… until someone goes against the altruist grain, then all hell breaks loose as Shirley found out. As with most of their professed values, “open-mindedness” only goes skin-deep.

BTW,I agree with madmax, that Paul Shirley was just asking to be fired. There are much better ways to do what he did.

I also marvel that Ayn Rand is allowed any time whatsoever in the popular media and that she is not totally forbidden. Its a testimony to just how powerful her arguments were that they can not be silenced.

Regarding Shirley, he had guts to write what he did but he was just asking to be fired. There is no way that a mainstream media outlet will allow altruism to be challenged especially in regard to a *black* country. The combination of the the black demographic plus altruism means that both altruism and *racial egalitarianism* are on the line in the Haiti crisis. As with the black inner-city residents of New Orleans, so with the black citizens of Haiti, you simply will not be allowed by the Left to challenge altruism at all let alone in the context of black welfare-statism (international or domestic). Nothing amplifies the power of altruism over the modern world like when the recipients are black (non-white in general).

Which makes me wonder if Objectivism should tackle racial egalitarianism directly or not? Part of me would like to see it but part of me thinks it will be easier to speak in race neutral terms.

The health and continuation of the species should never be the goal of a person’s actions, but it is true that that can’t happen unless incest is shunned. That’s just like how the overall well-being of society should never be the goal either, but that too cannot be achieved unless altruism is shunned. Reality has a graceful way of achieving those collective positives as nice, fringe benefits of rational, selfish actions.

I see your point though – that people would rather stay crazy than question their dogmas – and you’re right that in today’s environment he wouldn’t get away with going against the grain of altruism, but do you really think that the lesson he was trying to impart was worth it? I don’t think the conventional position on incest, unlike altruism, lacks (at least the potential for) a rational justification, so it seems dangerous to take shots at a widely held position which required a rational (even if never explicitly identified) process solely for the purpose of making a point about epistemology.

I think the reason why there wasn’t a controversy about his defense of incest is because people realized he wasn’t really defending it. He may have been trying to make the point you referenced from his Wikipedia page, but he didn’t do it very compellingly (and that’s why I’d never heard of him). If anything, people probably thought it was cool that he was nihilistically going against the grain – and that only reinforces the idea that the answer to dogmatic belief is perpetual open-mindedness.