• @[email protected]
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    271 year ago

    I think people do not understand where Ayn Rand was coming from. She came from the Soviet Union, a highly collectivist society. Everyone is expected to conform and be all the same economically. Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy. Unfortunately, some rich American asshats saw that her ideas have self-serving utility to justify their ultra-capitalist beliefs and privileges and continue exploitation, and then spread her nonsensical “objectivist” ideas around. Not many people actually believe the philosophy, although we unconsciously apply this especially with middle class NIMBYISM.

    “Oh, poor homeless people. I hope they could be housed. But I will elect a politician who will not build social housing because it will bring down the value of my property.”

    “I support mitigating climate change. But I do not want windfarms nearby. They are eye sores.”

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      I mean, lots of people with terrible and damaging ideas came from backgrounds that explain their terrible and damaging ideas. She doesn’t get a pass because the USSR was corrupt, nor does she get a pass because western capitalist society is also corrupt.

      • @[email protected]
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        161 year ago

        She came to the West and made it more corrupt with her half-baked ideas by amplifying the excessive use of individualist values.

    • @[email protected]
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      161 year ago

      Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy.

      No, you’re being disingenuous. She formulated her philosophy moral objectivism from her experiences as a child.

      This is what happened (from her wikipedia):

      Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, into a Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg in what was then the Russian Empire. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan). She was 12 when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted her family’s lives. Her father’s pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.

      When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, Rand was among the first to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. She was one of many bourgeois students purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many purged students, including Rand, were reinstated. She completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri; it became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn (pronounced /aɪn/).

      In late 1925 Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926. Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives learning English before leaving for Hollywood, California.

      In Hollywood a chance meeting with director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film The King of Kings and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met the aspiring actor Frank O’Connor; they married on April 15, 1929. She became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. She tried to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they could not obtain permission to emigrate.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Where is your objection? She formed her philosophy after experiencing a collectivist dystopia. Her family’s business was nationalised. That is part and parcel of such extreme collectivist socio-economics and thus enamoured by hyperindividualist extreme counterpart.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          Her family’s business was nationalised.

          Lol! The US nationalizes stuff all the damn time - Obama essentially nationalized the auto industry after the 2008 crash (right before handing it back to the billionaire parasites after their debt had been shouldered by the US people).

          Yet I don’t see anybody calling the US “collectivist.”

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      She came from the Soviet Union, a highly collectivist society.

      The USSR wasn’t a collectivist society - it was a centalized one. There’s a vast difference. Nobody calls the US military “collectivist,” do they now?

      • @[email protected]
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        01 year ago

        Centralised but everyone is expected to value the group over the individual. The property in the Soviet Union belongs to the people albeit managed by the state. Therefore, collectivist.

        Centralisation does not mean either just means individualism or collectivism.

        • @[email protected]
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          01 year ago

          Centralised but

          So you are now claiming that centralization isn’t inherently collectivist?

          The property in the Soviet Union belongs to the people albeit managed by the state.

          So you are now claiming nothing in the Soviet Union was nationalized?

          • @[email protected]
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            01 year ago

            You can be centralised but not collectivist. See the theory of anarcho-capitalism.

            I’m guessing you’re operating from different sensibility of political philosophy. Define collectivism then we can talk.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 year ago

              See the theory of anarcho-capitalism.

              I saw it… and just looking at it made it fall apart like an upside-down house of cards in a whirlwind. Strange… this seems to happen every time anyone looks at (so-called) “anarcho-capitalism” a bit too closely. Have you had better luck with it, perhaps?

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                Anarcho-capitalism doesn’t work, yes. What’s your point?

                Have you any luck yet trying to answer me how would you define collectivism?

    • Herbal Gamer
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      11 year ago

      she was just mad that her privileges were distributed fairly for once