Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ayn Rand cult

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was delete. -- ( drini's page ☎ ) 03:39, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ayn Rand cult

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Delete from the (removed) prod notice: "the article is nothing but unsubstantiated nonsense, blatant bias, and attempted smears coupled with racism", what little is not inherently POV is already in the Ayn Rand article Gwernol 16:48, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

• POV and racism. Delete it please. -- Grafikm_fr ^(AutoGRAF) 18:28, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
• Keep article needs time to mature, but is a good start. Superbeatles 18:48, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
• Merge into Objectivist movement, looks like POV fork to me. But where you found the racism in the article is beyond me. --Eivind^t@c 19:05, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

• Comment Found mention of race in history, my apologies. --Eivind^t@c 19:11, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
• Comment The text mentions "white, young men": therefore it is racist, agist and sexist. Lambiam^Talk 21:21, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete religioncruft. Danny Lilithborne 01:18, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete POV, original research, racist overtones, many "facts" are dead wrong; this article was deleted once before; it was, for some reason, re-created LaszloWalrus 01:40, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete -- what little can be salvaged could be merged under the article Objectivism under a "Criticisms" section, and the title has to go as being too inflammatory. There is a fair body of evidence (including the words of Nathaniel Branden) that points towards Randist Objectivism having cultish qualities, if not being a cult of personality outright, but this is not the article to discuss it. Haikupoet 03:26, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Change vote to Weak keep and rename to something like "Cult allegations in Objectivism" -- rewritten substantially, just needs a new title and a link in tObjectivism article. Haikupoet 04:30, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
• Redirect to Objectivist movement; there is a book called The Ayn Rand Cult, so it's not unthinkable as a search term. --phh (^t/_c) 19:36, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
• Delete; two parts patent nonsense with one part original research 216.120.8.254 22:04, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Note JRobbins and 64.167.172.163 are sock puppets of 216.120.8.254. BRussel 15:26, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. Info on the cult accusations have been added to the objectivism articles recently to make them more NPOV. However, there has been a bit of inconsistency between them, and I recently suggested that we create a central article for this controversy to improve the situation. Please do not delete such a needed article; we can always improve it to fit a better standard. If we do delete it, we will only allow the objectivists to get away with making another POV deletion to clean up their cult's image. -- LGagnon 02:33, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. The article was nominated before it had a chance a develop. The racism allegation is ludicrous, if the cult had/has little or no African American members, or Hispanics, or Asians, it's not the author of the article who is to blame (but rather the vast right-wing conspiracy ;)). I do however think that the change from "white, young men" to "inexperienced youth" was an improvement. Also - there is more scholarly work written about the Ayn Rand Cult than there is scholarly work written about Objectivist philosophy. -Dna4salE 19:48, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Note I can list twenty scholarly books off the top of my head dealing with Objectivist philosophy. I can think of only a couple of books, both non-academic, dealing with a purported "Ayn Rand cult." LaszloWalrus 06:40, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Comment Ya know, the Ayn Rand Institute is more pseudoscholarly than anything else. BRussel 15:38, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Comment Cambridge University Press is "pseudoscholarly"? LaszloWalrus 09:30, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete; Firstly, "Ayn Rand cult" is inherently a biased title; secondly, this article is full of opinions presented as facts; thirdly, this article was deleted once before. You might as well have an article called the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy," quote Hilary Clinton, treat it as established fact, and note that a lot of white men were invovled in it. JRobbins 22:18, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Note the above comment was left by JRobbins who has made 4 edits to Wikipedia, all to Ayn Rand related articles. BRussel 15:00, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Note 216.120.8.254 and 64.167.172.163 are sock puppets of JRobbins. BRussel 15:26, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

• • Comment: The article can be moved to a less biased name. It can also be cleaned up to be NPOV. This is a needed article whether the objectivists like it or not, so let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. -- LGagnon 20:30, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

*Keep; verifiable *and* notable. BRussel 15:00, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Note there is no user BRussel, the above comment was left by 213.80.1.162 who has made 4 edits to Wikipedia, all to Ayn Rand related articles. Gwernol 14:55, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete Per nom 64.167.172.163 04:47, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Note 216.120.8.254 and JRobbins are sock puppets of 64.167.172.163. BRussel 15:26, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Are anonymous votes even allowed? They are very easy to sockpuppet. -- LGagnon 20:27, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete original synthesis. Gazpacho 20:51, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
• Weak delete On the one hand, I have a philosophical disagreement with Rand's philosophy of self-interest uber alles (Why can't self-interest and altruism ever be merged?) but the article reads as being too POV. I would like to see a source, for instance on the "prohibited books" list that Rand was supposed to have kept. And besides, calling them a cult in the title itself is just asking for POV charges, as it makes them sound like the People's Temple. Pat Payne 21:02, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Please note that Objectivism's name is POV to begin with. They're hardly objective, despite what their name implies, and that alone is highly controversial. Just naming the Objectivism article by it's name creates a certain amount of POV. And that's no more than what this article does. -- LGagnon 02:05, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Comment' Almost every philosophy or ideology's name is POV by that standard, but there never was anything called the "Ayn Rand cult" anymore than there was an Evil Atheist Conspiracy or a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Should we have an article called the Existentialist cult because existentialists allegedly belive that Sartre and Camus are the aribiter of "final truth." Should we pretend there was something called "Existentialist psychology" used for "thought control." (There never was "Objectivist psychology.") Are Hegelians and Kantians also part of a cult? Let's leave the cult term for actual religions, not merely any philosophy with which many people disagree. LaszloWalrus 19:37, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Was there ever any controversy surrounding Existentialism claiming it is a cult? Objectivism is unique in philosophy in that not only is it rejected by academia (which makes calling it a philosophy POV as well), but in that there is a controversy over whether or not it is a cult. This is a very real controversy, unlike you hypothetical Existentialist cult; there's actual cited sources in this article to prove it. If Wikipedia were to ignore this then we would have a serious POV problem on our hands beyond anything this article presents. -- LGagnon 22:48, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. I have worked on the article, and it is now more NPOV and better referenced. I think we can build it up from here into something that we can all agree to keep. -- LGagnon 21:27, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

• Delete Ridiculously POV and full of original research. Not to mention the title of the article itself is inherently biased and POV. AscendedAnathema 02:47, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

• Strong delete Inherently POV as a page. Appropriate for inclusion within the context of the Ayn Rand page, but definitely not in of itself. Imperator2 02:51, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Please note that both the Objectivism and Ayn Rand articles are getting a bit large now. It would be for the best to use this article as a fork to lighten the load on those articles. And again, any POV problems can be solved with simple editing. -- LGagnon 22:55, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

• Strong keep First of all, there is already a section on the Ayn Rand page that covers this topic in brief and links to this in-depth article fork. Second, many people are demanding deletion not because of the merits of the article, but because they are huge fans of Ayn Rand and would like to remove anything that makes her look bad. Therefore, the most we should do is NPOV the article. Al 03:20, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

• Weak keep I have edited the article and I believe it to be more neutral, however, I agree that this issue can be covered in the Objectivism criticism section. Source 22:20, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
  • Changed vote to Weak delete Source 18:11, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
• Weak keep ..if we have War on Christmas... Myciconia 02:42, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.