Jon Stewart interviews historian Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand
tags:
Stumble This"Jennifer Burns can't explain why Ayn Rand's atheism is not much of an issue among conservatives today." -TDS description.
Jennifer Burns is an Assistant Professor of history at the Univeristy of Virginia and the author of the new book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.
October 15, 2009
Jennifer Burns is an Assistant Professor of history at the Univeristy of Virginia and the author of the new book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.
October 15, 2009
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Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right Book added by: NetRunner 
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*blocked
She was, by any measure I can agree with, a loon (not to mention a twisted, nasty old biddy). That said, Francisco d'Anconia's money speech in "Atlas Shrugged" is an amazing piece of writing, and certainly a philosophical treatise worth thinking about. I've read "Atlas Shrugged" many times through my life (it's one of my favorite books), but I long ago realized that it just isn't an appropriate philosophy to use in defining how to live a life. I would rather live my life by "Lord of the Rings" or "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"...if I had to choose a book for that purpose.
Full disclosure: I've been doing it with the Matrix trilogy as well.
... even the ugly younger sisters?
Jon is so much more polite than I could make myself be... Rand is one of those that has taken (or created) a position so extreme that in order for her philosophy to have any chance of working, the very nature of humanity would have to be changed. Exactly like Karl Marx, except that she apparently took that extremist position intentionally, even -after- seeing the results when such ideologies are applied to the real world.
Ok, so you go into a writer's party. One guy says. "I've wrote this great book, it has many big words." - next guy speaks up with, "I wrote a better book, it has much bigger and more varied words." - next guy steps up, "Mine has tons more words, big and small", etc etc. Then one guy says, "My book has every word in the english language!" Which is cool, but his book is the dictionary.
That's what an ideal is to me. A reference. No one should want to achieve it, they should just use it to learn how to write their own books.