"Atlas Shrugged" quiz for Ayn Rand fans

It's been a long time since I wrote on this blog about Ayn Rand and her endless monstrosity, "Atlas Shrugged" but I got into arguments with Rand fans on Facebook recently and put together a quiz for them  - Randroids almost never remember much about AS, if they ever really read it in the first place. 

The quiz gives you a sense of just how illogical Rand was and how much she hated those who did not agree with her "philosophy."

1. When a man inspired by John Galt's endless speech hears a mother tell her child to give away one of his toys, what does he do?

Answer

He slaps her so hard he fractures her jaw.

2. When an old guy in the 20th Century Motor Company's company town finds out that the money he wanted for record albums was given to an 8-year-old girl so she could have braces, what does he do?

Answer

He punches her in the mouth so hard he knocks out all her teeth - it's clear in context that Rand considers this justified - one clue is that the child is described as ugly - almost all villains in Rand's simple-minded tales are ugly.

3. What is Rand's explanation for the existence of Communism?

Answer

Sadism. "And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way (Ivy Starnes) eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’"

4. Who forced the 20th Century Motor Company to collectivize?

Answer

The owners of the 20th Century Motor Company themselves. Because you know, that always happens.

5. When trains from California reach New York City, and they have to dump tons of rotten produce they've been carrying, which river do they dump it in?

Answer

In the East River, which is on the other side of Manhattan from where the train line stops - at the Hudson River. This error is made worse by the fact that Rand was living in Manhattan when she wrote this.

6. How do the book's heroes Dagny and Hank convince local officials to allow their train to barrel through towns at dangerously high speeds?

Answer

Local officials were "outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour."

7. How does Rand deal with people on a train who hold pro-government opinions - including the children of those people?

Answer

She gases them, then blows them up.

8. When all industries in the United States are suffering from railroad failure-induced shortages, and cities are starving, what is the one industry that, inexplicably, manages to function perfectly?

Answer

The florist industry: "It was late afternoon when the florist telephoned her. "Our Chicago office sent word that they were unable to deliver the flowers, Mrs. Rearden, because Mr. Rearden is not aboard the Comet." This is how Rand decides to have Mrs. Rearden find out her husband Hank is having an affair with Dagny Taggart.

Oh libertarians. You're always wrong.

My FB friend Corey Robin got another shout-out from the Mighty Krug-Man the other day:

Actually, nothing — because those alleged principles were never real. Conservative religiosity, conservative faith in markets, were never about living a godly life or letting the invisible hand promote entrepreneurship. Instead, it was all as Corey Robin describes it: Conservatism is

a reactionary movement, a defense of power and privilege against democratic challenges from below, particularly in the private spheres of the family and the workplace.

It’s really about who’s boss, and making sure that the man in charge stays boss. Trump is admired for putting women and workers in their place, and it doesn’t matter if he covets his neighbor’s wife or demands trade wars.

Krugman referenced that Robin piece before as I talked about here. It's a very good piece.

The funny thing about Krugman giving a nod to Robin is that every time it happens a bunch of Robin's Facebook friends say something like "Congratulations Corey for the mention, and BTW, Krugman is a running dog of capitalism and a big poopy-head."

Many of Robin's friends consider themselves Marxists or anarchists or some other such useless leftist posturing. So it's especially amusing that Krugman was criticized by a libertarian for being an extremist leftist and a big poopy-head. Someone named Kevin Vallier at "Bleeding Heart Libertarianism" writes:

Krugman’s opponents aren’t just wrong: they oppose fundamental moral and political values (equality) that any reasonable, decent person should accept. How are Very Serious Progressives like Krugman to share a country such individuals? Krugman’s answer is clear: support state power to crush conservative policies and criticize their intelligence and character. 

It is easy to see the moral vice and animus in the post. Krugman dehumanizes his opponents by refusing to regard even some of them as fundamentally well-motivated and informed. Conservatives are foes and nothing more.

He doesn't even say Krugman was wrong to characterize conservatives that way - apparently to accurately describe conservative views is to "dehumanize" them.

I think this is the key to the whole thing: "Krugman’s opponents aren’t just wrong: they oppose fundamental moral and political values (equality) that any reasonable, decent person should accept."

What really bugs Vallier is the notion that anybody would believe that equality is a value that all reasonable decent people should hold. Krugman has values, and expresses those values, and Vallier finds this unacceptable.

And of course it's deeply ironic that any libertarian would complain about someone dehumanizing opponents - their heroine Ayn Rand specialized in dehumanizing her ideological opponents - anybody who doesn't believe that hasn't read "Atlas Shrugged." I talked about that in 2013:

The most prominent feature of Atlas Shrugged is its extreme binary view of the world - it is the most common criticism of the novel: the good guys are uniformly physically attractive and skillful and smart, the bad guys are uniformly unattractive (even Lillian Rearden who is constantly described as having "dead eyes") and stupid and incompetent and cruel. It is this extreme dichotomy that renders the novel ridiculous to so many people. Atlas Shrugged has been jokingly compared to The Lord of the Rings, except, the punchline goes, that LOTR "involves orcs." But I would argue that Rand so dehumanizes her ideological opponents that in fact Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings both involve orcs.

Remembrance of factories past

I was arguing with an Ayn Rand fan about the plausibility of the Twentieth Century Motor Company scenario in Atlas Shrugged. I suggested that the set-up had nothing to do with socialism, since Rand suggests that the real reason for socialism is basically sadism.

The Rand fan insisted that the whole thing was true because it demonstrated how socialism saps a person's spirit yadda yadda yadda. Your typical Libertarian idealizes capitalism so much, they seem to believe the only time workers are ever mistreated is under socialism. As if a sadist manager couldn't make life miserable for workers with no trouble at all under a free market system.

Ayn Rand did work a couple of shit jobs, but mostly she worked as a screenwriter, and once she had a hit with the novel The Fountainhead she not only supported herself through her literary endeavors the rest of her life, she supported her husband Frank O'Connor financially until his death. Although she used to pretend he was a serious painter, or would sometimes say he was "on strike."

Part of the problem is that most Rand fans are from the upper classes and have never themselves worked in a factory, and so have no idea. This got me thinking about the two factories I worked in, back in my youth. I decided to Google them and see what they were up to.

The Atco Knitting Mills Inc., in Atco New Jersey appears to be a toxic Superfund site now. I guess it's no longer operational but I couldn't find anything online confirming that. But I assume that kind of work is now done in China or elsewhere outside the US. 

The most depressing thing is that when you search for Atco Knitting Mills you find all these obituaries for women who worked decades in that hellhole. Like, for instance Carmella "Chubby" Civa:

Chubby was a lifelong resident of Atco and worked at the Atco Knitting Mill for over 40 years.

Which means she was working there at the same time I was there. I didn't get to know anybody though, so I wouldn't remember her, and it was a pretty big factory. But dear god, how could anybody work there for 40 years? I barely survived 4 days with my sanity intact. The endless, mindless repetition was maddening. And this was a union shop (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) although I didn't stay long enough to make membership. But even under the best of conditions, factory work is hard, boring crap work.

A few years after that I worked for a company in Camden New Jersey, Decalcomania, Inc. It appears to have gone bankrupt. Not a union shop, it was run by the Burton family - I knew the son and his wife, and they were singularly unpleasant people who treated the employees with contempt. I worked in almost every capacity at Decalcomania, from doing art paste-up to dark room image development to working on the factory floor doing sorting and packing to working at the front desk. I worked there longer than I worked at the Atco Knitting Mills, although that's not a very high bar. I eked out maybe a year and a half there before I headed for the greener pastures of Linda's Driving School and never worked in a factory again. Although I've had office jobs that were even more demeaning, where I was treated unfairly by managers, and sabotaged a couple of times by coworkers.

