Atlas Shrugged Chapter 8 - reasons to be a bad novelist - plus, I am not alone

One of the most stunning aspects of Atlas Shrugged fandom is how many fans declare that Ayn Rand was a good novelist. You can read the praise for yourself on the Amazon comments for the novel.

Now I can see why fanatical right-wingers would defend the novel - because it is in complete agreement with their extreme us-against-them view of the world, let's kill the moochers, etc. etc. But to claim it's a good novel? By what twisted bizarro world standard could Atlas Shrugged have literary value?

I happened to read Chapter 8, The John Galt Line, this evening and it is a veritable catalog of why Ayn Rand was such a truly bad novelist. Let us count the ways:

The chapter starts out with a two-page monologue by Eddie Willers, Dagny's loyal flunkie. I have to say that I spaced out a little while reading it because while the point of the monologue is sheer exposition, the exposition reiterates for the hundredth time the message of the book, which is that the Randian Supermen are superior, and the moochers are inferior. So at about the half-way point I had the impression that Willers was talking to somebody on the phone and we could only hear his side of the conversation - as if this was a play instead of a novel. But actually no, he's talking to somebody who is right there in the room with him. I had to go back and check because the reference to the other person is so fleeting it made no impression:

The worker smiled, looking at Eddie Willers across the table.
"I feel like a fugitive," said Eddie Willers. "I guess you know why..."

That's it. "The worker smiled." The entire next two pages are Eddie Willers' stream-of-consciousness to the worker.

As I recall, one of the signs of Aspergers is "one-sided verbosity" and this example is so extreme because it's in the context of a novel, and it breaks all the rules of writing a scene containing two alleged people. Although you could make the argument that Rand doesn't consider a worker people.

But the one-sidedness is so extreme that the smiling worker is apparently asking Willers questions but Rand can't even be bothered to write out what the worker says:

No, no, I never asked her why she chose that name. A sort of challenge I guess... I don't know to whom... Oh, it doesn't matter, it doesn't mean a thing, there isn't any John Galt, but I wish she hadn't used it. I don't like it, do you?... You do? You don't sound very happy saying it."

Rand even has Willers say that the worker doesn't sound happy, as if to underline the fact that she couldn't be bothered to just let the worker talk.

Now this isn't some kind of literary device. For the first seven chapters the conversations in the book were written in the standard way. She just suddenly felt like giving Eddie Willers an expositional monologue without any tiresome talking from the other side.

Or consider this tortured sentence a few pages later, while Dagny is having a sort of braniac amour:

A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience...

But even more egregious than Rand's crappy technique is her inability to create a logical, coherent world for these Supermen and moochers to dwell in. Consider this strange juxtaposition - apparently this world has a free and open stock market and yet the "businessmen" are idiots:

A few businessmen thought that one should think about the possibility that there might be commercial value in Rearden Metal. They undertook a survey of the question. They did not hire metallurgists to examine the samples, nor engineers to visit the site of the construction. They took a public poll. Ten thousand people, guaranteed to represent every existing kind of brain, were asked the question: "Would you ride on the John Galt Line?" The answer was, overwhelmingly, "No, sir-ree!" 

No voices were heard in public defense of Rearden Metal. And nobody attached significance to the fact that the stock of Taggert Transcontinental was rising on the market; very slowly, almost furtively.

OK so this is a world in which most businessmen don't even think that one should think about the possibility that there might be commercial value in Rearden Metal. And of the few who do, they don't hire metallurgists to test the metal, they survey "every existing kind of brain."

So that begs the question: who is buying stock in Rearden Metal? And on what basis are they buying the stock? Because in spite of the fact that this world has a free and open stock market, its newspapers are tightly controlled by some all-powerful anti-fact monopoly:

No space was given by the newspapers to the progress of the construction of the John Galt Line. No reporter was sent to look at the scene. The general policy of hte press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. "There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts."

So if even businessmen don't care about facts, how does the stock market in this world work? Hank Rearden brags how much money he's going to make on it by converting Dagny's bonds into stock, and Dagny brags about being a major stockholder in the John Galt Line, so it must be a legitimate financial market. But who else is playing the stock market? Only Randian Supermen? But if there are that many of them, enough to populate a functioning stock market, how is it that their world is completely controlled by the moochers?

In other words, Ayn Rand, who liked to think of herself and her supporters as supremely rational has created a world that does not add up.

And then there's the fact that apparently the one and only test of a bridge made of Rearden Metal will be to drive a train full of people over it.

The chief metallurgist of Associated Steel (who must be unemployed since not even profit-seeking business men will hire metallurgists in Rand World) opines:

"Why no, I don't say that the bridge will collapse... I don't say it at all. I just say that if I had any children, I wouldn't let them ride on the first train that's going to cross that bridge. But it's only a personal preference, nothing more, just because I'm overly fond of children."

So apparently the government run by the Moochers is unable to require the testing of the structural soundness of a bridge before allowing it to open for business.

And then there is the logistics of the John Galt line test drive, going from Cheyenne Wyoming to Denver Colorado (103 miles according to Google Maps - and apparently Rand World has cities with the same names as ones in the real United States):

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.

So the Moocher government, which up until now has been a formidable opponent against the Randian Supermen, couldn't figure out that all they had to do to prevent the John Galt line from its public-endangering test run was to enforce the existing zoning laws.

Who exactly bribed these local officials? Rand doesn't say - she uses the passive "had been bribed" - but obviously it was somebody acting on behalf of the John Galt Line. So the mighty individualists are able to achieve their crowning moment of glory in the most pedestrian way possible - through the corruption of petty officials.

And let us stop and consider for a moment why public officials would allow themselves to take bribes to permit a train to barrel through their town at dangerously high speeds. Clearly their actions were not for the public good. No the bribed officials were acting out of selfishness.

And as Hank Rearden is constantly bragging, selfishness is the best thing ever. Ayn Rand must believe that the selfishness of public officials in taking bribes is a very good thing indeed.

There are so many other examples of this brain-damaged incoherence and failure of rationality. But for now, I will go to the end of chapter eight, which made me recall the character Louis in ANGELS IN AMERICA saying to former lover Joe Pitt, after they'd just had a vicious fight: "it was like a sex scene in an Ayn Rand novel."

The shock became numbness spreading through her body- she felt the tight pressure in her throat and stomach - she was conscious of a silent convulsion that made her unable to breathe. But what she felt, without words for it, was: Yes, Hank, yes - now - because  it is part of the same battle, in some way that I can't name... because it is our being against theirs... our great capacity, for which they torture us, the capacity of happiness...

Apparently Dagny can't stop thinking about the parasites even while she's being uber-ravished by Hank Rearden.

It only gets more S&M from there. And remember, this book was praised by the former head of the Federal Reserve like this:

"Atlas Shrugged" is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. 

We will get to the perishing of parasites in Atlas Shrugged soon enough.

I guess I was foolish to think that I was the first to  live blog Atlas Shrugged. This person beat me to it by a couple of years. Although she seems to have not finished it yet, which is a worrying sign for me. I am looking forward to reading her posts, she notices things that I missed - she's absolutely correct in her comment about a scene at the Rearden anniversary party:

The talking heads tell ghost stories about a Norwegian pirate named Ragnar Danneskjöld, exactly as if he were Bloody Mary and they were trying to conjure him up in a bathroom mirror.

And thanks to one of the comments on the post, I discovered this hysterical Atlas Shrugged parody. It's a pitch-perfect rendition of Rand's style and I laughed out loud several times, especially here:

 A distinctive sound caught Dragnie’s ear as she neared the main entrance lobby. It was the sound of a human voice, emanating from the school’s auditorium. She felt herself drawn involuntarily toward it, as if something in her unconscious were responding to something of which she was not conscious.

