jews-as-Jews, ergo she was an 'ethnic particularist'.
I don't recall her criticising *any* ethnicity as such (or ever praising Jews-as-Jews, for that matter), so this sounds to me like a weak argument grounded in anti-Semitism. She seems one of the least ethnocentric writers imaginable AFAICS, and I don't think this was just a cover for her sinister Jewish plotting.

My understanding of Rand's philosophy and the Jewish faith leads me to believe there wasn't much common ground there. When I've met Randians, none were Russian and only one was semi-Jewish. But I've heard that Rand's anti-communist stance was fueled from the popularity of communism in some Jewish circles in the early 20th century. I don't know enough about Rand's early life and whether she broke from the Jewish community and exactly why. Perhaps one of you know her history better?

Quote from: S'mon;1121499He's saying she was Jewish, and as she never criticised Jews-as-Jews, ergo she was an 'ethnic particularist'.
I don't recall her criticising *any* ethnicity as such (or ever praising Jews-as-Jews, for that matter), so this sounds to me like a weak argument grounded in anti-Semitism. She seems one of the least ethnocentric writers imaginable AFAICS, and I don't think this was just a cover for her sinister Jewish plotting.

I figured he was implying Rand was Jewish, which is why I corrected him and intended to goad him into saying it outright.

Ayn Rand was a cunt in her own right, but she was not part of some vast Jewish conspiracy.

The biggest issues at hand have a lot less to do with ethnicity and a lot more to do with things like culture and economics, and how the two often affect each other in tandem.

Both the Far Right and Far Left like to demonize the Jews because they make a convenient boogeyman.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1121502I figured he was implying Rand was Jewish, which is why I corrected him and intended to goad him into saying it outright.

Ayn Rand was a cunt in her own right, but she was not part of some vast Jewish conspiracy.

The biggest issues at hand have a lot less to do with ethnicity and a lot more to do with things like culture and economics, and how the two often affect each other in tandem.

Both the Far Right and Far Left like to demonize the Jews because they make a convenient boogeyman.

Well to be fair the first one to ask "The ***ish Question" Was Marx, so the lefties come to it honestly, might be also why they love the Islamists so much.

Back to the topic, you can't "decolonize" shit, maybe countries where the colonization was "recent" but other than that shit. And they don't want to, they want to demonize western culture (RPGs are a part of it) while taking advantage of all it's trappings and advancements.

Would love to see them go live in the bushes in some jungle.

The more they cry about it the more I want a colonization game where the Spaniards are the good guys and the Aztecs the bad guys.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1121502.....

Ayn Rand was a c*nt in her own right, but she......

NO, she wasn't - and it is NEVER 'okay' to use that word towards someone just because you disagree with their philosophy.

How the hell did Ayn Rand get into the conversation in the first place?? She never wrote a role playing game.
Talk about topic drift....

- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;1121506NO, she wasn't - and it is NEVER 'okay' to use that word towards someone just because you disagree with their philosophy.

How the hell did Ayn Rand get into the conversation in the first place?? She never wrote a role playing game.
Talk about topic drift....

- Ed C.

Well, Ayn Rand's philosophy is downright awful. Forgive me if I'm harsh in my language.

If Giovanni Gentile is to the Far Right what Karl Marx is to the Far Left, then Ayn Rand is to the Far Right what Kropotkin is to the Far Left.

The writings of Marx and Gentile laid the ideological bedrock of the Authoritarian wings of the Right and Left.

Rand and Kropotkin wrote the holy texts of the Anarchist wings of the Right and Left

Quote from: Morlock;1121426Rand was a hack. And an ethnic particularist (which explains how she never turned her lens on herself or her own kind)...

"Her own kind" - Do you mean Humans? People who live in New York?

WTF?
She never wrote a role playing game

- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;1121511"Her own kind" - Do you mean Humans? People who live in New York?

WTF?
She never wrote a role playing game

- Ed C.

This whole shit is crazy.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1121513This whole shit is crazy.

Agreed.

Quote from: Morlock;1121426Rand was a hack. And an ethnic particularist (which explains how she never turned her lens on herself or her own kind)...

