It's a great discussion! I love it! But the article is still pretty poor. I'd rather have a good discussion over a good article than have one or the other missing.
I think many people read Rand all wrong. I found large elements of satire in Atlas and Fountainhead. Like Orwell in Animal Farm, she created a silly cartoon version of the world with its dynamics hugely out or proportion in order to bring out the subtle absurdities of modern life and government.
You're not supposed to read it and decided to move to the mountains of Colorado. You're supposed to read it and then have a fresh look at some of the dynamics that are going on around you and wonder if some change is in order.
That's a valid argument. Unfortunately, looking at some of the essay work that I remember being included in the paperbacks (sorry I'm not specific, I read it almost a decade ago), it seems that Rand was more serious than humorous, and her readers seem the same way as you've pointed out. Someone with a fresher memory / more time to Google can feel free to prove me wrong.
I think Rand ended up getting too full of herself. The Fountainhead is my favorite book of hers. By Atlas, she was dealing with a beautiful scope and marvelous characters, but she lost the willingness to really flesh her characters out. You get hints of moral contradiction and moral struggle, but that's it. Not like The Fountainhead, in which the hero and the villain are thoroughly explained.
Rand believed very firmly in her philosophy. Her fiction, however, is romanticized: Rand says that she portrays things not as they are, but as how she wishes they could be. It pains me when her "followers" take her black-and-white approach literally.
I'm not sure the gigantic speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged is merely about getting you to "wonder" if some change is in order. Rand wrote exactly what she thought you should think.
Yeah. But that's an exception to the rest of the book. I mean, good heavens, there's a mad scientist with a mustache who creates a death machine called Project Xylophone, there's a failing novelist named Balph Eubank, and a pirate is fraternizing with a coal miner. You can't look at that with any mindset other than "This is, above all, a fun read."
"As for the article being garbage, I appreciate where the author is coming from, but it's not insightful enough to warrant a link. Not to say it won't stir up the Objectivists here a whole lot."
The article has value in that it's stirred up an examination of Positivism. Too many college kids get all caught up in this nonsense. Then the join the Republican Party as a result.