Ayn Rand's theory of mind

Well I gotta say, no topic has brought strangers out of the woodwork to comment on this blog more quickly than my ongoing real-time review of Atlas Shrugged. Last week there were intellectually incurious types who found a single post about Atlas Shrugged on this blog and never ventured out of that one post.

The same is true of Michael R. Brown, a Randian fanatic who came to this blog and posted on it just so he could tell me that it was a waste of space.

Like the other Objectivists, this one also lacks intellectual curiosity, not bothering to venture off that one blog post (according to my web statistics) to see what else I've said about Rand.

Well nobody said intellectual curiosity was a virtue for a cult member.

Most of the people who like Rand are right-wingers, so it's always a surprise when right-wingers critique Rand like this piece in the National Review. Although it is the National Review, founded by William B. Fuckley (as the Reverend Bookburn likes to call him), who never warmed to Rand because her atheism made the Baby Jesus cry.

But the piece contains an Atlas Shrugged spoiler that made me re-evaluate Rand: here I thought she was a sick fuck - but based on the revelation in the NR critique, she's an even sicker fuck than I previously imagined.

It does give me an incentive to continue reading though, to at least get to the bit about the gas train - one of Rand's final solutions for the "moochers."

But before I continue reading Atlas Shrugged I have to go back to Rand's inability to intuit what people are feeling - the ability to do so is called the "theory of mind" which is impaired in somebody with Asperger's Syndrome:

Theory of mind is based on empathy, the ability to feel for others and put yourself in their situation. Being able to do so will make interacting socially much easier. Understanding the emotions people go through will give you the ability to predict their behavior which will effect social interaction. Knowing what to expect will help you know how to respond to the situation. To children who are unable to take into consideration how others might feel, think or respond, the world can be a terrifying place to be.

I found this fascinating Sally and Anne Test designed to evaluate a child's theory of mind skills. As the test result discussion says:

In order to get the test right, the child has to be able to put itself (sic) in the shoes of Sally. 

Sally does not know the ball has been replaced and the right answer of the test will have to be: Sally will search for the ball in the basket. 

Children with Asperger generally will say: Sally will find the ball in the box because that is where it is! 

In spite of the necessity to change perspective 20% of children with Asperger will give the right answer: sally will search the ball in the basket.
Most children with Asperger can answer this right when they are older and more experienced. 

Children without Asperger Syndrome will have no trouble giving the right answer: Sally will search the ball in the basket. 

So the discussion mentions what a neurotypical child will probably say, and what the child with Asperger's Syndrome is likely to say.

But what might the child with Asperger's say about the child who says that Sally will look for the ball in the basket?

Would the child with Asperger's say the neurotypical child is stupid because they gave the "wrong" answer?

Something else of interest from the same web site, asperger-advice.com:

Due to misunderstanding their behavior, adults with Aspergers can be seen as selfish by their peer group members. Other unfair labels can be: egoistic, cold, rigid or uncaring. Their behavior might appear to be unkind or callous. This kind of labelling is unfair and has nothing to do with behaving inappropriately on purpose. Adults with Asperger syndrome are neurologically unable to see things from the other persons point of view. They are frequently told by their peers or partners that their actions or remarks are considered painful or rude which comes as a shock to them since they were never aware of this in the first place. It’s therefore important to get a diagnosis so people around them understand their behavior better. 

How often does one of the "moochers" in Atlas Shrugged accuse a Randian hero of being selfish, egoistic,  etc? All the fucking time.

Reading a scene in Chapter 7 of Atlas Shrugged made me think about Rand's lack of a theory of mind. When Dagny visits d'Anconia's old college professor, Dr. Stadler, she asks him to explain why the State Science Institute he runs has come out against Rearden Metal. He says:

...if you consider that for thirteen years this Institute has had a department of metallurgical research, which has cost over twenty million dollars and has produced nothing but a new silver polish and a new anti-corrosive preparation, which, I believe, is not so good as the old ones - you can imagine what the reaction will be if some private individual comes out with a product that revolutionizes the entire science of metallurgy and proves to be sensationally successful!

Stadler then gives his reasons for this response to the sensationally successful Rearden Metal:

...Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by rational argument. The mind is powerless against them...

Now people like superior goods. They will generally pay more for superior goods. So if Rearden Metal is that awesome, why wouldn't people like it? Well in the case of the metallurgists at the State Science Institute, they don't like Rearden Metal because it threatens their own rational self-interest. They may not be the best metallurgists in the world, certainly not compared to Randian Superman Hank Rearden, but they are smart enough to understand that if Rearden Metal makes their work look bad, it's possible they could lose their jobs, or the very least, suffer from a loss of status. People care about income and social standing.

Coming out against Rearden Metal may be corrupt and in fact harmful to society - dare one say selfish? - but it's a rational, strategic move on the part of the SSI workers. But only if you are willing to grant that they have their own minds, their own motivations, their own point of view.

Instead of granting those things, Rand has the revered teacher of d'Anconia and Galt and the Norwegian pirate explain that it's because the people at SSI are not open to truth, reason or rational argument. They are "nothing but vicious animals" according to Stadler.

And Ayn Rand knows just what to do with those vicious animals who are too stupid to reason with. More about that soon.

For the record, a small sampling of people with autism spectrum disorder do not believe Rand had Aspergers.

The nays have it

To be honest, I was pretty confident that the vote would go against changing the NYCPlaywrights no-fee policy, which is why I had no qualms about posting the poll. The no-change forces won by a handy 80%.

I suspected sentiment was against posting calls for submissions that charged a submission fee but I didn't really have empirical evidence. Now I do. So if anybody ever complains about the policy I can say in all honesty that most people like it.

I certainly like it. I believe it's an insult to ask playwrights to pay for someone to read their script - or not. The fact is that there is virtually no guarantee that your script will even be read, which means that the fee-submission scenario is ripe for abuse. And let's face it, if somebody can pull a scam, it's probable that somebody is pulling a scam.

What really impressed me was how many people were willing to go on the record in support of their opinion which I posted (by explicit permission) on the NYCPlaywrights web site. Not too shabby at all.

Asperger's Shrugged - chapters 6 & 7

Atlas Shrugged makes so much more sense if you don't read it as a pro-capitalist screed  crossed with an ubermenschen romance but rather as someone with Asperger's Syndrome expressing her incomprehension and hostility towards a world dominated by neurotypicals.

That's the only way I was able to get through chapters 6 and 7 of the damn thing this weekend.

So what are the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome? Well according to the Mayo Clinic web site these are some:

1. Engaging in one-sided, long-winded conversations, without noticing if the listener is listening or trying to change the subject
2. Displaying unusual nonverbal communication, such as lack of eye contact, few facial expressions, or awkward body postures and gestures
3. Showing an intense obsession with one or two specific, narrow subjects, such as baseball statistics, train schedules, weather or snakes
4. Appearing not to understand, empathize with or be sensitive to others' feelings
5. Having a hard time "reading" other people or understanding humor
6. Speaking in a voice that is monotonous, rigid or unusually fast
7. Moving clumsily, with poor coordination

Certainly items 1, 3, 4 and 5 all seem to apply.

This is how Rand describes the relationship between d'Anconia and Dagny, who are the love of each other's lives:

She did not question him about the university. Days later she asked him only whether he liked it.
"They're teaching a lot of drivel nowadays," he answered, "but there are a few courses I like."
"Have you made any friends there?"
"Two."
He told her nothing else.