So I have to laugh when I see people claiming that only under socialism are workers ever mistreated. Horrible people exist under any economic system. Or as an ex-boyfriend of mine used to say, "the tiniest speck of power corrupts absolutely."

Hard times for Objectivists

It was a golden age for Objectivists back when nobody but Objectivists were paying attention to Ayn Rand. But thanks to a combination of the two Rand biographies that were published in 2012, as well as the Tea Party and Libertarian-esque politicians like Rand Paul and Paul Ryan Ayn Rand has gotten much more attention in recent years than since her glory days in the 1950s.

And therefore hilarity has ensued.

I've done plenty of research on Rand for my DARK MARKET in the past couple of years (the re-write is currently on hold) and found much Rand-spoof humor. This weekend I found even more from 2013 - John Hodgman appeared as Ayn Rand for something called The Dead Authors Podcast. Possibly the highlight is when Hodgman as Ayn Rand ranks the heroism/tragedy of the members of the Village People.

I was pretty surprised to find her listed in The Partially Examined Life (PEL) philosophy podcast and blog. But actually soon into the 2-hour long podcast it's clear the discussants don't take Rand or her "philosophy" seriously.

As the blog notes:

First Rand grounds everyday human knowledge, largely by dismissing the concerns of other philosophers (even those whom she unknowingly parrots) as absurd. Then she uses this certainty to argue for her semi-Nietzschean vision of Great Men who master their emotions and rely only on themselves. Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth are satisfied with neither effort. 

Warning: This attempt to make sense of Rand's texts will likely offend any Randians out there, and our reading numerous passages from her alleged "texts" may offend the rest of you. When in doubt, curl up in the fetal position and moan "A=A!" over and over again until the bad sounds stop.

As so often happens when intelligent people are confronted with the philosophy of Ayn Rand, these discussants express infuriation. Beginning at 01:05:45 in the podcast on Rand's epistemology:

SETH: The whole thing about how she can go 50 pages before addressing Wittgenstein's argument about use and then to just dismiss it in one sentence infuriated me... 

WES: ...She doesn't really know what linguistic analysis is, or positivism is, she says things about positivism which are just absurd. She associates it variously with relativism, everything seems to get associated with relativism and so she doesn't really have a solid idea of what Kant is about or positivism, linguistic analysis, things she's railing against so it's sort of a weird contemptuousness of something, and she's talking about definitions, she just doesn't even know the definition of them. She just doesn't even have the vaguest idea of what these things stand for philosophically.

DYLAN:  ...it's just so clearly what I would call nostalgic - it's this attempt to "I am very hostile to the idea that there can be ambiguity or disputes, we need to have an absolute authority upon which we can found our conceptual system"... the fact that she criticized Kant doesn't make sense to me because it sounds like she's an uber-Kantian in a weird way, although a misguided one.

WES: ...she characterizes academic philosophy as all one big cesspool of relativism and here she is riding in to save the day, and bring back the concept of objectivity - no all these people were worried about saving the concept of objectivity... that's the big straw man of this essay,that all these things are relativism... 

On Rand's ethics beginning at around 01:18:00

SETH: This is a perfect example of a straw man she makes. Nobody advocates the kind of altruism she's talking about. 

WES: Right. Sacrifice ourselves totally. 

DYLAN: It just doesn't exist. It's like she's thirteen years old or something. And running around "you want me to give up everything in my whole life! I can't"...it's just so pre-juvenile... (she builds) extreme versions of every case and takes one straw man after another, it's absolutely infuriating in this respect.

WES: her philosophy can be called "sentimentalism" ...it's this need for simplicity and certainty... 

By the second hour, Dylan gets to the heart of Ayn Rand and her "philosophy":

...she's like a celebrity of some sort, who somehow managed to get a grip in popular culture and called herself a philosopher and had philosophical aspirations... but you spend more time figuring out what she should have meant if it was actually consistent or thoughtful... 

I will definitely be checking out this PEL series further - not only do they have several podcasts devoted to Schopenhauer, but they have a good healthy contempt for the New Atheists, especially Sam Harris. For example:

Scientism is what makes it possible for someone like Sam Harris to be taken seriously on morality, despite the fact that his arguments flunk philosophy 101. That intellectually curious people are influenced by that kind of stuff (and freebase it regularly via TED lectures) is a crime. They're better off with "The Secret."

Love it.

You said it Krugman!

As usual, Krugman gets right to the heart of the matter:

After all, what is Atlas Shrugged really about? Leave aside the endless speeches and bad sex scenes. What you’re left with is the tale of how a group of plutocrats overthrow a democratically elected government with a campaign of economic sabotage.

I love me some Krugman.

St. Patricks/Atlas

My mother was up from Merchantville New Jersey visiting for the weekend. We have very different priorities and her idea of sight-seeing is going to St. Patrick's Church of 5th Avenue. It was the first time I had been there, and it was definitely impressive. Although I couldn't help laughing at the shrine to the "Prayer to the Holy Face of Jesus" - that phrase just makes me laugh. I am definitely going to hell.

 But on our way out I was struck by what was across the street - I'm no doubt one of the few people who would find this significant - but across 5th Avenue is the statue of Atlas holding up the world - this was a favorite work of art by the devoutly atheist Ayn Rand, and it appears on at least one edition of "Atlas Shrugged."

I might have been spending too much time thinking about Ayn Rand lately.

Who loves "Atlas Shrugged"?

Atlas Shrugged is such obvious crap - both as literature and as a political manifesto - that it staggers the imagination to think that there are people out there who think it's great and on both counts. Here are some examples from The Snark Who Hunts Back: Favorite Passages from Atlas Shrugged. "The Snark" writes:

While reading any truly great book there will be scenes that send shivers down your spine, make you cry, make you laugh out loud on the train, make you re-read the passage over and over a dozen times, or make you read the words out loud while sitting on a bench in the park outside your bank.
Usually a single book will get, at most, two of those reactions out me.
Atlas Shrugged has gotten all of them out of me…more than once.

He then lists these three below. Amazing.

Francisco D’Anconia “Money Speech” – Atlas Shrugged – Part II:

In the latest draft of my DARK MARKET I inserted references to this speech. Krugman likes to mock those politicians like Paul Ryan who get their views on economics policies from that D'Anconia speech. And as Krugman points out, D'Anconia isn't merely praising the gold standard, he wants to go back to using gold coins:

This had me wondering: when was the last time the economy actually ran on specie, rather than notes?

Bear in mind that paper money has been in widespread use for a long, long time. Originally these were often notes from private banks, like the $10 (“dix”) note from the Citizen’s Bank of Louisiana that may have given rise to the term “Dixie” for the south. There’s an extensive, mostly positive discussion of bank notes in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. But when did the notes become dominant over coin? 

Well, the Millennial Edition of Historical Statistics of the United States (subscription required) has some data. As I read it, as of 1813 there was only $7 million worth of coins in the hands of the U.S. public, versus $52 million in bank notes. So even two centuries ago, we were already a paper-money economy. 

And this means that Ryan wants to turn the clock back two centuries, not one.

Hank Rearden's Trial - Atlas Shrugged - Part II

Reading this reminds you how little Ayn Rand bothered to learn about the US judicial system - or how little she cared that her representation of a judicial system was utterly absurd and divorced from reality . In her American dystopia all Hank Rearden has to do is give a really swell speech and he was let go. His crime was selling metal to someone he wasn't supposed to if memory serves - one of those insane rulings that Rand's US democracy decrees whenever one of Rand's heroes needs a challenge. Rand never reveals the details of how these rulings become law - they just suddenly appear throughout the book. 

