Word: objectivist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...admit it. Last semester, you were tempted by the posters for the series of Ayn Rand lectures sponsored by the Objectivist Club...
Well, a few of my friends and I succumbed to the temptation and made it to the Sackler Museum for the last lecture of the series on Dec. 10 featuring Professor of Law Randall L. Kennedy debating Professor Harry Binswanger of the Objectivist Graduate Center...
...objectivist speaker barraged the ear with one generality after another to the great cheer and awe of the crowd. Some classic examples of his profound wisdom: "A is A," "Existence exists," "Freedom is the right for man to think" and--my favorite--"The good man lives, thinks, produces and respects others." He highlighted his otherwise vacuous talk with some select quotes from Rand's fiction and tossed in a few textbook points from Kant and Aquinas to make it all seem more legitimate, i.e. academic. Of course, the audience members, waving their well-thumbed copies of The Fountainhead, furiously shook...
Take the kind of audience Franken is referring to and move it to the Sackler; now you have a fairly good picture of an objectivist audience. On taxation, the objectivist says, "Taxation is coercion," the listeners nod. On environmentalism: "Man is master over the environment," the people clap. On women's and Afro-American studies: "Pseudo-disciplines," the crowd does the wave...
...autonomous thinking and reasoning that Objectivists claim to rely on goes, why is it that all an Objectivist can do to make an argument is say "Ayn Rand said such and such?" Where is the free thought? No where, it seems. It's all about whatever Rand wrote in her sacrosanct texts. They claim to have eschewed gods (which is fine) but have really put another in their place--Rand. Where is the reason behind the unwavering support for whatever Rand wrote? Nowhere, for it does not exist...