Infonaut's Journal: The Intellectual Dishonesty of Overzealous IP Protection

The guy who filed a patent application for a storyline thinks he's some sort of beacon of light for Objectivism, judging by the text of his filing. This is unsurprising, given that he has a technical background. Ayn Rand's writings tend to attract tech people, perhaps because many of them have an overdeveloped sense of their contributions to society. Yes, technology drives everything now, but you still can't make a modern society function without bankers, designers, truck drivers, construction workers, and dentists. Nobody here is Howard Roark, OK?

What I find particularly galling is that many of the people who buy into the Randian notion that unmitigated egoism will make the world a better place. Then they use the very collective mechanisms (in the case of Storyline Boy, the USPTO) they claim to abhor, in pursuit of their own supposedly pure goals.

Maybe that's the danger inherent in ideology. Once you buy into it completely, you never again have to think about what you're doing. You just point back to your religious/philosophical canon and call yourself a believer. Whether you actually come close to following that creed is beside the point.

You hit the nail on the head

[Concern]

Dogma is for the lazy.

If there was an easy answer we'd all be doing it by now.

Sadly, the siren song of the ego harmonizing with the legitimization of most of our worst impulses makes some people fly particularly far down Rand's garden path before they look up and notice the scenery. If they ever do.

Objectivism can seem like religion when you find most devotees of "the free market" and "property rights" can't robustly define what those are, and seem to have no rigorous notion of how any of the potential defi

Oppressed geniuses

[Infonaut]

Somewhere along the way you discover whether the Objectivist is of the "oppressed genius" or the "machiavellian capitalist" school.

My experience has been that most Objectivists are of the "oppressed genius" school. It may be that the "machiavellian capitalists" are experts at manipulating legislators, public opinion, and the marketplace, so they don't feel the need to hold to a stringent ideology of any sort. Then again, the "oppressed geniuses" may only hold to their Objectivist fantasies because they h

Ideology = lockstep

[ediron2]

Had an argument when I was a teen with a friend about smoking. She didn't do it because it was *wrong* according to our religion. I didn't do it because it was unhealthy. The argument centered on which of us was doing things for the more right reason, and it seems strange to me that she couldn't and wouldn't second-guess the religion. She also lost some of my respect. I couldn't stop thinking of all the times when a belief system acted as an enabler for turning off the self-questioning that might keep

Beautiful

[Infonaut]

Ideology::Communism -> Egoism .... "If you don't agree with Ayn Rand before you're 25, you're not paying attention. If you still do at 35, same thing.

I love that line. When I read Rand for the first time somewhere early in my undergrad days, I thought, "My gawd, this woman is so lucid, so willing to call bullshit!" After I got out of college and went into the real world, I realized that all of that bombast was, well... just bombast.

Ultimately the problem I keep bumping into with ideologies is that a