(no subject)

[eirias]

NYT reviews new Ayn Rand biography

Prize quote -- ouch, man, you are painfully right:

Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished.

Comments

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Hate to break it to you, but Alan Greenspan is/was reportedly a huge fan...

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Although you know that I would argue that Greenspan did a particularly crappy job of running the world. puffinesq's grandmother also has proclaimed him the "most boring man" she ever met.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

puffinesq's grandmother also has proclaimed him the "most boring man" she ever met.

If dmw7 is reading this, she will be deeply disappointed... :)

And yeah, I make no claims about how well Greenspan did his job! Just, you know, he had an awful lot of power for a few decades. Or perhaps more accurately, for those decades he got to wield one lightweight but rather long lever.

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Actually his actions make a lot of sense through the prism of objectivism. If you purely judged him based on his own beliefs and philosophy he didn't do so bad. The cream at the top got richer and everyone else who wasn't worthy got screwed.... "not worthy" being circularly defined as the people screwed by the market.