Ayn Rand - Page 2

Ah...gotcha!

You'll never catch me alive!!

I noticed in a lot of the pictures of the mongoloid teabag protesters that many signs mentioned Ayn Rand in their schizophrenic, lack of coherence messages. While the older protesters were protesting things like Barrack HUESSEIN Obama: baby murderer, the younger, college-aged idiots were declaring themselves John Galt or whatever. It concerns me that objectivists will overtake the Republican party in the coming years and make it even more evil than it already is.

One real Irony is although Rand saw herself as a defender of the Free Market, she is a very poor spokesmen for the Free Market.

Holy shit, that was great.

Also, that page is further evidence that talkbacks are almost completely worthless.

I didn't see this posted yet, but if I missed it, my apologies. Anyway, I give you the Ayn Rand Flow Chart.

Charlene Therzion as Dagny?
Considering Charlene's history of Left Wing Activism, you have to think her a little bit of a hypocrite. Political activism is fine...until it gets in the way of a fat paycheck.

The only halfway decent comment in that whole talkback was that exposure to Soviet Communism at it's worst in her youth traumatized Rand and drove her batshit crazy in the other direction, where any concern for other people is EVIL COLLECTIVISM!
Other than that,the talkback was a bunch of morons shouting at each other.

No more Angelina Jolie eh? Too bad. "It takes a crazy to play a crazy", that's what I always say

There seems to have been a rush of interest in Rand in the 60s and early 70s. Check out the shout-out in A Scanner Darkly, and an early takedown of Rand in the Illuminatus Trilogy. So no, I don't think it's just the current generation, much as I'm getting to that age where I get to blame everything on teenagers.

Most of what's right about Rand's writings is what I would refer to as "common fucking sense". On top of all her stupid, horrible ideas and bad writings, she was also intolerably arrogant towards anyone who questioned her, even benignly. (You get a much better sense of this from reading her essays.) Apparently if you hadn't naturally come to the same conclusions she had on your own, you were an irrational parasite. She really was a power-worshipping wannabe-ubermensch.

My first serious girlfriend became a Rand fanatic and it literally ended our relationship. It didn't end because I disliked Rand (I hadn't read anything by her at that point), but because the girl in question changed significantly as a result of having adopted her philosophies wholesale. It was a little like seeing someone get born again.

Since then, I've read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I enjoyed portions of The Fountainhead, especially the passages dealing with the architecture that Roarke builds, but on the whole I found the experience of reading her to be empty and cold. The philosophy she espouses leaves precious little need for connectivity in the world, and it extinguishes compassion, altruism and selfless love as valued ideals.

I don't disagree with her assertion that every action contains a selfish motivation, but I disagree that this eliminates the need for/value of selflessness. The mere existence of a selfish motive does not preclude the simultaneous existence of a selfless motive, nor does it excuse one from attempting to rise above the arguably primitive devotion to Self alone.

Her appeal isn't hard to fathom - she offers an 'intellectualized' benediction of the Self-oriented life, and provides people with material that allows them to justify the cutting off of compassion and the elevation of personal wants over everything else. I can absolutely understand why some would respond to this, even if I have no respect for the impulse. Ultimately, the observation that she's an extremist is, I think, the correct one to make.

There seems to be a revival of interest in Rand about every 20 years,mainly among college age students. I will probably get blasted for saying this, but College Age students are very prone to buy into some wierd crap.

But Rand has never had anywhere near as big a following as several other writers, Tolkien being the one that comes to mind. Of course Tolkien was a much better writer,and his flaws are not nearly as bad as Rand's.

Doesn't everyone become a discipline of Ayn Rand at age 14 when they read her. Then they grow out of it by College?

Never read any of it, but everything I've read of Objectivism and Satanism has lead me to believe they're the same thing.

You know who was an Objectivist? Failed professional bodybuilder Mike Mentzer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mentzer

Later in life (one day before he died, actually): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyF--C0r8PI

Also, you know who ruined his life by defeating him in the Mr. Olympia, causing his drug addictions, stays in mental institutions and his financial hardships?



My hero.

Let me distill that for you.

Well, that and the fact that if you try to distill a life philosophy from Tolkien's work you might actually get something that doesn't make you a sociopath.

The Atlasphere
For Objectivists who only want to date other Objectivists.
(yes it does seem to be for real)


And here are some hilarious excerpts from Atlasphere personal ads.

From that article:

Ahahahaha.

Apparently, Democrats, God and altruism are verboten on this dating scene, but shameless cognitive dissonance is not.

Just as good:

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that 'Other people' is in quotation marks. Is this to signify his contempt for said-'Other people'? To signify that he understands 'Other people' only as a concept?