The Story of The Twentieth Century Motor Company – Atlas Shrugged – Part II

This is one of my favorite parts of the book because it reveals what Ayn Rand thought was the true cause of Communism - sadism. Literally, sadism.

She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’

And no Rand chapter would be complete without someone being assaulted - in this chapter it's a little girl - but she's ugly, so it's OK, in Rand's world-view:

“Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old days, he used to skip lunch just to buy himself some new recording of classical music. Well, they didn’t give him any ‘allowance’ for records – ‘personal luxury’ they called it. But at the same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody’s daughter, a mean, ugly little eight year old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth – this was ‘medical need’ because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren’t straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious any more. But it seems like there was one thing he couldn’t forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them.

Since Rand didn't allow her book to be edited by Random House, nobody questioned what an eight-year-old girl was doing out by herself after closing time at the bar. And of course right-wing worshippers of what they think is a well-reasoned tale of the superiority of Capitalism never think twice about such details.

It's bad enough that there are people with no taste in literature nor ability to comprehend the utter failure of Atlas Shrugged as a political work, but you have writers for the Wall Street Journal who consider it a prophetic book - and Rand herself believed it too - I put that in my play.

Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read "Atlas Shrugged" a "virgin." Being conversant in Ayn Rand's classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only "Atlas" were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Please note - this is not some random blogger saying this. It's Stephen Moore, senior economic writer for the Wall Street Journal, an allegedly mainstream media outlet that pays its writers. It goes on:

Abolishing the income tax. Now that really would be a genuine economic stimulus. But Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Washington want to do the opposite: to raise the income tax "for purposes of fairness" as Barack Obama puts it. 

David Kelley, the president of the Atlas Society, which is dedicated to promoting Rand's ideas, explains that "the older the book gets, the more timely its message." He tells me that there are plans to make "Atlas Shrugged" into a major motion picture -- it is the only classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie. "We don't need to make a movie out of the book," Mr. Kelley jokes. "We are living it right now."

They did make a lousy 3-part movie out of the book. There's never any accounting for libertarian taste, ever.

Paying colleges to teach Ayn Rand

As Krugman mentioned, it was reported in Bloomberg in April 2008, (just as the financial meltdown was getting underway), businesses were paying colleges to teach the work of their hero, Ayn Rand:

``These gifts are really about the study of capitalism from a moral perspective and all we want is to make Rand part of the dialogue,'' said Bob Denham, a spokesman for BB&T, the parent of Branch Banking & Trust Co.

The idea that Ayn Rand taught a "moral perspective" of capitalism is an especially funny one, considering that her hero John Galt is a messianic weirdo who vows to destroy a society because he doesn't like the way The Twentieth Century Motor Company is running things. And the company is running things the way it does out of sadism. The company goes out of business, which I suppose could be seen as a cautionary tale against sadism as a business model.

Once again I have to wonder if fans of "Atlas Shrugged" have read it carefully - or at all. Businessmen seem to believe that it's all about businessmen being heroes, and that's good enough for them. 

The schools that were bribed accepted grants to teach the work of Rand that are named in the article are:

• University of North Carolina Charlotte 
• Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia
• Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina
• University of Texas at Austin.

However, the article mentions that 27 other schools have accepted a total of 30 million from BB&T Corp, but doesn't name them.

In 2014 Salon ran an article about other "dark money" - and it should be noted that after BB&T promoted the philosophy of Ayn Rand, with its anti-government, anti-regulation sentiments...

Back in 2008 during America’s financial collapse, BB&T Bank was one of the many big banks that crashed. In order to stay afloat, that bank took a $3.1 billion bailout from the Bush administration. 

At the helm of the bank at that time was John Allison, an Ayn Rand-loving CEO.
According to The Street, during his time as CEO of BB&T, Allison regularly used the BB&T Charitable Foundation, “to provide grants to schools that agree to create courses on capitalism that feature the study of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’”
Meanwhile, according to New York Magazine, Allison gave $500,000 to Randolph-Macon College to hire Dave Brat, so that he too could teach the Ayn Rand libertarian philosophy as an economics professor. 

Shortly after BB&T accepted $3.1 billion government bailout from the Bush Administration, Allison resigned as CEO, and was picked up by Charles Koch, to become the new president of the Cato Institute, formerly known as the Charles Koch Foundation, and to keep spreading the work of Rand.

The Koch brothers are behind 90% of all evil-doing in this country.

That 2008 grant isn't all that Rand worshippers gave to the University of Texas. It also has an on-going project:

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Atlas Shrugged," the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship renewed a $300,000 fellowship for research on Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. 

Since its inception in 2001, the fellowship has been renewed twice, bringing the Anthem Foundation's total contribution to the university to $900,000 through 2010.
The fellowship funds an array of research, conferences, guest lectures and objectivism-related scholarship in the College of Liberal Arts. Tara Smith, professor of philosophy, has published several articles on Rand's philosophy and the 2006 book, "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist" with Cambridge University Press

In 2009 UT held a symposium to celebrate Atlas Shrugged:

• 4 p.m.: "Ayn Rand: Evidence of a Life" by Jeff Britting, associate producer of the Academy Award nominated-documentary film, "Ayn Rand: Evidence of a Life;"
• 4:15 p.m.: "The Benevolent Universe Premise in Atlas Shrugged" by Allan Gotthelf, visiting professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh;
• 5 p.m.: "John Galt as the Hero of Atlas Shrugged: Leader and Lover" by Shoshana Milgram, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech;
• 5:45 p.m.: "The Appeal of Atlas Shrugged to Young People" by Onkar Ghate, senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.

The symposium is sponsored by the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism and Anthem Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism, both held by Tara Smith, professor of philosophy. Smith is the author of "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist."

You have to wonder who are these people? How can they seriously allow their names to be associated with such preposterous concepts as John Galt, Leader and Lover. What is wrong with you Shoshona Milgram?

And Tara Smith's entire career seems to ride on Ayn Rand. It would be a shame for her if people who are not in the Ayn Rand cult suddenly began to seriously examine the work of Ayn Rand and it became widely known that Rand was a crackpot and a crank as well as a bad novelist, and her "philosophy" is nothing more than the personal preferences of Ayn Rand, systematized  and promoted by oligarchs and their courtiers. But I'm hoping it will happen anyway. Sorry Tara Smith.

"...the real motive of any person who's ever preached 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.' "

I stopped contributing to Adam Lee's ongoing discussion of Atlas Shrugged due to censorship - because Lee's friend, who goes by the name of Azkyroth had a meltdown and began shrieking insults at me and insisted I was out to hurt the autistic because I speculated that Ayn Rand was on the autism spectrum.

To my knowledge, Lee has never objected to Azkyroth's habit of insulting anybody he disagrees with.

This censorship of disagreeable ideas -  thoughtcrimes to Social Justice Warriors like Lee and Azkyroth -  is a disgrace to rational discourse, and Lee has no sense of shame about it.

But I do check in to see how the Atlas Shrugged discussion is going, since some of Lee's commenters are quite astute and I'm always interested in learning what others think of Atlas Shrugged in-depth - I'm always afraid I might have missed something. And Lee does catch things I missed. He makes a good point (highlighted):

But after all that, Dagny objects, the tramp hasn’t told her who John Galt is or what he has to do with any of this. He says that it was something that happened at the first all-hands meeting after the company had agreed to go communist:

“‘This is a crucial moment in the history of mankind!’ Gerald Starnes yelled through the noise. ‘Remember that none of us may now leave this place, for each of us belongs to all the others by the moral law which we all accept!’‘I don’t,’ said one man and stood up. He was one of the young engineers… He stood like a man who knew that he was right. ‘I will put an end to this, once and for all,’ he said… ‘I will stop the motor of the world.’ Then he walked out.…We never heard what became of him. But years later, when we saw the lights going out, one after another, in the great factories that had stood solid like mountains for generations, when we saw the gates closing and the conveyor belts turning still, when we saw the roads growing empty and the stream of cars draining off… then we began to wonder and to ask questions about him. We began to ask it of one another, those of us who had heard him say it… You see, his name was John Galt.”

