Seymourblogger, Thanks for the expansion of the goals of education to include the work of Foucault.
Fighting the status quo as our daughter overcame the mediocre experience of public education, several of us saw that education was not really the goal .A desire to keep people stupid seemed to be. Knowing of the One World bunch, we assumed that was the source. It was obvious the ones implementing the programs did not have a clue. The schools are filled with self-proclaimed, usually destructive psychologists. One can see the methods described in "Brainwashing in Red China", a book now out of print. I had not considered Foucault, even though one of my majors, a while back, was philosophy. Back then focus was on the older established philosophers, which thankfully included Rand.
Reviewing Foucault, I see the easy transition from prisons to schools - which know resemble gulags to conceal their experimentation. Criminology was not a field of study for me, however, I did discover two statistics a while back which support Foucault's claims. There is a high incidence of uncorrected illiteracy among prison populations, perhaps an initial cause of incarceration but certainly not one the system wishes to correct. The other untreated and ignored statistic is that a high incidence of untreated allergies can be found in that population, which leads to both violent behavior and problems learning. If they wanted to reform the populations, both issued would be addressed and attempts to correct them made. Therefore, they obviously just warehouse, and Foucault's theories are proven. Thank you for another source beyond leftist Dewey and Bill Ayers, to explain what is going wrong with schools, while sleeping parents counter-productively pass levy after levy to keep it all going.,

Suppose certain business tycoons were corrupt and manipulated Congress. Suppose they were violent with their labor unions. Suppose Rand mistook a James Taggart for a Dagney Taggart.

How does that mean she faked reality?

Here is what Ayn Rand said about this:
All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy. The giants of American industry—such as James Jerome Hill or Commodore Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie or J. P. Morgan—were self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal ability, by free trade on a free market. But there existed another kind of businessmen, the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government, such men as the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was the political power behind their activities—the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges—that caused dislocations in the country’s economy, hardships, depressions, and mounting public protests. But it was the free market and the free businessmen that took the blame. “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,”
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 48

You blame businessmen and capitalism for the evils of Socialism. If you had a shred of moral decency, instead of complaining about the corny capitalist railroad situation in California, which was the result of GOVERNMENT, not free markets and not businessmen, you would complain about Tammany Hall, the Corn Laws, Union cronyism which allow union members to assault, maim and kill with impunity, the collectivism of agriculture under Stalin which killed millions, the Great Leap Forward of Mao which killed tens of millions or the DDT fraud that killed over 100 million. You sir are dishonest and moral corrupt.

I will if I want to-you are in my house

I did above

you have failed to acknowledge the gov'ts ultimate responsibility. Most of these situations were caused by the govt setting up situations whereby they profited and the free market was hog tied or perverted.

Your point? Don't give me rhetorical comments. Spell out what you mean.

Is that a fact.

Knowing the "intent" does help you guide the customer to what s/he needs or wants. I just said it more concisely. Because I think more concisely.

who had the power, vand? who had the power

You are justifying immoral acts by an "end justifies the means" argument. Certainly something that Hsnk Rearden would never do. Now consider this: Stanford played that game, then monopolized the railroads so that the average farmers were driven into bankruptcy to get their produce to market. Don't tell me about re-reading history. And don;t excuse the robber barons because the politicians are worse. That is a race to the bottom.

Objectivism is not consistent with Nietzsche at all. Rand is more consistent with Locke an Aristotle

I disagree slightly, the customer service agent needs to listen to what the customer wants and then help guide him to the proper answer. The problem today is that these people don't listen because they work of a pitch sheet that seldom addresses the question being asked. Furthermore, they are also trained to only follow the path designed by the management instead of dealing with customer needs. It is also aggravating when you get happy talk instead of responses to the customers needs.

Fred Speckmann

You are moving in the right direction. Rand is the great philosopher she always wanted to be but didn't really know she already was. She is a great disciple of Nietzsche's. Nietzsche is in almost every sentence she ever wrote. And all continental philosophy rests on Nietzsche.

And the complicity of all involved who knew about it.

Of course. What was he? Mentally deficient? If he didn't get it in writing then he didn't mean for it to happen, but this way he could act and say he never meant that. And that way you blame the guy that bought the company, said "and you believed me" and fired the people. "Remember who the enemy is." - Haymich in Catching Fire:The Hunger Games.

The ethic is in Rand's fiction and her life. Productive labor/capital which rarely exists today. Speculative profit is where it's at. And cartels.

Public school education can be understood through Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It is part of the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge/capital/normality. That is the focus of public education. It is not about learning. It is about obedience to the norm, so as to fit you in the niche of the system.

Customer service depends on your ability to read what your customer really wants. If you are replying to the content of what your customer asks for you are probably missing the intent. You need to be able to do both.

You need to reread history. To the extent that the so-called "robber barons" bribed Congress, it was for one of two reasons. 1. needed to get immoral permits or permissions from politicians or 2. politicians promised them an advantage that should not be allowed under the law. The ultimate immorality rests with the politicians of the time(s).

You would be better off rethinking the objectivist essays in "Capitalism the Unknown Ideal" I used to love those essays but found out that Rand and her followers faked reality. North and Stanford (railroad tycoons) got where they are because they manipulated Congress for their own ends. The rest of the Robber Barons got where they were because they sent thugs to put down the labor movement. You need to get a balanced view of history before you get a balanced view of today. Rand faked reality, and that is inexcusable. If Objectivism is to survive, it is not as a quasi-religion as it is now (built on blindness to reality) but as a philosophy that is empirical - it looks at what actually works for society and its members, not on some idealism that is a fake.

Hey jsw225 I was just reading your blog and the "Lack of Judgement" article is exactly what I'm debating with kh on another post. :) Good reads. Thanks!

no! we love gulchers' blogposts. Consider posting your latest in here when they happen. love the blog name btw

While not called Objectivist Essays, that is basically what I write on my blog every 2 weeks or so.

If this self promotion is too shameless: http://dannesrepossessions.wordpress.com... Feel free to delete this post.