Morlock, where the hell are you from?

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1121504The more they cry about it the more I want a colonization game where the Spaniards are the good guys and the Aztecs the bad guys.

That would be such an awesome game.

Greetings!

You know, it boggles me that these SJW's and liberal historical revisionists in academia never seem to come to grips with the fact that Cortez only had about 1,000 Spanish soldiers, ala Conquistadores, with him. A few horses, a few war dogs, and only a few small cannon.

Cortez had something far more powerful. A Native TRIBAL PRINCESS that became his LOVER, his TRANSLATOR, and CHIEF ADVISOR. She was at his side, at all times, and in every meeting. AND the loyalty and service of some 50,000 NATIVE WARRIORS that marched alongside Cortez, and helped bring the AZTECS to their knees, at every step of the campaign.

The Catholic priests complained that Cortez never went anywhere without the Native woman at his side. She slept in his tent every night, and everything went through HER, first. Cortez didn't know or do much of a fucking thing without her approval and encouragement.

Yeah. Think about that.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK;1121517Greetings!

You know, it boggles me that these SJW's and liberal historical revisionists in academia never seem to come to grips with the fact that Cortez only had about 1,000 Spanish soldiers, ala Conquistadores, with him. A few horses, a few war dogs, and only a few small cannon.

Cortez had something far more powerful. A Native TRIBAL PRINCESS that became his LOVER, his TRANSLATOR, and CHIEF ADVISOR. She was at his side, at all times, and in every meeting. AND the loyalty and service of some 50,000 NATIVE WARRIORS that marched alongside Cortez, and helped bring the AZTECS to their knees, at every step of the campaign.

The Catholic priests complained that Cortez never went anywhere without the Native woman at his side. She slept in his tent every night, and everything went through HER, first. Cortez didn't know or do much of a fucking thing without her approval and encouragement.

Yeah. Think about that.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

The Spanish didn't take over Mexico.  Mexico allowed Spain to take over cause it was a better fate than what the Aztecs where offering.  The real Mexican history should had been about how Mexico decided the Aztecs had to go and how they allied with Spain to make it happen.

Quote from: SHARK;1121517Greetings!

You know, it boggles me that these SJW's and liberal historical revisionists in academia never seem to come to grips with the fact that Cortez only had about 1,000 Spanish soldiers, ala Conquistadores, with him. A few horses, a few war dogs, and only a few small cannon.

Cortez had something far more powerful. A Native TRIBAL PRINCESS that became his LOVER, his TRANSLATOR, and CHIEF ADVISOR. She was at his side, at all times, and in every meeting. AND the loyalty and service of some 50,000 NATIVE WARRIORS that marched alongside Cortez, and helped bring the AZTECS to their knees, at every step of the campaign.

The Catholic priests complained that Cortez never went anywhere without the Native woman at his side. She slept in his tent every night, and everything went through HER, first. Cortez didn't know or do much of a fucking thing without her approval and encouragement.

Yeah. Think about that.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Fascinating I just returned from peru and not a single person there used that point.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1121520Fascinating I just returned from peru and not a single person there used that point.

Greetings!

Well, I wouldn't expect the people of Peru to have the same experience. The Inca Empire was very different from the Aztec Empire, and they had different relationships not only with their neighboring tribes and peoples, but also within Inca society itself, between the elite classes and the lower social echelons of their society.

It is interesting to learn how different groups of Spaniards interacted with native tribes and kingdoms, and those native tribes and kingdoms had different kinds of relationships with the Spaniards as well.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: S'mon;1121499He's saying she was Jewish, and as she never criticised Jews-as-Jews, ergo she was an 'ethnic particularist'.
I don't recall her criticising *any* ethnicity as such (or ever praising Jews-as-Jews, for that matter), so this sounds to me like a weak argument grounded in anti-Semitism. She seems one of the least ethnocentric writers imaginable AFAICS, and I don't think this was just a cover for her sinister Jewish plotting.

She's wasn't Jewish, She was an Atheist.