Mind you, these are Rand's superheroes - this lack of curiosity in each others' lives isn't just an odd trait of characters in a novel - as with all aspects of the Rand superheroes (aka "prime movers") this is supposed to be the ideal mode of behavior.

Dagny learns from d'Anconia's old professor in chapter 6 that his two friends were Ragnar Danneskjold, the Norwegian terror of the high seas (no lie), and John Galt.

One of Ayn Rand's traits according to Ayn Rand Fun Facts is that she despised small talk. This comes as no surprise because she absolutely cannot write small talk. Neither the superheroes nor the looters in Rand's simplistic dichotomy make small talk. Ever. At the excruciating party thrown by Hank Rearden's wife for their eighth wedding anniversary the conversations of the looters are entirely dominated by two blowhards who make the standard anti- "selfishness" and pro-modern art proclamations, peppered by questions from random no-name characters.

In another scene where Dagny is having coffee in a greasy spoon, the conversation proceeds thusly:

Her head fell down on her arm on the counter.
"It's no use lady." said the old bum beside her.
She had to raise her head. She had to smile in amusement at him and herself.
"It isn't?" she asked.
"No. Forget it. You're only fooling yourself."
"About what?"
"About anything being worth a damn. It's dust lady. All of it, dust and blood. Don't believe the dreams they pump you full of, and you won't get hurt. "
"What dreams?"
"The stories they tell you when you're young. About the human spirit..."

And on and on. That's why reading Rand prose is so tiresome - you never get a moment's rest from the proselytizing. Except when Rand is expressing her truly creepy views on human sexuality. In a passage where Rand is writing about the Dagster looking superfine in her ladywear at the Rearden party she says:

The black dress seemed excessively revealing - because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulders were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

Yes, Groucho performed in Gilbert and Sullivan

This also happened according to Wiki:

During a tour of Germany in 1958, accompanied by then-wife Eden, daughter Melinda, Robert Dwan and Dwan's daughter Judith, (Groucho Marx) climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the site of Hitler's death, and performed a two-minute Charleston

That pretty much sums up human civilization.

In case you wondered what the Charleston looks like.

Up votes for forced fatherhood

Let us pause from analyzing the work of Ayn Rand for a moment to discuss the work of that other eccentric opinionated big-mouth: moi.

I was very surprised by how many up-votes I got for my 2 cents on the question "Is Forced Fatherhood Fair?"

309 (by 1PM June 15) is not shabby at all. I thought at most I would get 10. But there's no telling how many down votes I would have received if the NYTimes had made that an option. Certainly some of the crankier respondents to my comment would have down-voted me, especially Terrence from Cincinnati who said, in part:

...Consider suggest a contrary position: that the art of contraception has so advanced that unless a woman signifies otherwise a man may assume the woman has taken steps to prevent pregnancy. If medical remedies advance to the point wherein a man simply has take a Plan-z pill, then perhaps he might be held to be equally responsible...

If this was Facebook I would engage in a debate, but the comments are closed - the NYTimes ain't no Facebook. 

I will say that it's remarkable he thinks the "art of contraception" is so advanced that any man engaging in intercourse with a woman can simply assume that she's taken precautions against pregnancy, and so if a man does impregnate a woman - Terrence clearly implies - he is not to blame and should not be forced into fatherhood. Because in his mind the default position is automatic no-fail birth control.

But his best statement is:

Nancy's remarks sound like a commonly encountered brand of feminism associated with lesbian hatred of men. 

I really have to wonder how things are there in Cincinnati for Terrance to declare the brand of feminism associated with lesbian hatred of men "commonly encountered."

I was wondering when men would start to squeal about being forced into legal fatherhood after they became unwilling biological fathers. This was not an issue until the very recent development of cheap and routine DNA testing completely screwed (so to speak) the traditional male option of denial or running off. 

As I noted in my NYTimes comment, the reason that men could always be so casual about heterosexual sex (well, besides the whole rape-potential issue and the double-standards issue) compared to women is because the stakes have always been lower for men as far as unwanted pregnancy. And now, suddenly, that playing field has been leveled. In the past the woman was always left holding the bag if the man so chose - and millions did - but now suddenly men are on the hook. And of course they hate that.

Now to be fair I could have tempered my last statement "And men don't want to give up the old unfair advantage" with "some men" although we really don't know what the percentages are. And people generally don't like to give up any kind of advantage, fair or not.

Maybe one issue with me is that my father loved being a dad. And he certainly wasn't the kind of person to run out. He was a rock. So it's hard for me to sympathize with men who think they can hit and run. Although I am very pro-choice I can't agree that because a woman could have an abortion in the case of unwanted pregnancy it means she should if the man is unwilling to be a father. And if she doesn't have the abortion, this position says, society should permit the man to refuse all responsibility for the child. 

DNA testing really does change things - men have to take more care in where they stick their penises now than ever before - and wow does that make some men mad. They want society to give them their old advantage back. Well too bad.

More on chapters 4 & 5 of Atlas Shrugged

When I blogged about chapters 1 - 3 of Atlas Shrugged I said:

The funniest bit so far though, is Rand's imagining how non-angular businessmen talk, as in a scene from chapter 2:

And I quoted some of the things uttered by these "businessmen."

But in chapter 4-5 I discovered that there's an even more implausible way to talk about business - the way that angular businessmen talk. Here's Dagny telling Dan Conway:

I intended to give you the battle of your life, down there in Colorado. I intended to cut into your business and squeeze you to the wall and drive you out, if necessary.

If you've ever worked in business in any capacity, you know that this is how human beings in business do not talk. The primary hallmark of business talk is niceness. Even if you are trying to do something nasty, you talk nice. And so of course Dan Conway responds in a way that is typical of no businessman ever:

He chuckled faintly; it was appreciation. "You would have made a pretty good try at it, too," he said.

It should be noted that Ayn Rand was never a businesswoman - she was a screenwriter and a novelist. Her husband was an actor and a painter. Rand researched the railroad business for Atlas Shrugged not by working with the people who actually ran the business, she researched the business by hanging around Grand Central Terminal and driving a train.

But back to Dan Conway - lest you think he's not an angular businessman, Rand establishes his angular bona fides early on:

 Dan Conway was approaching 50. He had the square, stolid, stubborn face of a tough freight engineer, rather than a company president. 

Conway has a square face. A square, of course, is composed of four right angles.

But back to Rand's representation of the way successful business people talk. Here is Dagny with Hank Reardon (we've already taken the measure of his hypotenuse):

"Pretty steep, Hank. Is that the best price you can give me?"
"No. But that's the one I'm going to get. I could ask twice that and you'd pay it."
"Yes, I would. And you could. But you won't."
"Why won't I?"
"Because you need to have the Rio Norte Line built. It's your first showcase for Rearden Metal."
He chuckled. "that's right. I like to deal with somebody who has no illusions about getting favors."
"Do you know what made me feel relieved, when you decided to take advantage of it?"
"What?"
"That I was dealing, for once, with somebody who doesn't pretend to give favors."
His smile had a discernible quality now: it was enjoyment. "You always play it open, don't you? he asked.

We've already met Dagny's unlikely brother, James, a loser in every way, starting with his lack of angularity, and probably the bastard of a wayward government employee. Here he is in the childhood flashback speaking to Dagny and Francisco d'Anconia:

"Don't you ever think of anything but d'Anconia Copper?" Jim asked him once.
"No."
"It seems to me that there are other things in the world."
"Let others think about them."
"Isn't that a very selfish attitude?"
"It is."

