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Lovecraft was also a racist. And I'm not talking ordinary, I'm talking hyper-racist to the point that would embarrass even his fellow Victorians.You're mostly right. He certainly started out that way in his youth. There's pretty significant evidance that his racist notions lessened dramatically as he got older. He never came out and renounced anything or apologized, but he did change the way he wrote and did discuss the views of his youth with colleagues.
When he was 45, In a letter to a woman named Jennie K. Plaiser, when discussing social politics he wrote: “…I realised what an ass I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right—for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past.”
Unfortunately for him (and us) he did most of his writing in his 20s, so the older, wiser Lovecraft doesn't get talked about much.
Please note that I am not trying to apologize, whitewash or diminish Lovecraft's well-documented racism. The man was racist for his time (especially in his youth), and shockingly, abhorrently racist when viewed by the standards of today. I just wanted to point out that Lovecraft is a great example of how hateful people can change their views.
It is interesting to compare this with Rand, who only got more bigoted, hypocritical and crazy as she got older.
To be fair, unlike Rand, Lovecraft didn't have his family lose virtually everything, including her country to a Communist revolution. When you've endured starvation conditions as a child you can become hypersensitive to the conditions that created your deprivation on through adulthood.
To be fair, unlike Rand, Lovecraft didn't have his family lose virtually everything, including her country to a Communist revolution. When you've endured starvation conditions as a child you can become hypersensitive to the conditions that created your deprivation on through adulthood.
Oh yeah, definitely. I suspect a lot of Rand's insanity and cognative dissonance comes out of the severe trauma in her childhood.
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That hypothesis fails to account for the millions of other people who endured the same traumas and yet went on to be decent human beings who did not found an intellectually incoherent cult of narcissism. Nor write really wretched prose. Rand is the outlier of emigrants who survived Sovietization, not the norm.
Did U No that Nabakov's sister and Ayn Rand were schoolfriends?
Oddly enough, yes. But then, I've spent more hours than any human should browsing JSTOR. #misspentyouth
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He was pals with Lord Byron.
I admit to being a little confused. Putting the discussion in context:
To be fair, unlike Rand, Lovecraft didn't have his family lose virtually everything, including her country to a Communist revolution. When you've endured starvation conditions as a child you can become hypersensitive to the conditions that created your deprivation on through adulthood.I just wanted to point out that Lovecraft is a great example of how hateful people can change their views.
It is interesting to compare this with Rand, who only got more bigoted, hypocritical and crazy as she got older.
Is pointing out Rand's Russian connection supposed to explain the fact that she's a hypocritical, narcissistic, histrionic b+!*& who, despite an apparent belief in philosophical clarity, has written a series of extremely bad, turgid, and implausible novels full of philosophical contradictions that fail to support their own thesis?
Which part of that is supposed to be due to her Russian background? The histrionics, the narcissism, or the amphetamine addiction?
Because, on the one hand, if you want to claim that her background helped to produce the hypocracy, the self-aggrandizement, and the inability to think clearly, you'll need a better connection than that. I think you've have an easier time making the case that she was a narcissistic b%+!# because she was an Aquarius.
And if you're not suggesting that there's a connection, then why does Russia matter? She could have been raised on a farm in Tunisia and she'd still be a narcissistic b*~$#.
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It seems to me that it's more about the state of capitalist society in 1950s America than first and foremost anti-Communist (although it is that too, inevitably, given its general choice of targets)
In story terms, we're finally getting somewhere - the Great Retreat has started and the Elves have returned to Twinkly Island the billionaires have all gone to Candy Mountain, protected by tremendous illusions and their own omnipotence, where they reintroduce the Gold Standard and make sure nothing is free except the fortnight-long speeches.
]I'd say it's the obsession with the evils of any form of collectivism. It's reasonable to suspect that growing up bourgeois and losing everything in several phases of the Communist Revolution could possibly shed some light on the origins of the philosophy she proclaimed in her books.
There are lots of people who are anti-collectivist, and for that matter, lots of ways to be anti-collectivist as well.
If all she were were a bad anti-Communist writer, neither of us would know her name. Her philosophy is, to put it diplomatically, both unique and innovative, to the point that most readers (both pro- and anti-) regard it not as an argument against collectivism, but an argument in favor of anarchism, and a particularly sociopathic form as well.