If you get two self-described born again egoists together doesn't it sort of automatically guarantee a relationship without trust or love?

How do these men remain unclaimed, ladies?

ETA: Maybe Jesse and I should date. We seem to be on the same page.

If any women won't fuck them, I will. They're good enough to make a straight man gay.

Will you bring me flowers every Saturday night? Strong, uncompromising, rational flowers?

Why does Steve Ditko never get the same level of hate?

He can draw. Kind of.

But his writing makes Rand look subtle and sane.
Is it because he hasn't developed a following of objectivist assholes?

Flowers are pollinated by bees. Bees live in hives, like communists. Your desire for flowers marks you as weak and foolish, therefore you do not deserve my kisses.

I really love that last one. "I don't know you, but even if I did, there's no way I would give a shit about you. Call me!"

Interview taken right before Rand dispatched a young Robert Shaw to assassinate Sean Connery.

It's not so much that Objectivsts are arrogant assholes. There are plenty of those about who are not objectivists..one of the worst I know has politics somewhere to the left of Mao Tse Tung.
It's that they think that being an arrogant assholes is a Virtue that makes them so intolerable.

This thread has shifted into 17 shades of awesome...

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm should I become an Objectivist just to use that excuse when buying flowers. Maybe.

I read The Fountainhead in high school and really took to it. Though I don't think it made me an entitled asshole. I actually mostly ended up really liking the story (which, if you strip down all of Rand's propaganda, is really short and simple). Actually, it was a character that Rand made most pathetic, Peter Keating, that was the most interesting to me.

Atlas Shrugged came later, and eventually, I came to enjoy those two novels the way I enjoyed Transformers 2. Hilarity. I really do enjoy them.

I have yet to meet and really talk to an Objectivist. But I did try to listen to one of their podcasts to see what they could possibly ramble on about for an hour. You know, for people who supposedly follow Rand's praise for the expert/competent, it was a really shitty podcast from a technical standpoint. And let's not even get started about the content itself. It was basically two dudes talking about the world and stating things and then 'shielding' themselves from having to cop to anything by saying, "But I'll have to do more research about this." Something told me that they never did...

God, those objectivist personals are essential reading for any fans of Rorschach/Bickle style inner monologues. So disturbing, so comical.

Come on Scwartz, where's your conviction? Kisses are for the weak.

I don't like the defense that Objectivism at least emphasizes individualism in a positive way. Well, yes, but Ratatouille does that too, only without sociopathy and rape.

Oooh, that's excellent. I also quite like this one:

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." - Dorothy Parker, on Atlas Shrugged

And of course, from that episode of Futurama where the gang are in the sewers and Bender finds the "literature" people have flushed down the toilet:

"There's nothing down here but crumpled old porno and Ayn Rand."

Don't forget the Ayn Rand Daycare Center from which Maggie Simpson makes her Great Escape from.

Well, he's a follower of Ayn Rand, not an original. Like Terry Goodkind. Also, Alan Moore said about all that needs to be said on the subject of Mr. A and The Question through Rorschach.

I don't know that this is true, really.

You can't really dismiss those characters and/or the philosophy that inspired them based off of Moore's Rorschach.

Yeah, Rosarch is pretty much a twisted altruist, no?

Or Officer Barbrady from South Park learning to read then choosing Atlas Shrugged as his first proper novel then deciding readings sucks and never wanting to read again...

Bump

...And now two bios of Rand are raising interest even more.

GQ has a hilarious write-up of both

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/book...s-fountainhead

My mom interviewed her once. What a nutter..

Yes, we know you inherited that trait from you mom.

I'm saying Ayn Rand was crazy/evil, not my mom (though maybe I would say my mom is nuts, too)

Savage! :: snap snap :: Eyes on the ball! We have much bigger fish to fry than that attention-suck.

I really, really could have done without the title or accompanying illustration, but the author does get off some good lines. I would like to enthusiastically, ringingly echo this -

Hear, hear!

I had a teacher in high school who offered extra credit for anyone who could stomach reading The Fountainhead and answering a few questions about it. He expressed his doubt that anyone could do it without giving up. I liked that guy.

Conversely, one of the most off-putting guys I have ever met, seriously just the worst person ever, took to it like crazy. After reading it, he went on about how much it changed his life and how none of us understood because we didn't read it. I remember seeing his myspace page (back when such things were popular) and noticing all of his blog entries were on his superiority thanks to his embrace of Rand's philosophies. I don't know if it's possible to have negative friends on that site, but I think he pulled it off. Even ol' Tom wouldn't go near him.

So sorry!