Rand Rand Rand
Surely your child should be named Rand Rand Rand Rand after
Ayn Rand
The Rand corporation
The Remington Rand typewriter (or creator of the Univac computer if you prefer).
The Krugerrand - not as good as bitcoins, I know.
We must SMASH the Democratic Deadlock with MINDFUL EVIDENCE
“They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad,” the great Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman once wrote. Harshly, I think. My own father, the late financier and diplomat Gilbert Xavier de Bong, who died designing the Richard M Nixon Presidential Library, bequeathed me many gifts. Not least of which is a deep moral purpose in life. “If it …
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Friday 7th November 2014 14:58 GMT John Styles
Rand
Also, I thoroughly recommend the book 'It usually begins with Ayn Rand' by Jerome Tuccille. Although most of it is about the minutiae of libertarian infighting, the bits about Ayn Rand at the beginning are worth the cost of the book.
Or do a search for 'ayn rand rational dancer' on Google Books and the whole chapter seems to come up.
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Friday 7th November 2014 15:56 GMT clanger9
Re: Rand
Excellent stuff, thanks for the pointer. A very neat skewering of the utter loopiness at the heart on the Rayndian cult. For example:
"Cigarettes were pro-life and pro-man since they were manufactured by productive capitalists for human enjoyment"
It's scary how many people still appear to sympathise with this junk.
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Friday 7th November 2014 16:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Rand
It is, always, worthwhile to remember that the Randian cult forwards Rand's "independent", "libertarian", "no altruistic" and "pro laissez-faire capitalist" beliefs...while Rand herself accepted [American] Welfare support payments in the end.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Later_years
Yes, it IS amazing how many people still appear to sympathise with this junk. Why? Because it is easy for egotists to believe that, being the center of attention, that they can and will get what they want simply through the "power" of their will. The perfect Rand symbolism.
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Saturday 6th December 2014 08:48 GMT Kepler
Re: Rand and Cigarettes
Apropos of what Clanger9 wrote above, here are two amusing anecdotes concerning Rand and cigarettes:
(1) In the early years of her group, everyone smoked. Reason and rationality required it! "Fire in the hand is fire in the mind!", they were fond of saying. So if you didn't smoke, you were anti-reason, anti-life, anti-mind, anti-man, etc.
But then the Surgeon General's Report came out, and Rand got wise to the dangers of lung cancer. She finally decided cigarette smoking is bad after all, and it suddenly became rational not to smoke. Somehow the requirements of reason and rationality changed over time!
(2) Back when smoking was still required, a young man who attended one of her gatherings (I've never been told who) pulled out his pack of cigarettes to light one up. Someone gently tugged at the sleeve of his jacket and said to him in a low voice, so as not to draw too much attention from others, "Miss Rand smokes Tareytons." The implication was clear: Reason dictated not only that one smoke, but that one smoke one particular brand!
The degree to which a group of people ostensibly devoted to reason and rationality could embrace argument by appeal to authority was staggering.
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Saturday 6th December 2014 09:22 GMT Kepler
Re: Rand and Cigarettes — boring, pointy-headed postscript
P.S. I think it only fair to add that we find these stories amusing precisely because the people in them are acting contrary to principles that they do in fact hold dear, and that at times (but not others!) they articulate quite well. Such silliness at a gathering of flaky mystics (say, Gurdjieff-followers, or Theosophists) wouldn't surprise or amuse us nearly so much. And the principles are not invalidated by their adherents' hypocrisy or all-too-human frailty, or even by the reductio ad absurdum of some of the adherents' antics.
(The principles stand or fall on their own, obviously.)
You can disagree — as I do — with her and their conclusions about where reason leads* yet agree with them that reason should be one's touchstone, and you can admire their devotion to reason as not only a guide but a life-organizing principle while laughing at their comical excesses and their departures from rationality.
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* Without getting bogged down in a needlessly detailed digression, I think one can like her epistemology — her first principles — without agreeing with all of her moral, aesthetic or political conclusions. And in regard both to her epistemology and to her moral and political conclusions, I think some of her stuff is very good and some of it is utter shit.**
(The aesthetic stuff — her views on music and dancing — is a joke that I don't even waste my time thinking about.)
So I am not an Objectivist — her term for a subscriber to her philosophy, which she presumed to call "Objectivism" — by any stretch of the imagination. I take great pleasure in pointing out what I see as the deep and stunning flaws in her system. Yet I have found myself surprisingly many times over the years in the odd and uncomfortable position of having to defend her views against unfair and poorly reasoned attacks, selective and out-of-context quotation, etc. I certainly do not agree with her, but I often disagree with her attackers as well.
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** She has some very good ideas about epistemology and the sovereignty of an externally existing reality, but then there is this wacko notion that all truths are somehow logically necessary. "A is A" carries way too much weight for a tautology.
She doesn't understand Kant at all, nor even try to understand him. Yet she appropriates many of his ideas! And calls him "the most evil man in history".
(In this regard she is much like the New Testament, which attributes countless well-documented Pharisaic sayings and teachings to Jesus while giving a wildly unfair and inaccurate portrayal of the Pharisees that essentially lumps them in with the Sadducees.)
She's great on liberty in many ways, but has a burr up her ass when it comes to anarchism, which she simply doesn't understand.
Plus she thinks she somehow invented libertarianism (specifically, the non-aggression principle), which she did not, and views all libertarians as plagiarists. Which is rather ironic in light of her behavior toward Kant.
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Friday 7th November 2014 15:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Satire Warning Please!
This article is actually quite funny (especially the buzzword/link bingo at the bottom) but only if you're not like the typical American Democrat politician, Steve.
Unfortunately, most of them would consider this article to be a primer on how to run the government. That's why it really needs a sarcasm tag.
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Friday 7th November 2014 19:23 GMT disgruntled yank
Surely it was Robert Graves, or maybe Robert Bridges who said that about books. Most of us remember Sir John Bejteman for "April is the cruelest month".
As for the offspring's name, I think that you should also take into account the great American educationist John Dewey in preference to the Dalai Lama. This would allow you to name the child Dewey Rand Rand D'wey Rand Rand Dewey Rand Rand.
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Friday 7th November 2014 21:33 GMT David Leigh 1
They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad,”
er 'the great Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman'
You are a complete ignoramus - sorry,probably too long a word for you, but see below:-
Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
John Betjeman would NEVER have written that!!
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Friday 7th November 2014 22:59 GMT Cliff
Re: They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad,”
Whoosh!
(Look at the other Steve Bong articles, lord Bong of #BusinessModel and ask that guff - you'll see he's a compound character of every cretin in Hoxton and as such will spout with absolute authority utter bollocks. He doesn't even get the name of The Register right, there are clues ask over the shop, this is deliberate)
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Friday 7th November 2014 21:33 GMT tfewster
Evidence?
> Once an evidence-based approach has been adopted we can bypass the messy business of analogue politics entirely – the business of “winning people over”, of getting and obtaining “consent”. Therefore, only those qualified to interpret the evidence, such as leading digital thinkers like myself can judge an evidence-based policy.
The Government don't need no steenkin' evidence. They KNOW what is right (but only for the proles naturally; They're far too important to be bound by silly rules themselves).
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Saturday 8th November 2014 02:19 GMT DocJames
“Rand”, after the heroine of all the Ayn Rand novels, who is Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand was the founder of evidence-based policy making. “Evidence-free assertions, appeals to tradition, and appeals to authority are not rational arguments; they are textbook logical fallacies,” Rand scholars tell us.
Genius. I love these bits; just perfection.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
