njlauren
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ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri
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ORIGINAL: WantsOfTheFlesh
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ORIGINAL: Moonhead
Anybody who can read any of the Gospels and not think that he was a liberal social reformer of the sort that neocon fuckwits with Leviticus 25:44 tattooed on their arm would run away from screaming for Ayn Rand was either dropped on their head as a baby or their mother was smoking crack all the way through her pregnancy.
dunno why libs hate rand so much coz plenty of tha things she said bout freedom and individuality make her kinda liberal tho not a sympathetic one.
Because she's a "classic" liberal, not a liberal the way it's used now. She's a liberal in the same way that Jefferson, Madison, etc. were liberals.
It is correct that the term "liberal" as understood by Jefferson ,Madison et al is different then the modern term. Their liberalism was based in the rights of man, it was based in the idea of the individual being sacred and so forth. They believed it came from nature, and that freedom was and should be inherent in the contract between person and state.
Ayn Rand was not in the mould, she used the libertarian ideal to justify self interest and greed. Unlike Madison and Jefferson, she was intellectually bankrupt, and used all kinds of flowery words to argue that the ultimate freedom was in the ability to achieve, specifically wealth, and that those people represented the elite of society, the elite of the world, and everyone else should basically worship them. Specific to her ideal was that no one owed anyone anything else, and if someone achieved something, they only had a duty to themselves, those less successful were parasites and worse.
Basically, Ayn Rand is a Benthalmite, and in the tv show lost the writers, who obviously read history, had this irony when the character John Lock comes back to the US under the alias Jeremy Benthalm, the person the ideal is named for. It was Benthalm who said the poor were lazy, that they didn't deserve help but rather needed to be shown approbriation for their poverty, it was his influence and his followers that created the debtors prisons and workhouses that Dickens excoriated in Victorian England. Locke was the basis for what Madison and Jefferson believed, and the writers did what they did because locke and Benthalm were 180 degrees apart.
Ayn Rand is nothing more than an apologist for selfishness, greed and elitism, something that traditional Liberalism would be disgusted by. Among other things, traditional liberalism did emphasize the need to help your fellow person, that we were in a society and a a society there was a duty to give back. More importantly, Liberalism of Lock, Rousseau and the like threw away the idea of 'natural elitism' i.e the idea of nobility, and they certainly would not espouse that a rich man was rich because he was special, because he occupied a special place, which Rand did espouse.
Madison and Jefferson would certainly, even though they were well off men themselves, read Ayn Rand and snort in derision, I can almost guarantee it, both of them had contempt for the British class system and in the idea of natural nobility, and Rand was just another form of that kind of thing.
I do find it interesting to hear the conservatives espousing Rand, people like Paul Ryan and a lot of the evangelicals, yet they claim to be 'Christian', Ayn Rand is anything but Christian. Besides being morally a putrid person, for many reasons, her idea of "I got mine, screw you" is totally opposite the Christianity they claim to believe. Christ said blessed were the poor and meek, not those who 'achieved'. I also find it really funny when the tea party types espouse Randism, sneering at government support for 'those too lazy to work' and the like, when many of the tea party types, whether it is the older folks, or people like farmers or those who live down south, get a lot more from the government then any poor person on welfare does, we have a gigantic pseudo welfare system that benefits many of the tea party types, whether it is nearly 100 billion a year in agricultural subsidies, federal generated power down in the TVA district that helps get the auto plants down there, the southern pine industry that was the result of the CCC, farmers having electrical power, phone service and cable thanks to uncle sam, when no power company would wire them, tons of subsidies that they gladly take while complaining how everyone else is living off the government.
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RE: Who wants separation of church and state - 
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