If you missed that, John Galt vowed to destroy an entire civilization because one business went communist. Disproportionate retribution seems to be the only kind of retribution that Objectivists know. 

This leads back to the question, again, of how the looters came to take over the world. If the Twentieth Century Motor Company’s plan was such a failure, its competitors should have thrived, and once it went bankrupt, the whole idea should have been discarded as an object lesson in what not to do. Instead, for some reason, everyone copied this manifestly disastrous idea, and it spread to all of society despite bringing ruin to everyone who adopted it. Atlas has no real explanation for how this happened,

However, Lee completely misses the boat with the last sentence above. Atlas does have a real explanation for the ultimate root of communism:

...if you ever want to see pure evil you should see the way her eyes glinted when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once... And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Although it is understandable that Lee missed it. It's so absurd it's easy to disregard the true significance of that passage. But I think there can be no doubt: Ayn Rand believes the root cause of "communism" and the views of anybody who disagrees with anything she believes, is sadism. Or to put a finer point on it - evil.

I think it's likely that Rand had undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome and she conflated the "neurotypical" view of the world with Communism. And since she could not understand the perspective of neurotypicals - and many on the autism spectrum express the same bafflement - she came to believe it must be due to willful malice.

This passage from Atlas Shrugged best expresses the almost mystical feelings that Rand's protagonists have about their enemies:

"Dagny, they're doing something we've never understood. They know something we don't, but should discover. I can't see it fully yet, but I'm beginning to see parts of it. That looter from the State Science Institute was scared when I refused to help him pretend that he was just an honest buyer of my Metal. He was scared way deep. Of what? Public opinion was just his name for it, but it's not the full name. Why should he have been scared? He has the guns, the jails, the laws - he could have seized the whole of my mills, if he wished, and nobody would have risen to defend me, and he knew it - so why should he have cared what I thought? But he did. It was I who had to tell him he wasn't a looter but a customer and friend. That's what he needed from me. And that's what Dr. Stadler needed from you - it was you who had to act as if he were a great man who had never tried to destroy your rail or my Metal. I don't know what it is that they think they accomplish - but they want us to pretend we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of that sanction, but, Dagny - I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don't give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don't give it to them. Because I know this much: that's our only chance...

...Yes," she said. "yes, I know what you've seen in them... I've felt it too - but it's only like something brushing past that's gone before I know I've seen it, like a touch of cold air, and what's left is always the feeling that I should have stopped it... I know that you're right. I can't understand their game but this much is right: We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It's some sort of fraud, very ancient and vast - and the key to break it is: to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept, to - "

This is no political or economic system they are talking about: the Soviet Communists were not known for caring what anybody thought - they did not hesitate to use force whenever they wanted, unlike Rand's "looters." And Communism doesn't express itself as "a touch of cold air."

This is about perceptual differences, not political differences. 

So the reason "communism" rules the world of Atlas Shrugged, in spite of the fact that it is presented as an objectively inferior socio-political system in the novel; and the reason that John Galt wants to destroy an entire civilization because of one bad business model is because these don't represent political or economic systems - they represent Ayn Rand's rage at living in a world dominated by neurotypicals, which "communism" embodies for her. 

Which makes sense since the major trauma of her early life (second only to the mechanical chicken incident) was the Communist revolution and the confiscation of her father's business. (Although ironically by ending prohibitions against Jews and women attending university, the Bolsheviks made it possible for Ayn Rand to get a higher education, a debt which she never acknowledged - but then she was notorious for claiming that nobody ever helped her.)

People perceiving the world in ways that Ayn Rand found incomprehensible were "evil" to her. And that's how she portrays those who are not the angular-faced producer heroes in Atlas Shrugged - as vermin that need to be exterminated, and that's why she put them on a train, listed their sins against Objectivism, and then put the train in a tunnel full of carbon monoxide. And then blew up the train. That's how Ayn Rand felt about a world controlled by neurotypicals.

And yes, there are those with Asperger's who are conscious of their hatred for neurotypicals, although of course not all people with Asperger's hate all neurotypicals.

• Wrong Planet: Why I hate neurotypicals
• Reddit: I hate neurotypical people
• Things that I hate: Neurotypicals

But on the other hand, at least one person with Asperger's describes neurotypicals as having "superpowers" for "mind-reading" abilities, and even compares this to the powers of a character on Star Trek:

A Betazoid is someone who has the power to sense others and read minds. Deanna is known for her contributions to the show as being able to sense when someone is angry, upset, anticipating battle, or even if the person is being deceitful. 

There was a particular Star Trek episode when Deanna Troi loses her Betazoid powers and she compares it to losing a sense.. such as losing sight, losing hearing, or losing a limb. It drove her CRAZY because she was unable to read people anymore. The rest of the crew was human, so they told her that losing her Betazoid powers was like stepping down to a human's level of understanding now she knew what it was like to not have that awareness. 

Even though Deanna Troi is not neurotypical NOR Autistic. The difference between her and the rest of the crew is how much awareness she had of other people. Deanna vs. a normal human is like a neurotypical vs. an Aspie. She even questioned Riker "How do you people live? Without being able to read others."

And the typical Asperger inability to read people is a problem for Rand's protagonist Hank Rearden, which she makes explicit in this passage:

Rearden had to decide how much he could risk to invest upon the sole evidence of a man's face, manner and tone of voice... 

"I guess I'm not smart enough to make the sort of deals needed nowadays," he said in answer to the unspoken thoughts the hung across his desk. 

The purchasing manager shook his head. "No Mr. Rearden, it's one or the other. The same kind of brain can't do both. Either you're good at running the mills or you're good at running Washington." 

"Maybe I ought to learn their methods." 

"You couldn't learn it and it wouldn't do you any good. You wouldn't win in any of those deals. Don't you understand? You're the one who's got something to be looted."

We'll never know for sure if Ayn Rand had Asperger's (unless we can somehow get hold of viable DNA from her I suppose) but I think that it's extremely likely, given all the evidence. Which does not explain her predilection for laissez-faire Capitalism - I think that is more explicable by her early life experiences - but it does help explain her extremely idiosyncratic presentation of the concepts of Communism and Capitalism. And speculating that she might have had Asperger's doesn't hurt anybody with the condition. Although of course such speculations would not be permitted in a world run by Social Justice Warriors like Adam Lee and friends. Which would be almost as ugly a dystopia as the world of Atlas Shrugged itself.

Bonus Rand artifact: An Actual Letter Ayn Rand Wrote To An Actual Teenage Girl

Michael Greve is an Ayn Rand-worshipping extremist

Here's an example of the mischief Ayn Rand's "philosophy" helps enable when marinated in the minds of those who are not especially bright and who lack any sense of empathy. Consider the NYTimes editorial about the efforts of Michael Greve and his gang of conservative activists to kill the Affordable Care Act:

The challengers did not innocently happen upon these words; they went all out in search of anything that might be used to gut the law they had failed to kill off once before, on constitutional grounds, in 2012. Soon after the law passed in 2010, Michael Greve, then chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is helping to finance the current suit, said, “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.”