Actually, no, it isn't. How can not caring about other things in the world be characterized as "selfish"? Boring, maybe. But it's only selfish if his interest in d'Anconia Copper somehow prevented other people from enjoying the contemplation of copper mining and processing. And ironically, d'Anconia shortly after this exchange, tells James that "words have an exact meaning."

But James must accuse d'Anconia of selfishness, just as Mother Reardon has to accuse Hank Reardon of selfishness, because Rand's heroes are virtuously selfish - and so the anti-heroes must be against selfishness, incessantly. Even if it means sacrificing the mot juste to describe Francisco d'Anconia's attitude towards his ancestral copper company, which would be "monomania."

So Rand considers monomania a good thing, and lacks insight into the motivations of human beings. Is it possible that Ayn Rand had Asperger's? 

I looked it up and discovered that although there's no record of her getting an official diagnosis, at least one of her admirers thinks so. In his review of two Rand biographies libertarian Stephen Kirchner writes:

...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. 

No surprise, Kirchner hates Paul Krugman, believing apparently that he played a successful round of gotcha with Krugman over some variation in the cover art of one of Krugman's books, while making common cause with crackpot Krugman-obsessive Donald Luskin.

The competing neuro-atypical theory is that Rand was a sociopath.

Who is the angularest one of all?

Well I finally got back to Atlas Shrugged. I read chapters 4 AND 5!

Although I must admit that the thing that kept me slogging along through two whole chapters was wanting to find out exactly how angular Francisco d'Anconia is. And I was not disappointed.

Chapters 4 and 5 are mostly a flashback to Dagny and d'Anconia growing up together and then falling in love as young adults - but then D'Anconia mysteriously went away.

Then we come back to the present and Dagny is meeting d'Anconia in a swanky hotel. There are many noteworthy items here but I'll save them for later. The most important aspect of these two chapters is the passage near the end of chapter five when Rand finally describes d'Anconia:

Nobody described his appearance as Latin, yet the word applied to him, not in its present but in its original sense, not pertaining to Spain but to ancient Rome. His body seemed designed as an exercise in consistency of style, a style made of gauntness, of tight flesh, of long legs and swift movements. His features had the fine precision of sculpture.

So there we go. The perfect Ayn Rand man - gaunt, tight, long, precise. She doesn't use the word angular but all that tight gauntness can lead to nothing else.

To be honest, I already knew he was the perfect Ayn Rand hero because prior to his physical description we learned he was obsessed with work and with making money and every single thing he ever attempts he does perfectly the first time, from hitting a baseball to driving a speed boat.

And when it comes to l'amour, well let's just say that ole Francisco takes what he wants with nary a trace of altruism.

Arguing with Objectivists

Like arguing with born-again Christians or Scientologists, it's really pointless to argue with Objectivists - hard-core devotees of cults cannot be reasoned with. So when, over the past couple of days, I got a couple of hard-core Rand-roids commenting on my recent post about Krugman name-dropping Francisco d'Anconia it was amusing for about the first couple of go-rounds before the zombie-like recitation of Objectivist talking points kicked in. A Leftist is to an Objectivist what a Body Thetan is to a Scientologist.

One thing I will say about Objectivism vs. Scientology - it's pretty clear that Scientology is far more organized and far more dangerous than Objectivism, even in spite of the popularity of Objectivism among Republican politicians. As Operation Clambake has documented, Scientology is far better at parting people from their money, friends and family, and is crazy-litigious to boot.

But the general principle of mindless cult behavior still applies to both: the Objectivist visitors are so intellectually incurious they couldn't even be bothered to check out the rest of this web site - my web statistics indicate that they only go to that one single web page every time they visit. Meanwhile they could be reading my review of the first three chapters of Atlas Shrugged.

Of course I'm not the first one to get the Rand-Hubbard connection, as this hysterical Cracked video demonstrates. Although really Ayn Rand should have a Russian accent.

That perennial tautology - evolutionary psychology douchebag

Devotees of evolutionary psychology are in a never-ending campaign to prove that their  unifying personality trait is extreme douchebaggery.

I've been informally documenting the phenomenon on this blog for years now.

The latest I discovered by way of this week's New York Magazine Approval Matrix - and then I went to Jezebel to check out the response - and I was not disappointed in all the hearty EP-slamming that went on. Although maybe best of all is this GIF of Mr. Rogers flipping the bird times two - although this being Mr. Rogers I do not doubt that what he was actually doing was singing a song about counting up to two.

Without further ado:

I have no doubt that Geoffrey Miller, Twitter handle "@matingmind" considers college classes his personal dating pool and doesn't like fat chicks. Because you know, being fat is a sign of being evolutionarily unfit - never mind that being too thin lowers fertility much more than being too fat. But then EPs just make it up as they go along.

But let us review the douchebaggery of the evolutionary psychologists.

Steven Pinker and his shameless hypocrisy.

Pinker never misses a chance to claim that the real reason anybody opposes the claims of evolutionary psychology is because they are a leftist. And then he turns around and uses hard-core right-wingers like Razib Khan to support his work.

Dario Maestripieri complains that women in neuroscience are unattractive

Apparently he's obsessed with supermodels.

Ed Rybicki on why women are natural-born shoppers

Rybicki defended his "joke" by claiming that it's funny cause it's true, citing the Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society.

Christopher Hitchens uses "science" to explain why women aren't funny

For most people who have heard of him, he's the guy who said that women aren't funny. Serves him right.

Daphne Merkin, promoter of evolutionary psychology, personally responds to my blog post 

I disliked Merkin's writing anyway, but I didn't write about it until she wouldn't shut up about how nature made old men hot and old women shit.

Richard Dawkins, who is not only one of the biggest Ev-Psych douchebags of all time,

he manages to blend that with anti-Muslim bigotry so perfectly.

And Dawkins good buddy Helena Cronin wrote a policy paper advising the British government to ensure that men are paid more than women

Because according to Evolutionary Psychology women have evolved to only mate with men who have more money than them. 

Three degrees of Ayn Rand

Something almost as exciting as reading "Atlas Shrugged" is discovering that I'm three degrees of Ayn Rand, sort of. The Ayn Rand Fun Facts notes that Ayn Rand was three degrees of Kevin Bacon:

Well, here's my Ayn Rand connection along those lines:

And Taylor Shilling wasn't only in the movie version of Atlas Shrugged, she played Dagny fucking Taggart. It's a small world after all.

Krugman and the Atlas Shrugged gang

One of the more amusing aspects of researching Ayn Rand for the play I'm working on is that I can just do a quick search of Paul Krugman's blog archives - he's mentioned Rand on many occasions as you can see here. But one mustn't only do a search on her name because Krugman also mentions characters from Atlas Shrugged. Just the other day he wrote:

Actually, before I get there, a word about self-styled conservative “market monetarists”: guys, have you noticed who your real policy enemies are? People like me, Brad DeLong, etc. are skeptical about the Fed’s ability to offset the effects of fiscal austerity, but we do want it to try. The furious academic opposition to quantitative easing is instead coming from moderate conservative macroeconomists, notably Taylor and Feldstein. So your problem isn’t just that the GOP’s effective leader on economic issues gets his macro from Francisco D’Anconia; it’s that even the not-so-silly wing of the party is dead set against what you consider reform.

Until recently I wouldn't have realized that this was a dig against Rand-worshipping Libertarians because I didn't know enough about Atlas Shrugged to realize that Francisco D'Anconia is the Latin millionaire playboy who had an affair with Rand's Mary Sue figure in the novel, Dagny Taggart.