You say Czarist Russian, I say Aquarius. I think that my explanation provides an equal or better foundation for analyzing her mess.....
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*Makes a drink for self* Personally, I'm quite fond of some types of collectivism - emergency fire and medical services, for example. I'm not sure I'd want it for everything, but when there are things that significantly support the general welfare and perform best when run as a governmental program (district, state law, national law, whatever)... *Shrugs*
*Makes a drink for self* Personally, I'm quite fond of some types of collectivism - emergency fire and medical services, for example. I'm not sure I'd want it for everything, but when there are things that significantly support the general welfare and perform best when run as a governmental program (district, state law, national law, whatever)... *Shrugs*
So are most people. Economists have actually spent a lot of time arguing about the sort of things that should be the responsibility of the state, and no one -- well, no one not a lunatic -- takes as extreme a position as Rand. (For example, even Alan Greenspan, who was himself a Rand disciple, acknowledged that a stable currency is a good thing and the responsibility of the State.)
Which again, suggests that Rand's opinions are not simply, or even primarily, consequences of her childhood experiences of the Russian Revolution. Millions experienced that, and only one turned that experience into a personality cult based on a public endorsement of sociopathy.
That hypothesis fails to account for the millions of other people who endured the same traumas and yet went on to be decent human beings who did not found an intellectually incoherent cult of narcissism. Nor write really wretched prose. Rand is the outlier of emigrants who survived Sovietization, not the norm.
Everyone reacts to trauma in different ways. They also come into it from different paths. And many people who endure trauma don't survive at all, or suffer aftereffects without becoming noticed or famous.
There's some weird miscommunication going on here.
Is it not possible to see her childhood in Revolutionary Russia as having greatly influenced her philosophy without being so reductive as to say that would only be possible if others had the exact same reaction?
Sure, it's possible to see that. Pareidolia is a thing. Erik Erikson wrote a lengthly and (at the time) well-received book that analyzed Martin Luther's theology largely in Freudian terms, and attributed most of his theological insights to the fact that he was toilet-trained too early as an infant.
That theory, perhaps obviously, is now considered ridiculously misguided.
People see a lot of convenient, oversimplified patterns that aren't actually there. This is particularly true when they're trying to explain a historically unique event in terms of mass events.
I submit that the connection between Rand's Russian experiences in the 1920s and her narcissistic philosophy of self-justification in support of her personality cult is equally pareidolia.
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The RationalWiki article on Objectivism is pretty entertaining.
There's some weird miscommunication going on here.
Is it not possible to see her childhood in Revolutionary Russia as having greatly influenced her philosophy without being so reductive as to say that would only be possible if others had the exact same reaction?Sure, it's possible to see that. Pareidolia is a thing. Erik Erikson wrote a lengthly and (at the time) well-received book that analyzed Martin Luther's theology largely in Freudian terms, and attributed most of his theological insights to the fact that he was toilet-trained too early as an infant.
That theory, perhaps obviously, is now considered ridiculously misguided.
People see a lot of convenient, oversimplified patterns that aren't actually there. This is particularly true when they're trying to explain a historically unique event in terms of mass events.
I submit that the connection between Rand's Russian experiences in the 1920s and her narcissistic philosophy of self-justification in support of her personality cult is equally pareidolia.
You know, I'd probably believe that if I'd just read the theory of Objectivism and argued with her cultists online. Actually reading Atlas Shrugged made it pretty clear. The whole backdrop of the setting is a world overrun by Marxism - all People's States nationalizing the property of the heroic Industrial Capitalists.
She really is writing pretty directly about it.
More than just the property. Rand's "Secondhanders" want to seize the labor the very genius the very essence of those creators as the world view of the novel. But the language of the secondhanders is clearly a mockery of Marx.
The Fountainhead though, is actually a decent movie despite the polemics.
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Wo, wo, wo, wo, Randy-Randy-Randy-dingy-bop-bop!
Wo, wo, wo, wo, Randy-Randy-Randy-dingy-bop-bop!
Objective Aunt Jemima, goddess of gold!
Pudgy-faced collectivists, she berates and scolds!
Queen of the railroads, hungry for spanks,
Objective Aunt Jemima, save a bit for Hank!
