Searching "comments":
| # | Comment | Survey |
|---|---|---|
| 31 | I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like _Life is Beautiful_ initially because all the ads I saw portrayed it as a silly slapstick Benigni film and I don't really enjoy that sort of film. However, the raves from friends convinced me to go and I thought it was one of the best films I saw that year. | Have you ever ended up liking a book/movie/album that you were positive you were going to dislike? |
| 32 | What would Ayn Rand have to say about love for your parents, for not creating wealth but taking care of them in their old age when they're about to die anyways? What would Ayn Rand have to say about compassion for illiterate inmates, for not creating wealth but volunteering time to teach them to read when they'll be in prison for the rest of their lives? From what I've read, she'd very likely say people doing that weren't behaving rationally and therefore weren't doing what they ought. But the problem with rationalism/objectivism/Randism is that people are rational, and a whole lot more. Those philosophies are incomplete and inadequate because they fail to recognize that very basic, very human fact. People will do irrational things like take care of a child with cystic fibrosis who will die in a few years no matter how hard they pound his back, sit in a tree because they believe in the worth of that tree, or donate money to some charity just because of a picture on TV of a starving kid. They'll demand job protection when they know their jobs are crap, they'll believe that a crucified man rose up into Heaven, they'll smoke and drink and eat poisons knowing the crap will kill them, they'll celebrate a fat guy in a red suit, they'll imagine that kissing a frog can turn it into a prince, they'll tune in by the millions to watch people eat rats on a desert island or cook asparagus in Kitchen Stadium. We do those "irrational" things, we are those people. Bill, I thank you for the mention of Rand because it finally let me figure out what has been bugging the hell out of me about her work. I think philosophies that "get it" as much as rationalism/objectivism/Randism do are really dangerous because what they don't get is subtle but absolutely critical to our existence as human beings. | Is wealth distributed fairly in the country where you live? |
| 33 | Thanks for the corrections, Bill! FYI, I entirely recognize that I wouldn't have a beef if I didn't believe there wasn't something to rationalism/objectivism/egoism/Randism in the first place. I think Rand and others have got it right in a lot of ways, there's just a couple of areas where I have to diss them.  The first is the logical extension of certain tenets by practitioners of these ideas that end up with behavior that is full of self-interest, but not a lot of enlightenment. Gandhi once said something like "I don't have any problems with Christianity, it's some Christians I have problems with." A similar thing applies for me. The second area is what I referred to in my previous response, that these -isms fail to be comprehensive philosophies that address all aspects of life and that lack of comprehensiveness must be recognized. This quote by Neal Donner gives a good example and says it better than I can: "The global claims which both Rand and Marxist advocates of centralized planning make on behalf of reason -- that it can deal with every problem, forecast every difficulty, understand every situation -- are themselves irrational. For though reason, like a computer, has incredible powers, it cannot do all things. And for Hayek, one of the principal false claims which reason makes is its pretension to predict the future choices of freely choosing human agents. This fact has doomed every effort to transform social science into "hard" science, and continues to make ridiculous the well-intended (?) pretensions of benevolent authoritarians to rearrange our lives for us." | Is wealth distributed fairly in the country where you live? |
| 34 | I agree w/romkey, though I would add loyalty to place as well as people. Since it's the people and the place that make the country, I think hating one's own country is also about hating oneself and therefore pretty destructive. | What amount of loyalty do you feel toward your country? |
| 35 | The family legend is that some black-sheep O'Brians in Ireland changed their name to "Drummey" so that it would be distinctive. | What is the nationality of your current last name? |
| 36 | Given that sports has largely replaced work (people can't wait for the weekend to watch NASCAR/football/soccer) and religion (people pray for their teams to win) as the "opiate of the masses," I think it's getting an appropriate amount of time on the news. | Do televised news broadcasts spend too much time on sport issues? |
| 37 | All but the jellyfish, they squick me enough already that when I've handled them I've been very sure to be handling a non-human-stinging one. | Have you ever... |
| 38 | nope, need to. | Have you been to the dentist in the last 6 months? |
| 39 | No. Were such a law to be proposed, I'd probably protest by burning a flag while singing the Star Spangled Banner, My Country Tis of Thee, and other patriotic songs. Why should a flag's rights be more important than a person's rights? | Should the intentional desecration of the U.S. flag by burning, tearing, defacing, or by any other means be made illegal and subject to a criminal penalty? |
| 40 | Duckbutt. (For a friend's hairstyle.) | What's the worst/best nickname you've heard for someone? |