Greve is willing to sacrifice public health for the sake of "political hygiene." The article continues:

After the challengers found the four-word “glitch,” as they initially called it, they worked backward to fabricate a story that would make it sound intentional. Congress, they claimed, sought to induce states to establish exchanges by threatening a loss of subsidies if they did not. (Not coincidentally, the challengers also traveled state to state urging officials not to set up exchanges, thus helping to create the very “crisis” they now decry.)

As soon as I heard what they were up to, I knew it was fueled by Ayn Rand brand libertarianism, and it took two seconds of Googling to discover I was right. 

Here is the abstract of a paper that Greve authored, published in 2011, entitled Atlas Croaks, Supreme Court Shrugs in which he complains that the Roberts Supreme Court is not sufficiently pro-business. Allusions to "Atlas Shrugged" are in the abstract, beginning with the title. I have highlighted others below:

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Term has confirmed, yet again, the legal commentariat’s conviction that the Roberts Court’s conservative majority is recreating an America of Ayn Rand’s imagination. States, the Court has held, may not sue to protect their citizens against out-of-state operators of coal-fired, carbon-spewing power plants. Foreign manufacturers of cutting machines that lop off operators’ limbs may sell the infernal instruments without fear of liability, so long as they do not physically enter or deliberately aim to sell in the plaintiff’s home state. Generic drug makers and vaccine producers may kill and maim their consumers, so long as their labels and products comply with perfunctory federal requirements. All drug makers may overcharge state and local government purchasers, subject only to virtually nonexistent federal administrative oversight. Corporations may force consumers into arbitration agreements; bill them to the tune of a few bucks each but, given the large numbers, for stupendous profits; and then defend against a class action on the grounds that arbitration is not made for that legal device. Also, employers may freely discriminate against millions of employees, so long as they do not inflict an injury that is sufficiently common to warrant a class action. And to protect this order, the plutocracy is constitutionally entitled to buy its own legislators: Public attempts to “level the playing field” violate the First Amendment. Full speed ahead for the Taggart Railroad!

Or maybe not. Upon inspection, the notion that the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence heralds a restoration of unbridled capitalism — or, more modestly, of reliable rules of the road for commercial actors — proves untenable, if not downright absurd. It is true that the Supreme Court often rules for business. And this past Term, unlike in preceding years, those rulings have often been the work of a narrow 5-4 or 5-3 conservative majority. Justice Elena Kagan, though recused from many cases this past Term, has found her reliably liberal voice in no time flat. She does write like a charm, though. However, the pattern is hardly unbroken. Moreover, and far more important, the conservative Justices’ pro-business decisions look like picking weeds in downtown Detroit or for that matter Mrs. Rand’s crumbling New York — well-meant, but unlikely to improve the neighborhood on a lasting basis. The point emerges in contemplation of the charter and instrument that the Supreme Court is supposed to protect: the United States Constitution.

Greve lists items he claims are, at least in the minds of "the legal commitariat" "recreating an America of Ayn Rand's imagination":

• States, the Court has held, may not sue to protect their citizens against out-of-state operators of coal-fired, carbon-spewing power plants.
• Foreign manufacturers of cutting machines that lop off operators’ limbs may sell the infernal instruments without fear of liability, so long as they do not physically enter or deliberately aim to sell in the plaintiff’s home state. 
• Generic drug makers and vaccine producers may kill and maim their consumers, so long as their labels and products comply with perfunctory federal requirements. 
• All drug makers may overcharge state and local government purchasers, subject only to virtually nonexistent federal administrative oversight. 
• Corporations may force consumers into arbitration agreements; bill them to the tune of a few bucks each but, given the large numbers, for stupendous profits; and then defend against a class action on the grounds that arbitration is not made for that legal device. 
• Also, employers may freely discriminate against millions of employees, so long as they do not inflict an injury that is sufficiently common to warrant a class action. 
• And to protect this order, the plutocracy is constitutionally entitled to buy its own legislators: Public attempts to “level the playing field” violate the First Amendment. 

Actually, this list is a mixed bag - some of the villains in "Atlas Shrugged" were crony capitalists buying their own legislators, so Rand was against "The plutocracy... constitutionally entitled to buy its own legislators." But for the most part, this is Rand's wishlist. For example:

Generic drug makers and vaccine producers may kill and maim their consumers, so long as their labels and products comply with perfunctory federal requirements

Ayn Rand (and her disciple Alan Greenspan) argued that there was no need for consumer protection because if businessmen allowed bad things to happen to their customers, they would get a bad reputation and go out of business. Problem solved. Not before people have been killed or maimed though, but that point didn't seem to concern Rand or Greenspan.

Greve seems to be saying that the Supreme Court has accomplished all these items on Ayn Rand's wish list, but he feels the Court hasn't gone far enough:

Upon inspection, the notion that the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence heralds a restoration of unbridled capitalism — or, more modestly, of reliable rules of the road for commercial actors — proves untenable, if not downright absurd. 

A cognitive disconnect occurs in this abstract because Greve describes these actions in such a way ("infernal instruments") that it sounds like he's criticizing them. You have to wonder about the mind-set of someone who writes like this. I assume he's mocking those (presumably the "legal commentariat") who are concerned about such things as industrial accidents - which would not be surprising coming from someone who lacks empathy. 

He goes on to confirm his belief that the Court, while it has done something, hasn't done enough:

...the conservative Justices’ pro-business decisions look like picking weeds in downtown Detroit or for that matter Mrs. Rand’s crumbling New York — well-meant, but unlikely to improve the neighborhood on a lasting basis.

In "Atlas Shrugged" the US economy is destroyed - hence "crumbling New York" because Rand's ubermensch heroes go "on strike" - the term "on strike" and the title of "Atlas Shrugged" were suggested to Rand by her husband Frank O'Connor. She went by "Miss Rand" not "Mrs. Rand" - her married name was Mrs. O'Connor, the name with which she used to apply for Social Security benefits.

At the end of his wish list of pro-business legal rulings Greve says "Full speed ahead for the Taggart Railroad!" One of the big moments in Atlas Shrugged is when Dagny Taggart, one of the owners of the Railroad, is speeding across America. The train goes full speed ahead the entire trip, not slowing down even when going through towns. How this was accomplished is made explicit in this passage of the novel:

Eddie Willers was watching her. He stood on the platform, surrounded by Taggart executives, division heads, civic leaders and the various local officials who had been outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour.

Whenever I read of some Rand fan proclaiming the wonders of "Atlas Shrugged" I almost invariably end up asking myself at some point "have they read the novel?" Their understanding seems to be based more on what they wished Rand said, rather than what she actually said.

I am inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, assuming that they simply didn't have suitable reading comprehension, or perhaps they were skimming, when they got to the part where it is mentioned that Ayn Rand's heroes bribe and threaten local officials to get their way. 

But in the case of Michael Greve, I suspect he's perfectly happy with bribing and threatening anybody who stands in the way of "unbridled capitalism."

Rand blogging

I'm doing another reading of my DARK MARKET play in a week, and this time for a director I've worked with in the past and whom I hope to work with again. So I will be doing some re-writing and so will have Ayn Rand on the brain this week (ugh!) and will be doing a lot of Rand-blogging.

First up: Krugman is not impressed by Alan Greenspan, and in fact:

I guess we wait for confirmation before adding this to the file of examples establishing Maestrodamus as the worst ex-Fed chairman in history. But consider the notion that this group regards AG as an authority figure. 

Never mind the bubble denial; almost five years have passed since Greenspan declared that we were on the verge of becoming Greece, Greece I tell you, and wrote one of the most awesomely terrible passages in the history of economic policy:

Despite the surge in federal debt to the public during the past 18 months—to $8.6 trillion from $5.5 trillion—inflation and long-term interest rates, the typical symptoms of fiscal excess, have remained remarkably subdued. This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency that can have dire consequences.

