Teleos, tea, 'n TP: Ayn Rand 'n Derrida........

[jolly]

Yep, 'tis true: TeaPea's project is closer to muthaphrackin' Ayn Rand than to Derridead.  The Objectivists may be mostly nutcases, LaRouchie weirdos and hysterical anti-pagans, precious-bodily fluid savers, Joe Fridays, libertarian whack jobs, scary retro-cons prattling on about the Trilateral Commission or  various flavors of the Illuminati, but Rand and her cadre do (or did)  worship  Aristotelian realism,  support the notion of the "magnanimous man,"  and share some affinities with  Nietzschean ideas, though I think they oversimplify Nietzschean ideas such as the Uebemensch  and the will to power. (No thinkers, however, have misconstrued Nietzsche more than postmodern gypsy kings such as Derrida  and Foucault). 
 
The Randians are  politically mistaken,  though not entirely; their attack on environmentalism is misguided, but their attacks on the mediocrity and absurdities of the federal mega-bureaucracies are not so far from a sort of conservative anarchism.
To their credit the Randians announce their religious skepticism  and materialism on their website, and proclaim themselves as inheritors of  the Enlightenment,  though I think they interpret enlightenment figures--say Voltaire or Jefferson--far too conservatively and authoritarian.  
 
Better hack materialist Aristotelian-Nietzscheans (though we should be wary of  Randian conservatives)  than hack quasi-idealist Heideggerian-Hegelians such as Derrida
 
 

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