The Ayn Rand Guide to Romance

Phi­los­o­phy is about the truth. You can­not sep­a­rate the philoso­pher from the phi­los­o­phy, since the philoso­pher should embody the phi­los­o­phy espoused. Rand made enor­mous mis­takes, that’s true. And Objec­tivism has sev­er­al major flaws (out­lined in a num­ber of places). But she was bang-on in her crit­i­cism of “self­less­ness” and “sac­ri­fice” as virtues. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, the task is nei­ther to excuse Rand and accept Objec­tivist writ­ings uncrit­i­cal­ly, nor to con­demn Rand and reject Objec­tivist writ­ings out of hand. Rather, it’s to look at these works and judge them on their own mer­it — includ­ing the con­text of the philoso­pher’s *prac­tice* of what she preached, and the times in which she preached it, in our eval­u­a­tion.

Man, there’s just some­thing about Ellen Keller’s man­ner­isms and way of speak­ing that gives me the scream­ing hee­by­jee­bies.

The des­per­ate­ly schlocky music that chat­ters inces­sant­ly through­out is enough to show how lit­tle faith these authors put in rea­son, and how lit­tle clue they have about what it is in the first place.