Her parents were Jewish though, her father a successful Pharmacist in St. Petersburg. The Red Commies and the Russian revolution wrecked everything for her family. His Pharmacy business was nationalized by the reds in 1920 like almost exactly one hundred years ago today, and her family was left to starve on the streets of St. Peterburg. However they left and moved to the Crimea, where many White Russians relocated who had supported the Tsar moved to after the revolution. She returned to St. Peterburg though to complete college.  Along with many other bourgeois students, she was purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, however, many of the purged students were allowed to complete their work and graduate, which she did in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment she wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri, which became her first published work.

In late 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She departed on January 17, 1926. When she arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926, she was so impressed with the skyline ofManhattan that she cried what she later called "tears of splendor". Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives, one of whom owned a movie theater and allowed her to watch dozens of films free of charge. She then left for Hollywood, California.

In Hollywood, a chance meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film The King of Kings and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor; the two were married on April 15, 1929. She became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. Taking various jobs during the 1930s to support her writing, she worked for a time as the head of the costume department at RKO Studios. She made several attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they were unable to acquire permission to emigrate.

Rand's first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932, although it was never produced. This was an anti-communist movie. She knew the red commies well, because of her families firsthand experience with them.

Rand's first major success as a writer came in 1943 with The Fountainhead, a romantic and philosophical novel that she wrote over a period of seven years.

In 1951, Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where she gathered a group of these admirers around her. This group (jokingly designated "The Collective") included future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara and Barbara's cousin Leonard Peikoff. Initially the group was an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment to discuss philosophy. She later began allowing them to read the drafts of her new novel, Atlas Shrugged, as the manuscript pages were written. In 1954 Rand's close relationship with the younger Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair, with the consent of their spouses.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, was considered Rand's magnum opus. Despite many negative reviews, Atlas Shrugged became an international bestseller.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her nonfiction works and by giving talks to students at institutions such as Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Lewis & Clark College on 2 October 1963. She also began delivering annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, responding afterward to questions from the audience (TED, you owe her big time!). During these speeches and Q&A sessions, she often took controversial stances on political and social issues of the day. These included supporting abortion rights, opposing the Vietnam War and the military draft (but condemning many draft dodgers as "bums"), supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973  and calling homosexuality "immoral" and "disgusting", while also advocating the repeal of all laws about it. She also endorsed several Republican candidates for President of the United States, most strongly Barry Goldwater in 1964, whose candidacy she promoted in several articles for The Objectivist Newsletter.

In 1964, Nathaniel Branden began an affair with the young actress Patrecia Scott, whom he later married. Nathaniel and Barbara Branden kept the affair hidden from Rand. When she learned of it in 1968, though her romantic relationship with Branden had already ended, Rand terminated her relationship with both Brandens, which led to the closure of the NBI.

Rand called her philosophy "Objectivism", describing its essence as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute"

In 1974 she gave the commencement speech for the graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point, which I'm including a link for here, because I think it is one of her best speeches…

West Point Commencement Speech 1974 – Philosophy, Who Needs It?
https://courses.aynrand.org/campus-courses/philosophy-who-needs-it/philosophy-who-needs-it/

I never had the chance to speak with her, however would have very much liked to. She died in 1982, and the first time I picked up and read one of her books Anthem, was in early 1984. I did have the chance to talk with Nathaniel Branden though, and that was a very illuminating conversation which I'll share some details today.

He went on to become  the founder of the self-esteem movement in psychology, and ended up becoming an eminent psychologist with a very large practice in Los Angeles.

Branden argued that self-esteem is a human psychological need and that to the extent this need remains unmet, pathology (defensiveness, anxiety, depression, difficulty in relationships, etc.) tends to result. He defined self-esteem formally as "the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness", and proposed that, while others (parents, teachers, friends) can nurture and support self-esteem in an individual, self-esteem also relies upon various internally generated practices. Branden distinguished his approach to self-esteem from that of many others by his inclusion of both confidence and worth in his definition of self-esteem, and by his emphasis on the importance of internally generated practices for the improvement and maintenance of self-esteem.

I looked him up, and just cold called him one day from my office here in Indiana back in late 2001, or early 2002, just to ask him about Ayn Rand and the Objectivist movement and why he withdrew from that movement. He responded affirmatively about his identity and previous affiliations when asked, because you know, cold-calling and all, wasn't 100% sure it was the correct Nathaniel Branden.

