What, she was supposed to hold reason as an absolute and NOT hold it as an absolute?

“self-interest is good and noble.”

To be exact, she said man was not a sacrificial animal. The jig was up on religion being a legitimate source of morality. F Buckly knew it, but still had to whine about it! What a loser doing it in her obit.

Also, he had no room to make fun of how Ayn spoke. He was an absolute horrible speaker and was always making weirdo eyes while he spoke!!
What crack pot WFB was. That he is an idol of the intellectual mystics on the right shows how lame their ideas are.

WFB had Bad Karma!!

You are welcome, Kai, to dismiss a man who seemed so deeply struggle with antithetical ideas because intellectual inconsistency and irony (I do understand the logic behind it), but it is for that very reason–the very irony ITSELF–that I respect Chambers.

It is fitting that National review used and continue to use a former Stalin soviet spy – that withheld evidence against Hiss from prosecutors for a decade and was caught perjuring himself under oath countless times – as a witness against Ayn Rand’s alleged hatred of humanity. For God’s sake, do you not see the irony of pushing that Atlas Shrugged screamed ““To a gas chamber — go!” all the time this liar had worked as a spy for the mass murdering machinery of Soviet Russia until at least 1938 (when he turned his coat because he had good reason to suspect he was next in line for one of Stalin’s purges).

On the other hand, I’m always peeved by pigeonholers. I see many young people who, in the first burst of intellectual freedom that results from a new acquaintance with the power of argument, set out to quickly dispatch all the “old guys.” Most of this intellectual activity is an act of making an in-or-out list, in which a memorized derisive phrase suddenly spares one the work of actually considering the thoughts of those dismissed. Ayn Rand, though, doesn’t do herself any favors when it comes to preventing this quick view: she succeeds instantly with those who would be horrifed to hear that she was an athiest and a self-avowed intellectual, and she instantlty alienates those she most longed to impress.

Such is my reasoning anyway.

Someone who managed to anticipate many of the chief philosophical developments of the last half-century (such as causal theories of reference, causal theories of properties, and the rapprochement between Aristotelean eudaimonism and classical liberalism) can hardly be worthless as a thinker; on the other hand, someone who was so frequently undisciplined in her reasoning can hardly be the greatest philosopher of all time.

I think convincing them would be a better option. And you’ll need something better than the National Review garbage. There’s no argument there.