Good stuff. On the other hand, a little Googly-moogly shows that Acar has posted no fewer than 5700 comments, most of them apparently on Objectivist boards. Anyone who has this much time to waste debating with lunatics can't be altogether right in the head.We are often reminded by Rand admirers that Rand could often be kind, gracious, patient and generous. Well, duh! So can everyone I know. These are traits which make life endurable for humans from Adolph Hitler, through Mafia dons to serial killers and child molesters. Evil does not always manifest by the absence of virtue but it is more typically evident by the presence of vice.
Can you imagine a woman who deliberately brings unbearable moral pressure on a weak husband to allow her to have sexual intercourse with a younger man once a week, and who, under the color of philosophy and reason, uses her intellectual power and her status as moral mentor to pressure a weak disciple to let her use the disciple's husband for sex on a scheduled weekly basis? Can you fathom the massive and despicable hypocrisy of thanking the reluctant spouses for their generosity and praising them for their rationality? ...
How can anyone deny the parallel between that situation and the cult leaders who pressure disciples into allowing the use of their spouses for sexual services, based ondoctrinal claims? Excusing and dismissing that level of hubris and manipulativeness as a private matter of a personal nature, unrelated to her function as leader is a level of blindness similarly comparable to what is experienced under true cult situations. How can the situation be separated from the philosophy if it was the philosophy that was invoked as the moral basis for the arrangement? And when error bore fruit thus exposing the bankruptcy of the alleged rationale, the general public was mislead and protected from knowledge of this arrangement which in Rand's words to the spouses was mandated by morality and reason. The public was entitled to this instruction and should have been encouraged to follow suit in their own lives. The manipulation and the misuse of moral force are unequivocal evidence of a serious character problem, one which clearly suggest psychopathic tendencies....
So Barbara Branden loved her dearly and still does. Rand called it the sanction of the victim.
So maybe he's only a voice of partial sanity. RandZapper salutes him anyway. We'll take what we can get.