Krugman also noted Paul Ryan's debt to Francisco D'Anconia.

But yes, I know. I can't keep avoiding it. The only way I can really critique Atlas Shrugged is to finally read the damn thing. And I promise I will read the whole damn thing. Even if it takes me years. Which it might.

The man who threw me for a loop

When this Scout Master was twenty-five he was the sexiest man on earth.

And to be fair, he's still pretty cute for his age, which is forty-seven. He still has a definite Harrison Ford thing going on. It's a shame he's losing his hair though, he had beautiful hair. But compared to many guys his age he's still pretty desirable. Even in that shirt.

I got this photo from Facebook, naturally. We aren't Facebook friends, there would be no point in friending him, but he's one of those people who leaves his Facebook profile open to the public. The Scout Master posted this because his son had received a Boy Scout badge or something. The Scout Master (SM) is very much into doing father-son things, judging from his Facebook profile, posting photos of his son's soccer games and camping trips all the time. Adorable. Although he never posts photos of himself - this was the only one I saw.

I don't often think about the SM these days, but it's hard to over-estimate how much impact this person had on my life and my erotic imagination, when I knew him when he was my supervisor in the graphics department of the corporate headquarters of a now-defunct toy manufacturer. I still remember the moment I first laid eyes on him. I was absolutely stunned by his beauty. I think I stood there for several seconds, staring and gaping, unable to believe my eyes as we were introduced. Working with him on a daily basis I was soon completely in love with him. Which I felt guilty about since I was in a ten-years-long relationship at the time, and the SM was dating the woman he would marry and produce a Boy Scout with. And I thought he was out of my league anyway, although he did once invite me to his apartment after work, and I didn't go because I had a prior appointment.

To get an idea of how sexy this man was, he was sexier than my friend Earl, who was legendarily sexy. When I told my friend Rachel, who was a coworker of mine and Earl about the SM and said that he was sexier than Earl, she could not believe it. But it was true. No wonder I used to have blue ovaries at the end of the work week from the intense, unfulfilled desire. And he wasn't only beautiful, he had (probably still has) a funny, down-to-earth personality too. I described him to Rachel as a cross between a young Harrison Ford and Michaelangelo's David, but with the personality of John Goodman. Predictably, women used to throw themselves at him - I once witnessed a woman arriving at a party grab him and French kiss him while his fiancee was ten feet away. He once mentioned to me that a coworker at the toy manufacturer told him she wanted to see him naked. The 50-something receptionist at the company was clearly ga-ga over him. He was that kind of sexy.

The SM had more impact on me than Earl, or the guy who inspired me to write dozens of sonnets. Ten years after I last saw the SM I was still having sexy dreams about him.

And thanks to this man I became a playwright. I was a graphic artist/illustrator when I met him but in an attempt to stay in contact with him after I left the toy manufacturer (I had only been a temp there for seven months) I entered a play contest at the community theater he worked with in Haddonfield NJ. My play, the first one I wrote, was one of four semi-finalists, although it didn't win the big prize. But it received a stage reading  and that was enough to get me started. Although the SM wasn't all that much into theater anyway, and by the time the play readings happened had since dropped out of the community theater.

I sometimes wonder if my life would have been better if I hadn't met the Scout Master - and if I had remained a visual artist and not become a playwright. Certainly I would never have met the dread Edward Einhorn or a certain gang of contemptible off-off Broadway actors. That would definitely have been a plus.

But mostly I wonder why the hell I didn't cancel that appointment and go over to the Scout Master's apartment when he invited me.

Am I a runner now?

Number 401 is ready to run.

My daughter signed me up for the Brooklyn Pride LGBT 5K Run and I did it today - does that make me a runner, officially?

I said completed, not did well. I actually ran more than I thought I would - I alternated walking and running. But unfortunately my right hip has been hurting for a month now, and while I did recently start physical therapy for it, I really felt it by the last quarter of the race. At that point I gave up any pretense of running and just limped along to the finish line. But at least I wasn't dead last. I finished before twenty other people.

Also, they didn't actually check if you were LGBT and I doubt I was the only straight person there, so technically it was an LGBTS race.

The whole trial is out of order!

The jurors who acquitted Ezekiel Gilbert, who murdered a woman over $150, need to be sentenced to ten years for idiocy in the first degree.

My Facebook friend Katha Pollitt pointed me to this petition against this verdict. Go there and sign it.

WHO ARE THE IDIOTS WHO RENDERED THIS VERDICT?

Apparently their thinking was that since Ezekiel Gilbert believed that the escort he hired from Craigslist owed him sex for $150 - an illegal transaction in Texas - he couldn't very well use the option of small claims court. So of course since he had no legal options to attempt to get his money back HE HAD TO SHOOT HER.

This verdict must not be allowed to stand. Even if most of the people who live in Texas are morons. Even morons deserve justice.

More awesome tales of blazin' Barry

The Choom Gang

How is it I missed this awesome article from a year ago?

A Users Guide to Smoking Pot with Barack Obama

"Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling."

Now that's what I call a sign of greatness to come.

Apparently it was a documentary...

I thought this Key and Peele video: Obama - The College Years was just so funny because it was so wild, the way Obama was portrayed. I only just found out how accurate it was in the New Yorker tonight:

We are now on our third straight (so to speak) President who, the evidence more than suggests, have personally flouted the laws against having possession of marijuana. But the incumbent is the first who has an irrefutable history as an “enthusiastic” (his characterization, not mine) stoner. If you read “Dreams from My Father,” then you know that Obama liked not only the drug’s psychoactive effects but also what might be called its democratizing qualities: 

I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference if you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room with some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school…. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism. 

David Maraniss, in “Barack Obama: The Story,” provides some pungent detail, helpfully summarized by none other than BuzzFeed. Young Barry, leader of a Punahou School clique styling itself the Choom Gang, pioneered “T.A.”—short for Total Absorption, the polar opposite of “I didn’t inhale.” Among other recreations, the future President was into “roof hits,” a non-wasteful method of smoking pot in a car (usually that white classmate’s V.W. bus, dubbed the Choomwagon) with the windows rolled up. Once the joint was reduced to a roach but some smoke was still trapped overhead, he and his friends would crane their necks upward to whoosh in the last wisps. He was also adept at “interceptions,” i.e., sneaking an extra toke when it wasn’t his turn—a risky stratagem, punishable, if noticed, by being skipped over on the next pass-around.

The Key and Peele video actually shows Obama doing an interception. Obama really was a huge stoner.

There is actually audio on Youtube of Obama reading from this section of his autobiography, but all the ones I found are posted by outraged right-wingers so I won't post one of those.

Another good aspect of the New Yorker article - it mentions the truly appalling George Bush "joke" in the context of Obama's most recent White House Correspondents Dinner in which Obama joked that BuzzFeed was something he did in college.

So the joke was perhaps a little tasteless, if you’re the sensitive type. Not as callous as the video Bush junior made for the 2004 dinner, in which he pretended to look under the Oval Office furniture, mumbling, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.” But still a trifle discomfiting.

I still can't believe that Bush joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction. This video expresses entirely appropriate outrage about it.

Another NYCP video

This is actually the last of the five we recorded back in early April and I am incredibly relieved to be done with them. This is one of the better ten-minute plays we did, although that doesn't mean it's perfect. It's very frustrating really because the writer has a very good premise - real dramatic potential and it's about something of consequence -  the systematic rape of Bosnian women by Serbs during the Bosnian War 20 years ago.

Unfortunately the playwright didn't really make it work. The fact that the entire middle section is one character giving the other character directions is a problem.

