Silent Servants...
... of the Used, Abused, and Utterly Screwed Up.
A Secular Franciscan looks at the world...
with a more jaundiced eye than ever...
and lots of ellipses for you to fill in the missing text...
(with thanks to Thomas S. Klise for the title)
"To be perfectly frank, I find Ayn Rand to be deeply repulsive — the dark side is, again, really dark. So, if Paul Ryan wants to attract Catholic voters, he’s going to have to make much clearer what he’s taking — and even more, what he’s leaving behind."
"Many proponents of capitalism, particularly the libertarian/Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand, so far away)-kind, argue that self-interest is good morally and beneficial economically."Ah, Ayn Rand, the pin-up girl (would she ever hate THAT description) of the newly liberated first and second-year university students! In our culture today, the earliest 'me' generation has become the purveyor of all that is evil about Capitalism...
"After Week With Pierre Bensusan, Resolve Not To Bore the Instrument"
"How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentieth century’s freest and finest thinkers"Influenced by Chesterton, Maritain and de Chardin...
"When it comes to morality, the philosopher Patricia Churchland refuses to stand on principle"
"A philosopher reflects on the craze for “planking” in the strangest places."
"Civilization teeters on the brink: they’ve made a movie of Atlas Shrugged."Ms. Rand's 'Objectivism' is a vile sort of philosophy, if it can be called a philosophy, and her books only emphasized the worst parts of her thinking. The Fountainhead is a truly awful, dismal film, with few, if any redeeming qualities. I agree. Don't go see this one...
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought." - John Kenneth Galbraith
Variety"I love William James. He’s just about the only philosopher who didn’t end up as either a pettifogging nit-picker or an overbearing egomaniac with delusions of genius."That should certainly get my philosopher friends going! (Hi, Anonymous! Though you might well agree, or at agree in part...)
Some Objectivists are going to be very unhappy to hear some of this about their saint..."One of the extensions of these premises to daily life is that "[o]ne must never attempt to fake reality in any manner," in words from The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) that appear in variations throughout Rand's work. To fake reality despoils that which makes human beings human. Wishful thinking, unrealistic hopes, duplicity, refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of one's actions—all these amount to faking reality and, to Rand, were despicable. But Rand herself faked reality throughout her life, beginning in small ways and ending with the construction of a delusional alternative reality that took over her life."