Yep: he was annoyed at the markets for failing to deliver the crisis he was expecting, and considered it “regrettable” that the crisis had not arrived.

I've been a fan of Krugman since at least 2001 when I realized he was one of the few pundits not swept up by the raging war-fever in response to the 9-11 attacks. So his detestation of Ayn Rand and her admirers, which of course very much includes Greenspan, is just a bonus. But I love it so much.

And Krugman has more than a passing acquaintance with her work, as was obvious to me by his blog post entitled Obamacare, the Unknown Ideal - you have to be pretty up on your Rand bibliography to get that one - Rand published a collection of essays called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal which includes pieces by Greenspan.

I Tech has made the first essay What is Capitalism? available online in (poorly photocopied images) PDF format.

Ayn Rand was not erudite

I bought "Radicals for Capitalism, A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement" by Brian Doherty and read a fair amount of it yesterday. 

For some reason I thought this would be an even-handed view of libertarianism, perhaps due to the word "freewheeling" but Doherty is a true believer, a senior editor at the Koch brothers-funded Reason magazine, and a big fan of Ayn Rand. 

You can tell he's in the Objectivist tank because he makes the usual complaint made by Rand fans and followers - poor Ayn Rand was misunderstood and disrespected - with the implication that the cause is liberals who are just too stupid to get Rand. 

This Randroid attitude is possible thanks to Objectivists' mind-boggling obtuseness. Here Doherty gripes about philosophers' attitude towards Rand:

Rarely do other philosophers comment on her without hostility or incomprehension. The first instance of measured criticism was an edited volume by Den Uyl and Rasmussen with critiques and commentary on Rand by a variety of scholars, most of them disagreeing with her conclusions or methods. But the book at least treats her as a fellow player in the philosophy game. Barbara Branden says that she knew NBI's main goal had been achieved when Rand's New York Times obituary called her a "novelist and philosopher." It is not an honor many professional philosophers would grant Rand.

What Doherty neglects to mention - deliberately or out of standard Objectivist obtuseness I cannot say - is that Rand refused to participate in any of the scholarship required of professional philosophers. In her delusional arrogance she thought she would simply be accepted as a philosopher, since her sycophants had declared her to be one, and because she wrote a shitty sci-fi fantasia of a novel that sold well. Her one-time friend (until she ex-communicated him for publicly disagreeing with her) the philosopher John Hospers wrote:

I told her that if she wanted to become known in philosophical circles, she should write a piece or two and submit it to the Journal of Philosophy or the Philosophical Review or the Review of Metaphysics. After its publication, I said, it would be studied, commented on, and probably criticized. She would then respond to these criticisms, which again would evoke more from others, and at that point, I said, "I guarantee that you will be known as a philosopher." But she never did this. She did not want to enter the arena of public give-and-take with them. She wanted them to come to her. What she wanted of philosophers, other than recognition, is not easy to say. I am sure she would have cursed them soundly if they offered criticisms. Even a mild criticism would often send her to the stratosphere in anger. 

Doherty's own incomprehension is apparent when he writes:

Many may identify themselves with Roark and Galt without the real stuff to back it up, which is the root of the popular disdain for the Randroid; a Roark type who isn't actually an accomplished genius can be insufferable.

This is a perfect description of Rand herself. She claimed that she and her husband and the Brandens were the living embodiments of the Ubermensch "producers" in Atlas Shrugged, at war with the "second-hander" moochers and parasites. Meanwhile Rand got almost all her understanding of philosophy second-hand, and Doherty knows this, and yet that somehow still doesn't give him a clue. He writes:

Rand was not erudite; most of her education in contemporary philosophy came from things she was told by philosopher friends, like Peikoff or John Hospers (before he was banished.) Modern culture, except for her beloved detective and adventure novels, drove her to fits. She didn’t read much, and most of what she knew about the world in the last decades of her life came from the New York Times. Her library, Hessen recalls, consisted largely of “books autographed and sent to her from other Random House authors, like Dr. Seuss or whatever, and books from research done in connection with railroads or architecture or steel. She never went to bookstores.

"Not erudite" is an understatement. This is a woman with pretensions to philosophy, and yet she utterly lacked intellectual curiosity and made no effort to read anything but pulp fiction. There are cab drivers and domestic workers who read more widely than Ayn Rand did. 

Another is-it-deliberate-or-not sign of Doherty's obtuseness is his apparent mystification over why Rand's work provokes the response that it does, even from conservatives:

Still, critics such as Whittaker Chambers (and many other Rand critics share this view) who hear in Rand's writings a stern voice commanding "To a gas chamber - go!" are themselves revealing a crabbed sensibility.

This isn't the first time I've wondered if a Randroid has actually read "Atlas Shrugged." 

The reason Chambers said that is because in one chapter of the novel Rand literally sends characters she hates - she lists their sins against Objectivism - into a tunnel full of carbon monoxide. Then she blows up the train. And the cause of the disaster is a politician who is trying to get to a voter rally on time - apparently Rand's dystopia is a fully-functional democracy. And the sins against Objectivism include taking a government loan to start a business, writing a play that criticizes businessmen and being married to a man with a government job - Rand kills the woman and her children too for that sin. 

Rand was a deranged extremist, and you have to wonder what is wrong with people like Doherty that they don't get that.

One of the favorite Rand-fan defenses against her critics is to mention how well "Atlas Shrugged" sells, as if popularity indicates excellence. Doherty:

Her books continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year and will continue to enthrall future generations - and continue to lead a certain savvy percentage to appreciate the necessity of personal liberty and limited government.

I wouldn't be so quick to crow about the popularity of Rand's work, if I was her fans. The Bible is consistently the top book listed as a favorite of Americans. Rand herself was an  atheist (I like to think that besides her love of cats, it's the only thing we have in common), and I would argue that the continuing greater popularity of the Bible over Atlas Shrugged merely indicates that Shrugged doesn't have quite as much mythology, right-wing wishful thinking and violence to satisfy the ignorant and the stupid as well as the Bible does. But you can't fault Rand for not trying.

Democracy: why we can't have nice things.

By way of Krugman is this slightly dated but nevertheless brilliant discussion by Cory Robin of the conservative mind.

I found this especially interesting because I had a reading of the second draft of my DARK MARKET play on Sunday, and the actors and I were discussing the mysteries of the conservative way of thinking. I suggested that one of the most important features of the conservative view of the world is hierarchy - and to my delight Krugman agreed in his column today:

And why this hatred of government in the public interest? Well, the political scientist Corey Robin argues that most self-proclaimed conservatives are actually reactionaries. That is, they’re defenders of traditional hierarchy — the kind of hierarchy that is threatened by any expansion of government, even (or perhaps especially) when that expansion makes the lives of ordinary citizens better and more secure. I’m partial to that story, partly because it helps explain why climate science and health economics inspire so much rage.

I followed Krugman's link to the Robin article and found more good stuff. 

Robin:

No simple defense of one's own place and privileges, the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the capitalist, with his vision of the employer's untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father's rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his way subscribes to this statement, from the 19th century, of the conservative creed: "To obey a real superior ... is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."

One thing he seems to be saying, although not explicitly is that this conservative view  -  a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull - is likely to be unpopular with many people and so they hide their real views behind a facade:

Playing the part of the dull-witted country squire, conservatives have embraced the position of the historian F.J.C. Hearnshaw that "it is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit." While the aristocratic overtones of that discourse no longer resonate, the conservative still holds on to the label of the untutored and the unlettered; it's part of his populist charm and demotic appeal. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatism is an idea-driven praxis, and no amount of preening from the right or polemic from the left can reduce or efface the catalog of mind one finds there.