At the time, I was also quite unaware that he had been in a relationship with Ayn Rand, and that they had not amicably parted, so did not understand why he had abruptly left the Objectivist movement back in 1968, and that was literally my first question for him. "Why did you just quit when everything was going so well?"

Anyway. once we got through that emotional minefield, we were able to move on to some productive conversation.  He actually never left the Objectivist movement, rather, he was excluded by Ayn Rand after their breakup. He never spoke negatively about her, or Objectivism, and in my conversations with him, if he had the choice, I believe he would have continued with the Nathaniel Branden Institute and promoting Objectivism as his primary work.

As it was, he moved back to L.A. with his new wife in 1969, and started his Psychology practice also getting his Phd. there in 1973. After which he began a successful four decade career as an Internationally renowned psychologist. He had a tough spot of luck. His second wife accidentally drowned in their pool after falling in as a result of a seizure in 1978. So he literally had to completely rebuild his life a second time, ...less than a decade after having to completely rebuilding his life the first time.

During our conversation, and as a result of my questions about the long-term goals and results of Objectivism, it came out that he thought there should be more to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy than what she presented, and while he didn't say it in words,  his actions and subsequent choices of words and actions told me a lot more about what actually happened, and the rift that had developed between them, which was much less about their personal relationship, and much more about their professional one.

I can confirm that although he remained a supporter of Rand's philosophy, he did name to me problems of a tendency for Objectivists to encourage emotional repression, and in making moralizing permanent judgments about other people. Also that Objectivists routinely experienced a failure to appreciate adequately the importance of kindness in human relationships.  A lot of this had much less to to do with him personally and much more to do with the rough upbringing that Ayn Rand had to deal with as a target of the red commies, but I'm not sure he ever realized that directly, he just adjusted to it subconsciously, deciding how he was going to promote Objectivism.

He also apologized in another interview to "every student of Objectivism" for "perpetuating the Ayn Rand mystique" and for "contributing to that dreadful atmosphere of intellectual repressiveness that pervades the Objectivist movement." He was very uncomfortable with the "cult" like aspects of the Objectivist movement and much preferred a grander much understated gentler approach for everyone involved. He also thought that people could change, and become better, and worked ceaselessly to develop new tools mostly related to self-esteem or lack thereof, so that people could recognize when they were the problem, and could then self-correct their negative, or otherwise self-destructive and destructive behaviors.

He subscribed to the theory of Objectivism completely... "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". He lived this way after Ayn Rand rejected him for loving another woman besides her, and his first wife also divorced him as well, although she remained lifelong friends with him? Anyway, when I spoke to him he was about as satisfied as anyone could be with all that he had to deal with in his own personal life, and had made his life after Objectivism about improving the awareness and quality of life of many thousands of other people. Personally, I rate that as excellent on the Ayn Rand scale of living well and as a true Objectivist.

A link to his website for you today, where his estate still sells his books. I'll confirm directly a bit later on this week that his wife Leigh Horton Branden, as heir, is receiving the proceeds from book and publication sales there, as I learned her email addy doing research for this report for you today, and will email her Monday.

http://www.nathanielbranden.com/

Maybe I should do an article on Leonard Peikoff as well, as the heir to Ayn Rand's estate (With the exception of Anthem, which is in the public domain now) he has carried on her legacy and still currently runs the Ayn Rand Institute which is currently located in Irvine, California. I'm not sure he's keeping up with her legacy so well though, his latest book is "The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out"

So he's now busy finding all the cultural excuses for the West to fail, all the while failing to realize that it's literally the communists with their poisonous leftist ideals, and their long-term goals and actions that are deliberately destabilizing societies, in order take control of them strong-arm style, that remains the greatest threat to what remains of freedom here in the United States.

Anyway, Ayn Rand was Atheist, not Jewish, Don't let the Commutards tell you different, because they actually don't know her well enough to actually know.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1121504The more they cry about it the more I want a colonization game where the Spaniards are the good guys and the Aztecs the bad guys.

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