The conversation is about the reason people hate her, the reason there is such an anti-Rand attitude everywhere, why Shermer got inundated with negative comments about his positive review. This is interesting to me. Personally, I don't take her seriously, but I'm generally anti-philosophy anyway, so I'm sure no one gives a **** about my criticisms of her.
Again, I'm not engaging in a logical fallacy if I'm simply trying to illuminate the reality of the cultural phenomenon, not make an argument against her using argument from authority.
Again, you've shifted the conversation back to the merits of her philosophy whereas I'm talking about the reasons she is hated by so many people. I'm reluctant to enter into discussions about it because I hate philosophy so much. What is interesting to me is how both sides build up their battle positions.
The fact is that she made errors in reason and philosophy. Those errors led people to a certain fervor, a certain obsession, that perpetuated itself, the pseudoreason that reinforces itself like how Michael talked about. This causes people who aren't involved in it to get a creepy feeling and boom, you have Rand hatred. This is my argument. It is unassailable.
Well, yes, your argument is unassailable. Because you hate philosophy, and therefore you've made statements that are irrefutable within the context of the allowed discussion given the premise that the subject itself cannot be discussed.
You say she made errors, but can't cite them. You somehow think that comments on a Shermer article have credibility, but don't cite any. Essentially this is a position of "no evidence".
But, we agree that those errors so aggrieved people that they got obsessed with their hate for Rand.
That causes people who are relatively impartial to the issue to get a creepy feeling, and thus we discuss the creepiness of Rand hatred.
Also, I'm not sure I am moving the argument back to the merits of her theories if I just suggest that certain approaches perpetuate ignorance. Generally speaking, one would think that was bad, but in this case, perpetuation of ignorance concerning Rand, is considered good.
Well that's likely for nefarious reasons. However, this reminds me of an
interview by Michel Foucalt which I quote in part:
Paul Rabinow: Why is it that you don’t engage in polemics ?
Michel Foucault: I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.
In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.
The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.
