Meeting Ayn Rand on the Las Vegas Strip

> when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing

This part alone shows how much superficial BS this is.

You cannot produce anything without using the earth's resources. They do not naturally belong to any man.

So it's either "take what you want, by force, and fuck everyone else", or we find some peaceful way to share those resources amongst each other. Preferably without terminally destroying them for future generations.

Yes, the latter is done through a huge variety of intricate social constructs, and all of them are corrupt to some degree, because such is mankind.

But the only society in which you do not need permission from your fellow men is one in which the majority of the population has the status of serfs.

Rand set out to create an anti-Marxism and she succeeded... in creating a dogmatic totalistic philosophy that inverts Soviet-style fundamentalist Marxism.

Never fight against-- you inevitably become that which you fight. (to paraphrase Nietzsche)

Like Marx, Rand was far better at criticizing than she was at proposing a solution. Both proposed scenarios with a big hand-wavey "magic happens here" step in the middle followed by a utopia.

I also have to say this: Rand's admiration for big business and for "captains of industry" was obviously coming from someone who'd never actually worked in the high corporate world. Your average executive is almost indistinguishable from a Soviet apparatchik, and corporations are internally not terribly unlike Soviet bureaucracies (especially big ones). The number of real executives who at all resemble Rand heroes is something you can count on one hand -- and interestingly most of them don't espouse Randian-type ideology. Most seem to be either apolitical or slightly to the left.

Some of Rand's ideas are interesting and well stated. I think she's worth reading. But a lot of her politics sounds really archaic now that we're almost 25 years past the cold war. Today's totalitarians are mostly ultra-right-wing theocrats, strong men like Putin, and neoliberal state-capitalists who are attempting to create a kind of high-tech feudalism.

The fanatical totalistic version of socialist ideology is dead (that's a good thing-- one down, three or four to go). I'd personally take European or Canadian style "light socialism" over Iran or Singapore, thank you very much.

Hmmm, the situation has changed since when I wrote that. At the time there were a lot of grayed out comments that were pretty neutral. That's great news!

I think the biggest draw for Ayn Rand and her works is that there are very few "role models" for fiscal conservatives in today's political environment. Most Republicans are neo-conservative warhawks that only pay lip-service to fiscal conservatism. Very few of them represent the older, Eisenhower traditional-Republicanism, who feared the Military-Industrial complex and understood fiscal conservatism. Even the "tea party" conservatives are mostly anti-intellectual, anti-tax, social conservatives. Fiscal conservatives are usually intellectuals who have a wide range of social beliefs and do not fit in with that crowd.

Ayn Rand's Objectivism aligns well with fiscal conservatives and capitalists in a way that is hard to find elsewhere. I have met a lot of people who are pro-capitalism fiscal conservatives and they seem to have fallen through the political cracks. I see very few politicians or public-figure role models who appeal to Capitalists.

I think the guidelines suggest something a little less broad than "whatever you personally find interesting":

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Let me elaborate: Should I start spamming links to long-winded vegan propaganda? I would find it interesting, because it appeals to a viewpoint I happen to agree with. I also find Sailor Moon to be interesting. Should I start linking Sailor Moon content? Exactly how ridiculous and fluffy do my interests have to be before we can agree that there would be a better forum for the content?

Although they might be interesting to some particular hackers, vegan evangelism, libertarian politics and Sailor Moon are pretty far from the obvious intent of "things that good hackers would find interesting."

More than that, political content is poisonous to good discussion. The more you allow politics in, the more politics will consume everything, and the more comment threads you'll have that only gratify people's need to be outraged. I can understand that some political stories legitimately reflect a new trend that affects hackers and entrepreneurs, but allowing anything that interests anyone just allows far too much junk and hastens the site's decline.