And she doesn't even give good directions. The assassin character is going from 86th and Lex to the northern end of Times Square, on 48th Street and the Marie character, who claims to be in the US for ten years tells her to take the 6 train instead of the 4-5 express, and she tells her to go to Grand Central Station and then take the L shuttle to Times Square.

Now usually this would be a viable option, but Marie makes a big deal about what a crazy place Times Square is. So if the assassin was going to take the 6 train instead of the express she could get off at 51st and Lex and then just walk to 48th and Seventh Avenue - it's like a ten minute walk and she could avoid most of Times Square, with its legendary Bolivian panpipe music and break dancers.

Normally I wouldn't have bothered to analyze the changes needed for another playwright's ten-minute play, but since I had to video-record and then edit this thing - and I had 4 different camera angles to deal with - I got to know the play pretty well and so couldn't help but notice some of these glaring inadequacies. Once again this is a case where the writer should go back and tighten the play.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the Marie character mentions all these little irrelevant things about Times Square including two that are now obsolete - she mentions Dick Clark and the fact that there used to be hookers in Times Square and now it's home to a big Disney store. That's old old news and I can't imagine why this woman from Bosnia who has only been in the US for 10 years would consider that at all an interesting item and especially something worth talking about to an assassin. Now if she had grown to love New York maybe you could accept that she likes to repeat the standard complaints of New Yorkers but at the end of the play she reveals that she doesn't even consider it her home and as soon as the rapist is killed she's heading back to Bosnia. So all that Times Square stuff was pointless - except as time-killing filler to get from the assassin showing up to us being told about the goal of her mission.

And then there was the fact that she waits until the middle of the play to show Sophia the gun when she could racheted up the drama from the beginning of the play by pulling the gun out then.

And one more thing - the effort the Marie character puts into making Sophia look like an American girl is utterly pointless. During the play it's established that Sophia is only there for less than one day, nobody knows she's there, and when she finally meets her target her entire interaction will consist of her saying "Greetings for Sarajevo" and then shooting him in the head. This pointlessness was especially annoying to me because I did not have a Yankees cap and had to use a NYPD cap instead - and then I did my best to ensure that the hat couldn't be read by tweaking the video during editing.

And then there was the thing about American girls wearing a different kind of lipstick than Bosnian girls. This was complete news to me and not only that, the author doesn't even explain HOW their lipstick is different.

Oy.

So the next NYCPlaywrights project is monologues, which are harder to screw up than a ten-minute play. We'll be doing readings/reviews of the semi-finalists this week and picking four - and I have the whole summer to video-record them.

So there will be plenty of time to finally finish Atlas Shrugged!

Rape deniers admiration society

There are few public intellectuals who are more absurd than Katie Roiphe, who made a name for herself by sucking up to the male media and literary establishment as their go-to female feminist-basher. Or as Alex Pareen so perfectly says in his Salon Hack List 2011:

Katie Roiphe discovered long ago that the secret to perpetual employment in the world of ideas is to be a vocal dissenter from the perceived stogy liberalism of your non-white male demographic group. Thus, the success of the Black Republican Pundit and the anti-feminist woman author. No editor ever got fired for printing a “provocative” piece in which a woman — a woman! — trashes feminists.

One of Roiphe's most grotesque attempts to avoid unemployment was to deny rape, especially date rape. Although one good thing came out of it - Katha Pollitt wrote one of her best pieces, a superb take-down of Roiphe in The Nation called "Not Just Bad Sex."

...Be that as it may, what happens to Koss's figures if the alcohol question is dropped? The number of college women who have been victims of rape or attempted rape drops from one in four to one in five. 

ONE in five, one in eight- what if it's "only" one in ten or twelve? Social science isn't physics. Exact numbers are important, and elusive, but surely what is significant here is that lots of different studies, with different agendas, sample populations, and methods, tend in the same direction. Rather than grapple with these inconvenient data, Roiphe retreats to her own impressions: 

"If I was really standing in the middle of an epidemic, a crisis, if 25 per cent of my female friends were really being raped, wouldn't I know about it?"  

(Roiphe forgets that the one-in-four figure includes attempts, but let that pass.)  

As an experiment, I applied Roiphe's anecdotal method myself, and wrote down that I know about my own circle of acquaintance: eight rapes by strangers, (including one on a college campus), two sexual assaults (one Central Park, one Prospect Park), one abduction (woman walking down street forced into car full of men), one date rape involving a Mickey Finn, which resulted n pregnancy and abortion, and two stalking (one ex-lover, one deranged fan); plus one brutal beating by a boyfriend, three incidents of childhood incest (none involving therapist-aided "recovered memories"), and one bizarre incident in which a friend went to a man's apartment after meeting him at a park and was forced by him to spend the night under the shower, naked, which he debated whether to kill her, rape her, or let her go. The most interesting think about this tally, however, is that when I mentioned it to a friend he was astonished - he himself know of only one rape victim in his circle, he said - but he knows several of the women on my list. 

It may be that Roiphe's friends have nothing to tell her. Or it may be that they have nothing to tell her. With her adolescent certainty that bad things don't happen, or that they happen only to weaklings, she is not likely to be on the receiving end of many painful, intimate confessions. The one time a fellow student tells her about being raped (at knifepoint, so it counts), Roiphe cringes like a high-school vegetarian dissecting her first frog: 

"I was startled... I felt terrible for her, I felt like there was
nothing I could say." 

Confronted with someone whose testimony she can't dismiss or satirize, Roiphe goes blank...

The New York Times T Magazine editor knew that in order to find someone to write a glowing hagiography of Bernard-Henri Levy of course they could count on patriarchy's staunchest defender, Katie Roiphe, to do the job right. Just how glowing is this piece? Hysterically so:

One imagines that the scuffle Lévy describes between art and philosophy over the centuries is taking place in some tiny way in the making of the films. Here is Bernard-Henri Lévy in all of his magnificence coming into studios and handing artists texts to read that he thinks are relevant to their work. Do they agree? Do they have their own ideas of what they want to read? Does this bother Lévy, who is, for a writer or intellectual, used to a fairly high level of power in the outside world? He says it does not bother him at all. He says the collaboration is part of the “Borgesian fiction” of the experience. He also says, “Sometimes there is quite the discussion.”

Who is Bernard-Henri Levi, in all his magnificence? Well conveniently that very same Hacks of 2011 article by Pareen also includes Levi:

As if being pompous, self-serious, self-important and lazy weren’t enough, he’s also the public face of not one but two campaigns dedicated to defending powerful men against rape accusations. He organized a petition decrying Roman Polanski’s extradition to the United States to face prison for jumping bail after being convicted of raping a child years ago. Polanski didn’t deserve to go to jail, according to BHL, because he is a very good filmmaker. 

Then BHL’s dear friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for raping a hotel maid, and BHL wrote a truly astounding column defending his friend by attacking the victim and decrying the American justice system for not providing adequate special treatment to a man as rarefied and well-respected as Strauss-Kahn. 

“What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs,” BHL said of the totally standard treatment of Strauss-Kahn following his arrest for rape. 

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
After the charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped due to unknown inconsistencies in the accuser’s story, BHL declared victory and claimed that Strauss-Kahn was the victim of “torture” due to his class, and his being French. 

I must state, to be clear, that I don’t think it has much to do with this worldwide religion and delirium that is anti-Semitism. But what I do believe is that this is the appearance of a new variation on Maurice Barrès’s phrase that has become, “That X—in this case Dominique Strauss-Kahn—is guilty, I deduce not from his race, but from his class.” 