One of the useful aspects of Ayn Rand is that she hid nothing of what she thought - thanks to her own inability to dissemble (which I suspect is the result of her undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome) combined with her publisher's disinclination to edit Atlas Shrugged for fear of a Rand tantrum resulting in the loss of income, we get a pure unfiltered hit of the belief that:

a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. 

Boy howdy, is that the essence of the Rand world-view. And because she was such a bad novelist, not only is the world of Atlas Shrugged ugly, brutish and dull, as the result of the tyranny of the worser men over the better, but the worser men themselves are ugly, brutish and dull.

And Rand knew exactly what to do with them - put them onto a train, list their thought crimes, send the train into a tunnel filled with carbon monoxide (thanks to the insistence of a politician wanting to make it to a voter rally in time) and then blow up the train.

You can see why the savvier conservatives of the National Review found her such an embarrassment, and wrote scathing reviews of Atlas Shrugged. While they may not have hated worser men enough to want to see them all dead, they certainly agreed that, fundamentally, it's thanks to democracy that we can't have nice things.

And if you consider a palace the ultimate in nice things, then this view of the world makes sense. Concentration of wealth allows for the gratuitous creation of beauty, and there are those who covet a Louis XVI chair and will never be able to appreciate the utilitarian elegance of an IKEA chair. 

The rich vein of Ayn Rand-based comedy

It's always good fun to parody the "philosophy" of Ayn Rand, although it is really easy, to be perfectly honest. I did it myself in my play DARK MARKET. In fact, it's the first thing she says in the play:

   GREENSPAN
Miss Rand? Are you here to haunt me like Jacob Marley?

   AYN RAND
How dare you! You know I hate “Christmas Carol”! That tale of an heroic businessman, Ebenezer Scrooge, forced by supernatural beings to give his wealth to that moocher Bob Crachett and his family of worthless parasites. 

Good times. And of course Objectivists really do hate "A Christmas Carol" as I documented a couple of years ago.

So of course I enjoyed this recent New Yorker parody. The conceit is that Ayn Rand is reviewing children's movies. My favorite:

“The Muppets Take Manhattan”
This movie was a disappointment. The Muppets do not take Manhattan at all. They merely visit it. —No stars.

Nathaniel Branden is dead

Just as I'm completing the first full draft of my play DARK MARKET, about Ayn Rand's influence on Alan Greenspan, and indirectly, the 2008 economic meltdown, I find out that Nathaniel Branden died on December 3.

Reason, the magazine for libertarians and therefore, worshippers of Rand, said this:

Then, after Rand broke from him and all "official" Objectivists were required to revile him, Branden was a living example that intelligent admiration for and advocacy of Rand's ideas need not be tied in with thoughtless fealty to Rand as a person, or to the pronouncements of those who controlled her estate, with all the attendant flaws and occasional irrationality: that one need not be an official Randian to spread the best of Objectivism. As late as 2010, Branden published print versions of his NBI lectures helping systematize her ideas under the title The Vision of Ayn Rand. 

Branden was a friend to Reason over the years. An interview he gave to the magazine back in 1971 was vital in breaking the then very-small-circulation publication up into the thousands in circulation.

And of course Branden was Rand's boyfriend for several years and she broke with him and cursed him and destroyed his Nathaniel Branden Institute, which was devoted to promoting her work, when he refused to resume having sex with the apostle of reason. According to his memoir:

"Getting tired of a serious, philosophical life?" she asked sharply. "You're on your own now in every way that counts. Unless you mean you want to be rid of me." 

"Free of you? I want us to be friends forever." 

"Friends is not what I'm talking about! What new irrationality is this? Do you think I would have dedicated Atlas Shrugged to a friend? I've told the whole world that you are Objectivism. Do you think I would say that about a friend? What's the matter with you? Don't you attach meaning to the words you speak? Where has your mind gone?" 

The message was clear - if I were not in love with her, that meant my mind was gone and I was a traitor to our philosophy. This was Ayn's notion of giving me every chance to withdrawal from our "romance."

Who is John Galt? A homicidal maniac

In the comments section of this post entitled Atlas Shrugged Humor somebody posted a link to the recently released Atlas Shrugged Part III.

I don't know if this person bothered to actually read what I wrote about Atlas Shrugged, or maybe they don't even care - they're hoping that anybody will watch the movie, even for free, even if they despise Ayn Rand.

It looks like the third installation of Atlas Shrugged has bombed even bigger than the first two:

That must be the fault of those damn freedom-hating socialists, or perhaps it’s due to the fact that so few of the Tea Party types the series’ producers once hoped would queue up are, er, the literate sort. Or maybe it’s just that the prior installments weren’t very good movies, and it should surprise few that this last one is the worst of the lot. You can’t really blame the filmmakers: Stuck with a budget that again halves its immediate predecessor’s (now down to $5 million), they’re hapless to convey the grand scale of events Rand intended.

More of my opinions about Atlas Shrugged.

It's good timing for me, since I am working on my play DARK MARKET, getting it ready for a reading this Sunday. The influence of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged over Alan Greenspan is a huge issue in my play.

Krugman on Bundy & friends

KRUGMAN:

So what were people like Sean Hannity of Fox News, who went all in on Mr. Bundy’s behalf, thinking? Partly, no doubt, it was the general demonization of government — if someone looks as if he is defying Washington, he’s a hero, never mind the details. Partly, one suspects, it was also about race — not Mr. Bundy’s blatant racism, but the general notion that government takes money from hard-working Americans and gives it to Those People. White people who wear cowboy hats while profiting from government subsidies just don’t fit the stereotype. 

Most of all, however — or at least that’s how it seems to me — the Bundy fiasco was a byproduct of the dumbing down that seems ever more central to the way America’s right operates. 

American conservatism used to have room for fairly sophisticated views about the role of government. Its economic patron saint used to be Milton Friedman, who advocated aggressive money-printing, if necessary, to avoid depressions. It used to include environmentalists who took pollution seriously but advocated market-based solutions like cap-and-trade or emissions taxes rather than rigid rules. 

But today’s conservative leaders were raised on Ayn Rand’s novels and Ronald Reagan’s speeches (as opposed to his actual governance, which was a lot more flexible than the legend). They insist that the rights of private property are absolute, and that government is always the problem, never the solution.

I always love it when Krugman gets a little Rand-bashing in. And speaking of Bundy, wasn't I just talking a couple of weeks ago about freaks who claim that slavery was good for black people?

Here we go gathering nuts

Speaking of magazine archives, I now have access to The New Republic's archive which goes back even further than the New Yorker's - all the way back to 1914 (the New Yorker was founded in 1925.)

I've never paid much attention to The New Republic - I've always preferred the Nation for politics and the New Yorker for the arts - although there is plenty of cross-over between TNR and TNY, especially via Hendrik Hertzberg.

But my general impression of the New Republic, especially during the Bush years was that it was centrist or even at times right-leaning. As anybody who reads this blog can tell, I am allergic to rightwingers.

So considering how lukewarm I am about the magazine, why did I subscribe? Because I just had to get access to a review of Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" which is entitled, irresistably "Here We Go Gathering Nuts."

I've been out of the Ayn Rand loop since my break with Daylight Atheism and its Social Justice Warrior censorship tendencies, but was brought back in thanks to the Mighty Krug-man, who referenced the Rand book in his blog post Obamacare, the Unknown Ideal. In addition to a jab at Ayn Rand the piece contains a smack-down of the always-deserving rightwing NYTimes op-ed columnist Ross Douthat:

No, I haven’t lost my mind — or suddenly become an Ayn Rand disciple. It’s not my ideal; in a better world I’d call for single-payer, and a significant role for the government in directly providing care. 

