Talk:Criticism of Objectivism (Ayn Rand)

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[edit] Article charter

This article is intended to describe only coherent, reasoned criticism of Objectivism, not polemic rants (to which category an unfortunately large amount of criticism has belonged) or political debate. Also, the article does not and should not take a position pro or con the criticisms or Objectivism. When there is directly relevant counter-criticism, counter-counter-criticism, etc. then it should be included in an intelligible manner. If you can't express a criticism neutrally and factually, then it probably doesn't meet these guidelines (which are compatible with general Wikipedia guidelines).

I think that this charter belongs in the lead, but at any rate it should be taken as an important guiding principle by the editors. Otherwise, the article will end up full of the kind of noisy, useless, counterproductive crap that we've seen in the related Talk pages. — DAGwyn (talk) 22:12, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Speedy deletion of this POV fork

This article is a blatant POV fork, intended to hide away criticism of Objectivism. It should be deleted ASAP. -Bert 19:11, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

That is utterly false, and comes from a POV pusher in his own right (see Talk: Ayn Rand). The intent, as is clearly stated in the intro, is to provide an appropriate place to summarize (thoughtful) criticism of Objectivism. I have planted links in the relevant main articles to make it visible and easily accessible. The main motivation was that numerous editors have continually warred over attempts to burden what were meant to be biographical or descriptive articles with various complaints against the ideas being described. Since the factual content of the article was generally not in dispute, this was not a NPOV issue, but rather an attempt to exploit a neutral article as a soapbox to present a POV contrary to the subject matter. This new article gives people a place to expound upon their POV without detracting from the quality (especially the cohesiveness) of the main articles.

We did the same thing quite some time ago for criticism of the C programming language, and that was very successful at improving both articles. The key is to keep the criticism article focused on rational arguments rather than mere flamage. — DAGwyn (talk) 19:43, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

DAGwyn is correct about the usefulness of this article. It serves as a better and longer form for criticism and hardly hides it away, it's linked to directly and clearly. He is also correct that "Bert" is a POV pusher. Ethan a dawe (talk) 20:09, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Wow, both of the edit-warring POV pushers agree. This surely indicates that I am in the right. - Bert 20:25, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi Freddy Ethan a dawe (talk) 20:28, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] expansion or merging

This entire page is jumbled, incoherent, and poorly written - much like Rand's 'philosophical' works. I suggest it should either be expanded to provide more detail on the central points (at present the largest section on any single thinker is given over to Nozick, not a critic of Rand at all), or else pared down and merged with the main article on Objectivism. On balance - especially given the polemical nature of this subject - I suggest the latter. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.220.6 (talk) 03:03, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

I disagree with the comments expressed above. This article was created in the first place to move the distracting argumentation out of the simple descriptive article, where its presence itself had been hotly debated. Because as a "starter set" it contained only the fragments of existing critical text that had been hacked in and out of other articles by various editors, it isn't initially especially well organized, and doesn't go into much detail yet. That simply means that there is more work to be done here. Nozick's critical comments are certainly criticism; you seem to have confused "criticism" with "condemnation". Polemics should certainly be excluded from this and the main Objectivism article. — DAGwyn (talk) 19:53, 16 May 2008 (UTC)