Monetarist Mikados, out in Colorado
Blow away the Looters like a force 15 tornahdo,
Hurray for wealth disparity and bollox to your charity,
Impress me! (Impress me, Aunt Jemima)
Impress me! (Impress me, Aunt Jemima)
Nice one, Zank.
In the meantime, good news - Ayn has introduced the GIBBERING SWAMP (of mediocrity). Someone like Lin Carter could have done great things with a GIBBERING SWAMP, but AR's genius is so limitless she can pass over it in one line and move onto more promising material, such as Francisco D'Anconia turning out to be half-charity patient, half crutch.
Eh?
Still, serves him right, if this mildly creepy bit of dialogue is anything to go by:
DT: 'How did you know what I look like in... my office?'
FdA: 'I've told you I've been watching you for years'
DT: 'How were you able to watch me so thoroughly? From where?'
FdA: 'I will not answer you now'
And then she yelled, 'PISS OFF, YOU SLEAZY OLD BASTARD!' and kicked him in the nuts.
Except she didn't, more's the pity.
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Hey, don't knock Francisco. That guy mastered a speed boat without a single lesson.
Yeah, but only so he could stalk Dangly by water as well as by land.
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'H'mm, what could this story really do with to pep it up a bit at this point?', thinks Ayn.
'I know - a DEATH RAY! Of course!'
How right she was, even if they only use it to destroy a barn and a poor, innocent goat, the fiends.
How right she was, even if they only use it to destroy a barn and a poor, innocent goat, the fiends.
The goat was a leech, who ate stuff he didn't grow himself or acquire via free trade.
Also, the novel (ANY novel) would be greatly improved by the addition of leech-goat. Or goat-leeches. I'm not picky.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that technically speaking Rand wasn't a bad writer. She might have been a much greater one if her vision hadn't become so dominated by her background trauma and subsequent fixations. She's kind of like a Lex Luthor/Doctor Doom of writing, someone who might have been memorable for good reasons if only if.....
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How right she was, even if they only use it to destroy a barn and a poor, innocent goat, the fiends.The goat was a leech, who ate stuff he didn't grow himself or acquire via free trade.
Also, the novel (ANY novel) would be greatly improved by the addition of leech-goat. Or goat-leeches. I'm not picky.
And gibbering swamps, and death-rays.
We have the makings of a solid gold WINNER here, for sure.
It has been brought to my attention that someone here insist on denigrating swamps
Stop it, just stop it.
thank you
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This is no haven of anti-swampism, I'll have you know. No-one here (least of all Ayn, I'm sure) is using the phrase 'gibbering swamp' in a negative sense at all - if the swamp is gibbering, it's some way above the average, merely squelching, swamp, as you'd expect of a truly self-respecting, self aware, waterlogged and peat-rich Objectivist. Soon, it will open a University philosophy department or aircraft factory and set the world on fire, you just wait and see.
Rolling on the Wandering Monster Table in the Gibbering Swamp, what do we find?
O look, a fear-corroded ape.
Mercy me - a log floating in the void! Run, before the beast awakens!
And Europe's idol, a leprous mystic bum.
Well, I suppose I'm European, and there is a Mystic Bum I idolise...
Halloa.
Is it mine?
Yep, but I must say I've never noticed any leprosy.
OK!!!
Ahem.
However, there is good news, in that Dangly now has three boyfriends, all of whom are fine with her getting it on with the others, which is good work, and also some distressing news - I find that vegetables have no values, or wishes.
Sorry - did you want to say something?
I most certainly did!
Might I point out that the statement above is both completely false and also grossly, grossly offensive to those of us in the vegetable kingdom who have struggled for and dreamed of, and continue to struggle for and dream of, a world that will truly embody the Eternal Values of Truth, Justice, Morality, Law and Honour?
You've always been my favourite vegetable, Pumpkin! {winks roguishly}
It is times like this when I am most grateful for my Vow of Celibacy.
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This thread might be the only worthwhile thing to ever come of this book.
This Cracked sketch is pretty good.
"I'll make them the most slappeable people on Earth..."
The longest King novel (THE STAND) is 470,000 words, ATLAS SHRUGGED is about 650,000 words. The only work of SF or fantasy that is longer is VARNEY THE VAMPIRE (at 670,000 words).
The Mahabharata is something like 1,800,000 words.