Category: Favorites

I thought my car had been stolen yes­ter­day. Turns out the Uni­ver­si­ty had decid­ed it and 3 oth­er cars need­ed tow­ing to anoth­er park­ing lot far­ther away. Why? So a tem­po­rary chain link fence could be put up. The rea­son for the fence is not obvi­ous, it mere­ly par­ti­tions part of the lot from the rest. It appears that the fence is one of those things that exists only to make things slight­ly more grat­ing for peo­ple. So I searched the lot for about a half hour won­der­ing if I had parked it some­where else and had for­got­ten. As my anx­i­ety lev­eled increased I real­ized that my 1993 Oldsmo­bile EightyEight was­n’t there. Shit. So I go back to call secu­ri­ty and here we go:

Secu­ri­ty: “Notre Dame Secu­ri­ty this is San­dra.”
Adam: “I’m call­ing to report a stolen vehic…”
S: “Oh! Were you parked in D2? We towed 4 cars out of there to the North lot today.”
A: “Yeah I was in D2, did you tow a…”
S: “We’ve got a grey Ford Pick­up, license plate num…”
A: (curs­ing inter­nal­ly) “No, that is not my car. I have a…”
S: “…and we have a grey Oldsmo­bile that belongs to…”
A: (irate­ly) “I have an Oldsmo­bile but its navy not grey, the name is Adam Har­vey.”
S: “I’ve got an Oldsmo­bile with Indi­ana plates reg­is­tered to a Har­vey A. Barnard.”
A: (more inter­nal curs­ing) “Yeah, that’s me.”
S: “There is no cost to you, sir. Have good day.” (click)
A: “Fuck.”

Absurd. Espe­cial­ly in the exis­ten­tial­ist mean­ing of the word.

Its gonna take awhile to read Atlas Shrugged since the book itself is large enough to be borne by Atlas. So to amuse myself while I read it I’m going to rip on Ayn Rand’s phi­los­o­phy: Objec­tivism.

Day 1: The last few pages of the book (after the nov­el itself) are devot­ed to a syn­op­sis of her phi­los­o­phy.
Major Objec­tion: A phi­los­o­phy that depends on a pulp print­ing of a book to get a word in edge­wise rather defeats the cred­i­bil­i­ty of said phi­los­o­phy.
Meta­physics: “Objec­tivism rejects any belief in the super­nat­ur­al-and any claim that indi­vid­u­als or groups cre­ate their own real­i­ty.”
Major Objec­tion: This in effect states that soci­eties should not exist. For what is soci­ety, but a mass con­sumed cre­at­ed real­i­ty? Lunatics are ostra­cized for the very rea­son that their cre­at­ed real­i­ty exists in con­flict to the sta­tus quo. Objec­tivism also there­fore oppos­es the exis­ten­tial­ist idea that mean­ing is cre­at­ed and exert­ed by the indi­vid­ual. For Objec­tivism, mean­ing must exist as fact only, the ulti­mate prag­ma­tism.