Atlas Shrugged Movie

[burnthebeautiful]

It would be fun if your pee turned the colour of the stuff you drank, but nope, just somewhere between clear and yellow every time

Again Cap. Liberty -- crackin' me up -- between this and your "man store" OMG 

You're drinking the wrong stuff. Try this instead.

Haha, glad I am making you laugh

By the way I misread the quotation box thing before, I meant unlike you I am not a fast reader, instead I wrote unlike error I am not a fast reader, as I was reading the quote box wrong :p

Have I met you? I'm not sure who you are/What your real name is.

[error]

I'm not a fast reader either. It took me a week to read Atlas Shrugged.

[AlexLibman]

Me reader slow.  Me get caught too much up in me thoughts.

Me books download audio and forth and back switch.

Me also sometimes like watch movie first.

[burnthebeautiful]

I'm not a fast reader either. It took me a week to read Atlas Shrugged.

Godamnit I fucked up the quote thing AGAIN.

UNLIKE ROSIE THE RIVETER, I AM NOT A FAST READER. That's what I was trying to say both times, and managed to fuck it up, twice!

Damn, I need to get me done some brain learnin'.

[Rosie the Riveter]

It would be fun if your pee turned the colour of the stuff you drank, but nope, just somewhere between clear and yellow every time

Again Cap. Liberty -- crackin' me up -- between this and your "man store" OMG 

You're drinking the wrong stuff. Try this instead.

Haha, glad I am making you laugh

By the way I misread the quotation box thing before, I meant unlike you I am not a fast reader, instead I wrote unlike error I am not a fast reader, as I was reading the quote box wrong :p

Have I met you? I'm not sure who you are/What your real name is.

I'm not sure if we've meet --my name is Kate and you can see me

here
http://www.myspace.com/castlechaser

and

here
http://www.freetalklive.com/females.php with the nhfree sign

If we haven't meet look for me at the Liberty Forum on Sat and at Kevin's party after.

~Kate

[burnthebeautiful]

Hmm, I don't think we've met. Sadly I can't make the liberty forum, one of the many disadvantages to living in Sweden

[coffeeseven]

I was scanning for interesting videos the other day and came across an interview Ayn Rand did with Phil Donahue. Anyone seen it?

She came off as an asshole, in my opinion.

[planetaryjim]

Dear Coffeeseven,

Please, please post a link to that video.

The Blanchard show in New Orleans http://www.neworleansconference.com/ has a great video of Ayn's 1982 appearance at that event.  She spoke intelligently and was charming, I think.

Phil Donahue would be hard for me to talk to without taking him to task repeatedly.  He was always trying to get the audience to agree with him, I think, and was generally a second hander.  I'm not surprised Ayn had trouble being pleasant to him.

Regards,

Jim

[Lloyd Danforth]

I was scanning for interesting videos the other day and came across an interview Ayn Rand did with Phil Donahue. Anyone seen it?

She came off as an asshole, in my opinion.

She was just being her sweet self

[coffeeseven]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRDgIXn2IWs

Be sure and watch all 5 segments so you can see where she strips an audience member of her right to free speech because it does not match her own beliefs.

[burnthebeautiful]

The one objectionable thing I picked up on in the Phil Donahue interview is that when Ayn Rand is sternly telling a woman off for saying Ayn Rand is a cult, Rand says something like "This is my show, why are you coming on my show to insult me?"

I suppose she meant "mine" in the sense that someone might say "it's my turn" or indeed "my interview", but I still found it weird that she would call the show hers, Rand being such a believer in private property and all.

[Sweet Mercury]

These "I read Atlas Shrugged this many times!" claims remind me of the essay "The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult" by Murray Rothbard...

One method, as we have seen, was to keep the members in ignorance. Another was to insure that every spoken and written word of the Randian member was not only correct in content but also in form, for any slight nuance or difference in wording could and would be attacked for deviating from the Randian position. Thus, just as the Marxist movements developed jargon and slogans which were clung to for fear of uttering incorrect deviations, the same was true in the Randian movement. In the name of "precision of language," in short, nuance and even synonyms were in effect prohibited.

Another method was to keep the members, as far as possible, in a state of fevered emotion through continual re-readings of Atlas. Shortly after Atlas was published, one high-ranking cult leader chided me for only having read Atlas once. "It's about time for you to start reading it again," he admonished. "I have already read Atlas thirty-five times."

