Suck on this, Ayn Rand.

[ernunnos]

Yet another reason I don't follow objectivists in idolizing businessmen. SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- Chinese bloggers, even on foreign-sponsored sites, had better choose their words carefully -- the censors are watching.
Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.'s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words

Comments

[boffo]

Ayn Rand didn't idolize *all* businessmen. She specifically had contempt for the businessmen that sell out or collude with the government to avoid participating in actual capitalism. Witness James Taggart, one of the villains in Atlas Shrugged.

[geah]

Right. If every company refuses to go into China, nothing changes...actually, it probably gets worse.

Just like Levi's and rock 'n' roll helped bring down the Berlin Wall, so will Long live d3mocr4cy, let fr33d0m r1ng.

[ernunnos]

Helping repressive regimes build the machinery of oppression in no way advances freedom. Blue jeans and music aren't even remotely part of the machinery of oppression. Nice try though.

[geah]

The Internet and IMing are not the tools of oppression. They're the tools of freedom.

I'd rather see the access there with China's crude, and easily bypassed, attempts at censorship, than no accesss at all.

[yoak]

You don't follow Objectivists because they idolize Communists and those who oppose democracy, freedom and human rights. Check.

[ernunnos]

Exactly. That's the practical effect when you assume that the pursuit of profit is the highest good. Not everything that's economically efficient is necessarily compatible with freedom.

[ernunnos]

Rand's message in her fiction, and her message in her philosophy were often very much at odds.

For example, although many of her characters were independent rogues who broke the law - pirates, terrorists - she supported a strong central government that ruthlessly put down all challenges to its authority on the grounds that anything less was gang rule. Her 'intellectual heir' Leonard Peikoff has even gone so far as to oppose the individual right to keep and bear arms, even though Ayn Rand's own characters are portrayed using personal arms to fight a corrupt government.

People who go by Rand's stories end up with very different ideas than people who go by what she preached in her personal church. When I refer to objectivists (especially big-O Objectivists), I'm usually talking about the latter.

[betternewthings]

On the upside, every time Western businessmen have thought they could outwit Chinese people, they lost.

[pjammer]

I think those who sold opium would disagree. :)

[betternewthings]

well they're getting their payback now.

next: payback for affirmative action!