But Ross Douthat, in the course of realistically warning his fellow conservatives that Obamacare doesn’t seem to be collapsing, goes on to tell them that they’re going to have to come up with a serious alternative. 

But Obamacare IS the conservative alternative, and not just because it was originally devised at the Heritage Foundation. It’s what a health-care system that does what even conservatives say they want, like making sure that people with preexisting conditions can get coverage, has to look like if it isn’t single-payer.

It's yet another excellent mini-essay by Krugman, by all means go read it.

So Krugman provided a link to the Wiki of "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", and the Wiki mentioned the New Republic review and with such a great title (I LOL'd when I read it) I knew I must read it without delay.

The New Republic archives has six articles that mention Ayn Rand. Curiously, it contains no reviews of Rand's fiction but does contain reviews of her essay collections, including The Romantic Manifesto and For the New Intellectual. I'm looking forward to reading them all. Especially since I want to get my money's worth, the review of Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, while good, is pretty short for a $20 subscription.

I've discussed the book on this blog before - "nutty" is a good way to describe it, but then, it's a good way to describe Rand's "philosophy" generally. The review, written by Honor Tracy (pseudonym of Lilbush Wingfield, a British travel writer and novelist) notes Rand's bizarre habit of quoting from her own novels to support her socio-political points.

...Does she, can she, really mean all she says? And does most of what she says mean anything at all? Take this vivid little sketch of our time:

"With most of the world in ruins, with the voice of philosophy silent and the last remnants of civilization vanishing undefended, in an unholy alliance of savagery and decadence, bloody thugs are fighting over the spoils, while the cynical pragmatists left in charge and way out of their depth are trying to drown their panic at Europe's cocktail parties where emasculated men and hysterical, white-lipped women determine the fate of the world by declaring that socialism is chic."

(Rand's description of European cocktail parties sound just like the parties in "Atlas Shrugged.")

Quite a lot of the book is as funny as this and one is repeatedly tempted to quote her. She evidently feels the same, as an extraordinary amount of space is filled by excerpts from, or references to, her earlier writings, with which she takes it for granted that all are familiar. "Do you remember that scene in Atlas Shrugged etc?" she will gravely inquirer, or "Consider the growth of socialized medicine throughout the world... then read the statement of Dr. Hendricks in Atlas Shrugged..." This instruction, by the way, can be ignored: it appears on page 157, by which time the reader will easily divine what Dr. Hendricks has to say on that or any subject without troubling himself to verify.

I'll definitely be checking out more of Honor Tracy's work. 

Daylight Atheism, Adam Lee, censorship and Social Justice Warriors

For six months I was a frequent and enthusiastic participant in Adam Lee's ongoing discussion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at his site Daylight Atheism, but on Sunday, February 23 I quit because I was censored.

Although I am an atheist, I didn't need confirmation that atheists can be just as authoritarian and as devout worshippers of authority figures as any religionist - I had seen what the mostly atheist followers of Richard Dawkins had done when a woman in the atheist community dared to express an opinion with which Richard Dawkins disagreed. And then of course there is atheist hero Sam Harris, defender of torture and ethnic profiling.

From very early on in my analysis of Atlas Shrugged, it struck me that it was very likely that Ayn Rand had Asperger's syndrome. When I googled Ayn Rand and Asperger's I found one of Rand's fans making the same suggestion:

...It is almost certain that Rand had Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that has only come into greater awareness since the early 1990s...  

...It is possible that neither  author knew enough about Asperger’s to make the necessary connections, but there is abundant evidence for this proposition, particularly in Heller’s description of Rand’s childhood. It is perhaps just as well that neither author explicitly considers this possibility, because it would be all too easy to pathologise Rand, leading to a reductionist psycho-biography that would have done disservice to her ideas and influence. 

Descriptions of Rand's character from many sources as well as video evidence make it clear that she had traits much in common with what are said to be Asperger's traits. And an important reason for why "Atlas Shrugged" doesn't work as an actual critique of real-world socioeconomic systems, is because Rand probably viewed the world through undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome. It is the theory that makes the most sense.

Now I'm certainly opened to arguments against the notion that Rand had Asperger's, but I didn't get arguments last September when I first brought up the subject at Daylight Atheism - I got abuse. And Adam Lee was perfectly fine with this - which of course should have been a red flag to me then. An anonymous coward (although his true identity appears to be Alexander Weaver) who goes by the screen name Azkyroth, who rarely made any substantial contributions to the Atlas Shrugged conversation was the worst offender:

Azkyroth  Nancy McClernan • 6 months ago

The book will make so much more sense if you look at it as revenge-porn by someone with undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome

No, it doesn't.

And fuck you back.

If you follow the "No, it doesn't" link you can see that Azkyroth's evidence for why I am wrong is a TV Tropes article that supports everything I said - the traits listed as indicative of Asperger's are very much like descriptions of Ayn Rand in the two biographies and two memoirs by her biggest sycophants, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. None of these authors suggests that Rand had Asperger's but their reports of her behavior aligns very much with the descriptions.

Adam Lee tried to turn this into an issue of the wrongness of diagnosing the dead. First, there is a long tradition in literary analysis of diagnoses of dead writers and Ayn Rand is certainly not the first famous dead person about whom it as been speculated had Asperger's.

But also, hypocritically, Lee never had a problem with anybody suggesting that Ayn Rand was a psychopath.

The idea that Rand was a psychopath is absurd - the reason that psychopaths are so scary is because they are masters of faking emotions they don't feel. If there was ever anybody who lacked the ability to fake, it was Ayn Rand.

Now I have no direct experience with people with Asperger's as far as I know. A cousin of mine has twin boys who have Asperger's but I've never met them. We are Facebook friends though. So I have no negative feelings about people with Asperger's and my understanding of the traits of Asperger's comes mainly from people who have Asperger's talking about Asperger's.

I explained this to the people at Daylight Atheism, but it did no good. Instead Azykyroth claimed that my speculating that Ayn Rand had Asperger's was the equivalent of being a racist. I know that sounds absurd, but here is a screen shot of the comment:

And you can see the results - rather than refuting Azykroth's bogus comparison to racism, instead Adam Lee told me to STFU. 

So it seems that as far as Adam Lee is concerned, the mere speculation that somebody that he and his friends don't like has Asperger's is the equivalent of racism.

Apparently all along Adam Lee was a Social Justice Warrior and I didn't realize it. Possibly because my understanding of SJW was that if you disagree with them about something you are accused of racism. But it seems that another method is to accuse somebody of "ablism" and then compare that to racism. So to disagree with a SJW you may be accused of racism, or alternately, one degree from racism.

Azykyroth wasn't content merely to suggest I was an "ablist" - that wasn't vicious enough:

Azkyroth's lie about me having an "obsessive need to demonize people with AS" was allowed to stand, but my defense of myself was deleted. And of course Azkyroth presents no evidence at all that I have ever harmed any living person by my speculations that Ayn Rand may have had Asperger's - but that isn't necessary. Social Justice Warriors don't have to provide evidence for any of their vicious attacks - they argue by assertion and evidence counts for nothing.

My assumption is that although I only know Azkyroth as an anonymous online coward, Adam Lee is a friend of this person in real life, and so feels compelled to side with him. But it's possible that Lee feels that the hypocritical prohibition against the topic of Ayn Rand and Asperger's is perfectly right and just without any personal considerations.

In any case, I saw no point in continuing to participate in a discussion run by Social Justice Warriors. Adam Lee has no shame about publicly siding with liars and unhinged defamers and feels no shame in censoring good-faith arguments on behalf of liars and unhinged defamers. But that's what Social Justice Warriors do.