Hm, yes, Americans, always throwing rich powerful white men in jail. Our rich white male prison population is truly our national disgrace.

So of course it's only natural that two such egregious hacks should find common cause in publicizing the magnificence of Bernard-Henri Levi. I guess rape deniers need to band together for moral support.

The skeptics he-man feminist haters club

While reading up on the bizarre shenanigans of CFI CEO Ron Lindsay I saw references to somebody at the Women and Secularism conference who was apparently considered a nuisance, at best, but nobody named any names or provided a link. But today via Skepchick I found Greta Christina's posts on the issue and she writes:

And all of this unfolded while one of the primary anti-feminist harassers was sitting there in the audience. All of this unfolded while a person who has been invading and disrupting the Twitter feeds of conferences he thinks are too feminist, a person who has defended the misogynistic online harassment and the use of hate speech against feminist women in the atheist movement, a person who has written for, and done a recent interview with, a misogynist, rape apologist website that’s being monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center (the organization that monitors hate groups), a person who has said, “I fail to see how refusing to believe in God leads to the ‘logical conclusion’ of abandoning the belief that women exist to serve men,” a person who dealt with a dispute by posting someone’s home address on the Internet, was sitting in the room. The fact that Justin Vacula was attending this conference had many people on edge: nobody knew if he was planning in-person confrontations, or continued online harassment, or what. Many of the people Vacula has personally targeted with harassment were in that room with him. For Lindsay to give that particular opening talk in that loaded environment — and for him to then make a point of going up to Vacula and personally welcoming him to the conference — showed a level of contempt for the speakers and attendees of that conference that is shocking… and that is entirely unacceptable.

When I initially wrote about this controversy, I theorized that Ron Lindsay was trying to impress Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer. But it looks like I may have over-estimated Lindsay. It appears that Ron Lindsay was trying to impress Justin Vacula.

I had heard the name before - it's hard to forget since it looks like the name rhymes with Dracula, although I don't know how it's pronounced. But I had never really paid much attention to Vacula's activities. He and Lindsay appear to be cut from the same lying bullshit cloth though:

The goal of both Lindsay and Vacula is to try to misrepresent what Watson is saying. 

I didn't realize it when I first wrote about the Lindsay controversy, but he and Watson had clashed prior to the Women in Secularism conference. In Watson's excellent article in Slate about sexism in secularism she called Ron Lindsay out - although not by name but with a link:

But still, there are leaders in the skepticism community who refuse to accept that there is a problem, and those who play the “both sides are wrong” game, insinuating that “misogynist” is just as bad an insult as “cunt.”

She linked to Ron Lindsay's article "Divisiveness in the Secular Movement" in which he says:

But it’s not that simple. It’s not that simple because while everyone agrees that telling a woman you want to kill her after you rape her is intolerable and in and of itself marks you as someone who has no place in the movement, the label “misogynist”  is sometimes thrown about carelessly. For example, Russell Blackford, the Australian philosopher (and Free Inquiry columnist) has been called a misogynist shitbag. Yet, as far as I know, Blackford has never made any hateful comments or threats to women; indeed, he has condemned them. He has expressed doubts about the wisdom of harassment policies adopted by some organizations and, if I recall correctly, he has taken exception to some of the criticism directed against TAM (the JREF’s annual meeting). But although Blackford’s views on these issues may be misguided, that hardly qualifies him as a misogynist. 

I don’t mean to suggest that the stigmatizing and slurs flow only in one direction. Obviously not. Those calling attention to the problems of harassment within the movement have been dismissed as attention whores, feminazis, or man-haters. Again, even if the incidence of harassment within the movement and its seriousness were overstated (the reality is we don’t have reliable statistics, so anecdotal evidence is all anyone can point to), this would not imply that those emphasizing the problem are engaging in unacceptable conduct. They can be mistaken without being self-centered fanatics.

Now consider Lindsay's comparison:

While everyone agrees that telling a woman you want to kill her after you rape her is intolerable and in and of itself marks you as someone who has no place in the movement, the label “misogynist”  is sometimes thrown about carelessly.

He describes something that has happened, in many variations to Rebecca Watson. Watson has helpfully documented the hatred aimed at her on her  Page O' Hate. Here is one example:

And he compares that to Russell Blackford being called a misogynist shitbag. Once.

And it's unlikely that anybody is so obsessed with hating Russell Blackford that they create and maintain a web site just for that purpose.

And then Lindsay reassures his readers that in spite of this one insult to Russell Blackford, 

"I don’t mean to suggest that the stigmatizing and slurs flow only in one direction. Obviously not."

So you see? He isn't saying that it's ONLY feminists who are responsible for slurs. The other side is just as bad. 

And in any case, after reading Russell Blackford whining about a code of behavior I do think he's an idiot. But notice that my thinking he's an idiot doesn't mean that I want to threaten him with bodily harm. That's what the anti-feminist side does.

And that's why both sides are not equally to blame. 

Oh and as we know, Ron Lindsay is a pal of Justin Vacula. Here is Vacula giving an interview to his other good buddy, Paul Elam. Here is what Elam said of Watson:

But after all, Elam just called Watson a whore, he didn't threaten to rape and kill her. So obviously Justin Vacula and his good buddy Paul Elam have a place in the movement. 

Although thanks to the elevatorgate blog, I see that Russell Blackford is an even bigger idiot than I initially thought:

Poor Blackford - "bullied" by Rebecca Watson. I wonder how many rape threats or even just threats of having coffee thrown in his face that Blackford has received. All these old men, being repressed by women having contrary opinions!

As for Vacula, whatever else you can say about him he definitely appears to be a puerile moron:

Don't satirize feminists but happily draw Mohammed?

What he considers "satire" appears to be him taking a photo of what is purportedly feminist skeptics and replacing the message that they were originally spelling out with "We (heart) Justin."

Now if you are familiar with the English language you will understand that by no definition is this in any way "satire." 

And because a feminist complained about his wankery, he attempts to present secular feminists as hypocrites because they support the right to graphically portray Mohammed without the threat of death.

And that is the hero of the anti-feminist movement within skepticism. That's Ron Lindsay's buddy. Jesus fucking Christ.

Greta Christina urges people to contact CFI instead of just blogging about this issue. I did contact CFI back on May 19, saying that while I support Lindsay's right to be an asshole, having him as their leader is a drag on their organization.

Still fighting the Civil War

It turns out that one of my co-workers buys into the bullshit fantasy in which the Civil War was fought over "states rights" instead of slavery. And apparently he's not alone. According to a Pew Research Center study, 38% of Americans say the Civil War was fought over slavery, and 48% it was fought over "states rights."

Of course I've felt it my duty to throw facts at him. I pointed out to him the impact that southern states have had on textbooks, which is confirmed by this article in Salon:

As the UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy) gained in political clout, its members lobbied legislatures in Texas, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Florida to ban the purchase of textbooks that portrayed the South in anything less than heroic terms, or that contradicted any of the lost cause’s basic assertions. Its reach extended not just to public schools but to tenured academia—a little-known chapter of its propaganda effort is detailed by James Cobb in his 2005 book “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.” Cobb recounts how in 1911, for instance, University of Florida history professor Enoch Banks wrote an essay for the New York Independent suggesting that slavery was the cause of secession; Banks was forced by the ensuing public outcry to resign. Perhaps Banks should have seen that coming: seven years earlier, William E. Dodd, a history professor at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College, had complained that to merely suggest the confederacy might not have been a noble enterprise led by lofty-minded statesmen “is to invite not only criticism but enforced resignation.” Dodd himself would later migrate to the University of Chicago, where he established a Northern outpost for Southerners who were interested in a serious examination of Southern history. Such scholarship was not encouraged back home: the first postwar society of Southern historians was created in 1869 for the explicit purpose of vindicating the confederate cause. 