The rereading of Atlas was also important to the cult because the wooden, posturing, and one-dimensional heroes and heroines were explicitly supposed to serve as role models for every Randian. Just as every Christian is supposed to aim at the imitation of Christ in his own daily life, so every Randian was supposed to aim at the imitation of John Galt (Rand's hero of heroes in Atlas.) He was always supposed to ask himself in every situation "What would John Galt have done?" When we remind ourselves that Jesus, after all, was an actual historical figure whereas Galt was not, the bizarrerie of this injunction can be readily grasped. (Although from the awed way Randians spoke of John Galt, one often got the impression that, for them, the line between fiction and reality was very thin indeed.)

Then again, I like what I have so far read of Rand's work. I've read Anthem, The Virtue of Selfishness, and and in the middle of We the Living. Does her fiction take a turn for the worse (or, at least for the ridiculous) as time goes on? Or is she just mischarecterized?

[Lloyd Danforth]

I struggled thru  'We The Living', although I enjoyed her other two novels.   Some philosophy in all the novels, but, there is more to learn in the non-fiction.  Her 'The New Left, The Anti Industrial Revolution'  has certainly held up as a prediction.

[planetaryjim]

Dear Coffeeseven,

Thanks for that link!  Much entertainment in those videos.  Karma for you!

Regards,

Jim

[planetaryjim]

Dear Sweet Mercury,

I'm very fond of Murray Rothbard's writings.  Lew Rockwell has done yeoman's work in making these available online at the vonMises.org and LewRockwell.com sites. 

There is no question in my view that Nathaniel and Barbara Branden and others within Rand's inner circle (which for a time included Alan Greenspan, Rothbard, and John Hospers) were rather diabolical in their behavior toward others.  I think any time a clique operates with techniques like ostracism, it is losing quite a lot of value by refusing to examine alternate views.  I'm certain that both Rothbard and Hospers were ostracised by the inner circle, and that's sad.  I've had the privilege of meeting Hospers on several occasions, and he has impressed me very favorably as a gentleman, a philosopher, and a decent human being. 

I'm not an objectivist, so it follows that objectivists won't like what I say about her, but, from what I've read and seen on video, Ayn Rand was not a very pleasant person.  She was sometimes petty and sometimes vicious, she was not easy to get along with, and she was in these ways and many others quite human.  Her humanity and foibles do not detract from her well-reasoned positions, but, rather, reinforce them.  She demonstrates that many of her ideas were quite good, and quite possible for humans to embrace without divine levels of patience.  On the whole, I like her.  After all, I'm not entirely pleasant all the time, myself.

Most books and most films are very different on a second reading.  That's especially true of novels and mystery films.  In my experience, the film "The Usual Suspects," and the film "Grosse Pointe Blank" are completely different and much better on a second viewing.  I've also seen the original "Star Wars" film a dozen or so times since it first came out about 30 years ago.  Obviously, there are cultish enthusiasts of Star Wars who have seen it hundreds of times, and must be glad for DVD prices these days.

Atlas Shrugged is a great work of fiction.  It is a very moving book, it has many items of quotable and poignant dialog, and like other great works it holds up well on re-reading.  For many reasons, I like The Fountainhead even better.  As her pen name is one she took up after coming to the USA from Soviet Russia, I think there is no doubt that Ayn knew when she adopted the name that the word "Ayn" in Arabic may be translated as "fountainhead" or "spring source."  I gather from apocrypha of the inner circle that "Rand" was the brand name on her typewriter.

I think Rothbard's criticism of the inner circle and the cult of personality surrounding Ayn Rand is well reasoned.  At the same time, the basic criticism of cults of personality is a communist theological point, suggesting that no individual should be extolled for any reason.  The trial of the Gang of Four in the 1970s has presumably disappeared from view, being shrouded now by decades of time, but that is the context in which I first heard the term "cult of personality" as a criticism.  For my own part, I think individuals are the quantum units of political energy, are worth having, and should be extolled.  Many individuals have many great virtues worth imitating.

Yes, I like Ayn's fiction.  She wrote well.  I continue to think that The Fountainhead was better written, easier to read, and just as effective at conveying her main points.  It avoids the lengthy sermons that seem to infest Atlas.  I continue to think that Atlas Shrugged is an important work of fiction which, even if it had no other merits, would be useful in understanding the broad stretch of libertarianism in America politics.

When I first read it, I clipped together the dozens of pages of Galt's lengthiest sermon, toward the back, because it was, in my view, a pointless recapitulation of all the sundry lessons taught in the various situations of the book to that point.  I've read that lengthy sermon several times since, and continue to hold to my view that it is pleonastic.  It is a sort of sad commentary on Ayn's view of others that she seems to have felt the need to go over the material so pedantically.  And, as a summary of her own philosophy, those dozens of pages stand up well on their own.

Regards,

Jim