ALT.SF4M

  Amusements 8/97

   • j********o@***.com
     16/08/1997 00:00:000 UTC

     Just to break the monotony - another satisfactory issue of SciFi Age,

     _except_ for a lackluster effort at self-plagarization by Greg Benford!

     This guy is really queer for the Galactic Center, for beejezus's sake!

     Whole passages from his series about the same are reproduced in
     "Galaxis."

     Pleh! But, the issue is redeemed by one very good story, a good one, and

     an acceptable one.

     Especially cool Daria episode, "The Misery Chick" - some conflict arises

     between the buddies. "The Big House" was also especially funny.

     Gorno

     "If women ran the world, do you think rockets would be shaped the same?"

     "Probably, but they'd be much larger."

       • j********o@***.com
         17/08/1997 00:00:000 UTC

         Bloom's Closing of the American Mind serves as a survey of
         philosophical

         thought and reading it has gotten me interested in philosophy again.

         Something that occurs to me is that Ayn Rand is an inheritor of
         Nietzsche.

         While the latter was a serious scholar (if, like her, a temporal
         failure

         and generally pathetic human being whose ideas were bad for
         humanity, and a

         victim of his own romantic and intrinsically self-contradictory

         anti-rationist philosophy), her ideas are a reactionary spin on his
         own.

         To whit: Nietzsche betrays the premise of classical philosophy, that
         is,

         the rational search for the objective Good, by proposing a strictly

         subjective world, and embraces the poet, traditional competitor to
         the

         philosopher, as creator of the myths which philosophy sought to
         penetrate

         and escape. His Superman is the creator of myths, and cultures - a
         Moses

         who himself carves the Ten Commandments and promulgates them by his
         own

         force of will; the Athenian who excavates Socrates' benighted cave,
         only

         within which, says Nietzsche, can man be content. Rand seems to
         marry the

         two - her Superman, however, is he that sees through the myths of
         society

         and recognizes an objective esthetic order which he pursues; he
         carries

         the indifference of the philosopher to the culture around him to an
         amoral

         indifference towards the people around him. He does not wish to
         impose a

         moral order for any supposed public benefit, he merely seeks to
         create the

         beautiful for his own satisfaction, and that of others gifted with
         true vision.

         Both bad ideas. Me, I'm with Kant - put your irresolveable
         contradictions

         in different corners, don't mix them together.

         Gorno