The fear of losing one’s job worked to keep most dissenters in line, but if that failed, self-appointed censors in the community were always on the lookout. In 1913, for instance, the sons of confederate Veterans succeeded in banning from the University of Texas history curriculum a book that they felt offered an excessively New England slant on recent history. The UDC industriously compiled lists of textbooks used in schools across the South, sorting them into one of three categories: texts written by Northerners and blatantly unfair to the South; texts that were “apparently fair” but were still suspect because they were written by Northerners; and works by Southern writers. Outside academia, the New South creed, popularized by Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady in an effort to spur economic development, also reinforced this new orthodoxy. A big part of Grady’s canny public relations was to pay extravagant homage to the imagined splendor of the antebellum South, and to portray the New South as a revival of that genius instead of what it really was: the rise of a whole new class of plutocrats.

The UDC did lots of damage although according to the Salon article it no longer has much clout - but it still has a web site. But if you want a more active group of racist traitors you can check out the Southern Nationalist Network. I found that web site thanks to the Dixie Cinema web site - although they had reviews of neither the recent Lincoln nor Birth of a Nation. Although you can pretty much guess what they'll say if they ever do.

To see Southern revisionist bullshit in action check out the Dixie Outfitters web site wherein they claim:

Since the Southerners had escaped the tax by withdrawing from the Union, the only way the North could collect this oppressive tax was to invade the Confederate States and force them at gunpoint back into the Union. 

It was to collect this import tax to satisfy his Northern industrialist supporters that Abraham Lincoln invaded our South. Slavery was not the issue. Lincoln's war cost the lives of 600,000 Americans. 

The truth about the Confederate Flag is that it has nothing to do with racism or hate. The Civil War was not fought over slavery or racism.

We at Dixie Outfitters are trying to tell the real truth via our art and products in regards to the Confederate Flag. We hope to educate people about the Confederate Flag and stop the divisiveness caused by ignorance and emotion.

They go one step further than most lying Southern Revisionists - they don't simply avoid mentioning slavery - they actively claim that the Civil War was not about slavery.

These lying scumbags also have a Facebook page.

And now for some fresh air - I bought this movie when it was first released, but you can watch the entire thing for free on Youtube - it's C.S.A. - which presents the horrible dystopia that might have resulted if the South had won the Civil War.

Back to the Future day countdown

Every now and then some Facebook friend of a friend believes that TODAY is the day that Marty McFly arrives in the future from 1985. And you have to tell them no, they fell for a hoax.

From now on I'm just going to send them to the Back to the Future Countdown page.

Although really they should know better because it's going to be a much bigger deal when October 21, 2015 does roll around than just somebody will mention it on Facebook.

We still don't have hoverboards (well, except for a useless prototype) or flying cars, but Back to the Future II did get somethings right.

Fux Capacitor

We began looking at counterpoint in my music course. It turns out there are five different "species" of counterpoint first classified by Johann Joseph Fux in his Gradus ad Parnassum, which is available for free on the IMSLP web site. Unfortunately nobody thought to translate it from the original Latin into English yet. There are English translations but not free ones. All the bigs used Gradus ad Parnassum - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Bach.

Somebody needs to write a five-species-enabled counterpoint generator and call it the Fux Capacitor. Because hey why not?

(Although technically Fux is pronounced "fooks" not "fucks" which kind of ruins the gag, but only if you pronounce it like a German. And if you ain't German... )

So while reviewing the rules of counterpoint it occurred to me that there must be a computer-based counterpoint generator out there. And there are - but not free ones. That I've found. Yet. (I did find one for $5)

Automated music has been around for a long time. According to this paper:

...the computer to aid a composer or even generate an original score. The idea of automatic music generation is not new, and one of the earliest “automatic composition” methods is due to Mozart. In his Musikalisches Wurfelspiel (Musical Dice Game), a number of small musical fragments are combined by chance to generate a Minuet.

But according to Wikipedia Musikalisches Würfelspiel :

The earliest example is Johann Philipp Kirnberger's Der allezeit fertige Menuetten- und Polonaisencomponist (German for "The Ever-Ready Minuet and Polonaise Composer") 1757...

Mozart was born in 1756. Not even he was prodigy enough to be fairly described as responsible for "one of the earliest" and in fact Wiki points out that although a version of Musikalisches Wurfelspiel was attributed to Mozart there's no direct evidence.

But counterpoint lends itself directly to computer programming because of the series of explicit rules developed for it:

1. Begin and end on either the unison, octave, or fifth, unless the added part is underneath, in which case begin and end only on unison or octave.
2. Use no unisons except at the beginning or end.
3. Avoid parallel fifths or octaves between any two parts; and avoid "hidden" parallel fifths or octaves: that is, movement by similar motion to a perfect fifth or octave, unless one part (sometimes restricted to the higher of the parts) moves by step.
4. Avoid moving in parallel fourths. (In practice Palestrina and others frequently allowed themselves such progressions, especially if they do not involve the lowest of the parts.)
5. Avoid moving in parallel thirds or sixths for very long.
6. Attempt to keep any two adjacent parts within a tenth of each other, unless an exceptionally pleasing line can be written by moving outside of that range.
7. Avoid having any two parts move in the same direction by skip.
8. Attempt to have as much contrary motion as possible.
9. Avoid dissonant intervals between any two parts: major or minor 2nd, major or minor 7th, any augmented or diminished interval, and perfect fourth (in many contexts).

Ayn Rand Fun Facts!

I realize it looks like I'm stalling on reading Atlas Shrugged... but hey, check out these Ayn Rand Fun Facts! Wow was she a nasty person!

Here are some of the funnest facts. The first one provides an explanation for what my Ayn Rand-loving Libertarian former co-worker told me (and our entire department via company email) - that Farrah Fawcett was considered for the role of Dagny Taggart in an early planned version of "Atlas Shrugged."



Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 20

One of Rand’s favorite television shows was Charlie’s Angels. She said it was a  ”triumph of concept and casting.” Rand described Angels as “uniquely American,” but said it differed from all other shows because it depicted true “romanticism” (as defined by Aristotle as “not…things as they are, but…things as they might be and ought to be”). Farrah was Rand’s favorite Angel; she wanted her to play Dagny if Atlas Shrugged were ever made into a movie. The fondness was mutual. Shortly before her death, Farrah called Ayn Rand a “literary genius.”


Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 37

Rand really didn’t get jokes. An example:

An acquaintance, to Rand: “Two fellows were sitting down at the end of [a] bar. And one said, ‘My God, you see those two women coming across the street? One’s my wife and the other is my mistress.’ The other guy said, ‘You took the words right out of my mouth!’”

Rand: “What an extraordinary coincidence.”

Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 41

When two of Rand’s Objectivist followers in the “Collective” got married, they included in the ceremony vows pledging their “joint devotion and fealty to Ayn Rand.” Also part of what had to be the worst wedding ever, they read to one another from the “sacred text” Atlas Shrugged.

Ayn Rand Fun Fact # 48

When Gentry International wanted to make a movie of Atlas Shrugged, Rand agreed on the condition that they get Rod Serling to write the screenplay. Gentry brought the proposition to Serling, and “Serling simply laughed—his laugh getting louder and longer the more he pondered it.”


NOTE: The fun facts blog also includes tidbits of Rand's sex life, but I was too skeeved out to repost them here. Go there at your own risk.