• • Islam’s Affinity with Force and Fraud 
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The Fountainhead  |Objectivist author  | Imagine [Ellsworth] Toohey in a turban, or sporting a keffiyah and a pair of babouches. He could adapt to Islam, easily. It made no difference to him, either, which totalitarian system prevailed. He could submit to Islam, provided he could also subjugate the independent man and erase him from existence. His ends would comport smoothly with Islam’s – and his means, as well.      View blog reactions

• • The Many Appetites for Cruelty 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | Cruelty is intimately linked to sadism. A sadist is chiefly a nihilist. Like the villain James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, who yells, “I want to break him! I want to hear him scream!” he wishes to erase the good so that the evil can exist unidentified as such and unopposed.      View blog reactions

• • The Court’s Mock Examination of Obamacare 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Individual Rights  |Objectivist author  | In Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, Narragansett is a judge who has withdrawn his wisdom from the world in protest of the kind of “wisdom” exhibited by the Supreme Court. What he would actually be writing is an amendment. Doubtless he would have included the private realm of health insurance. It would have been a no-brainer.      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand Nation: Look Elsewhere To Learn About Ayn Rand 
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Objectivist author  | Imagine a lecture on the ideas of Ayn Rand – or on those of Immanuel Kant, or John Locke, or Plato, or Aristotle, or on the philosophical system of any major thinker of the past – delivered by Ronald MacDonald in full clown regalia. Pretty ludicrous? Picture it combined with the rhetorical equivalent of “death by a thousand chortles,” punctuated with spittle-spewing Bronx cheers. Pretty disgusting? Not very amusing? Then you will have an idea of the nature and purpose of Gary Weiss’s book on Rand and Objectivism, Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul.      View blog reactions

• • The ‘False Alarm’ of the Latest Executive Order 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | On Sunday morning, March 18th, I learned about the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order, signed into law by President Barack H. Obama on March 16th. As some news blogs noted, Friday was a curious time to inform the nation of the NDRP EO, or “EO 12919” (for Executive Order), an EO to which the mainstream media seemed oblivious and un-newsworthy. I immediately recalled Directive 10-289 from Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, in which the Head of State, at the behest of his national economic planner, issues a decree that freezes everyone and everything in place to combat an ongoing, government-caused national “emergency.”      View blog reactions

• • • Stealing Ayn Rand’s Thunder 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  |Objectivist author  | A new book on Ayn Rand and Objectivism came out in February, from St. Martin’s Press, Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, by Gary Weiss. The book will be reviewed here at a later date. However, if Weiss’s Huffington Post article on Ayn Rand is any indication of its objectivity, or lack of it, it telegraphs the book’s inherent malignity.      View blog reactions

• Washington’s Rocket Bombs 
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Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | I do believe that had [George Orwell] not died of tuberculosis (1949), he would have become one of the first neo-conservative intellectuals and writers in the West. He had been creeping in that direction ever since the Spanish Civil War, driven by his growing and articulate animus for totalitarianism (born during WWII, during which he saw elements of it in British government domestic wartime policies). This direction could only have ultimately led him to renounce collectivism, but probably have not motivated him to advocate capitalism or found a fresh new political philosophy (as Ayn Rand did, but from a philosophical perspective, and not from a solely political one). In that respect, he was not a profound thinker or philosophical innovator. But he was a first-class and honest observer.      View blog reactions

• • Are Left and Right Meaningless Political Labels? 
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Personal life  |Objectivist author  | Book review: The Left is Seldom Right, by Norman Berdichevsky.
In a chapter too short by several hundred pages, Berdichevsky [...] tackles Hollywood’s Leftish paradigm and our Leftish literary establishment but leaves one unsatisfied. Ayn Rand is mentioned once as the only screenwriter in Hollywood who had lived under Communism, and a quotation from her HUAC testimony would have been illuminating.      View blog reactions

• • The Closing of the Muslim Mind 
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The Virtue of Selfishness  |Objectivist author  | To use novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand’s term, the Ash’arites argued in favor of a complete, universal, across-the-board “blank out.”      View blog reactions

• • Much Ado about Nothing: Fatal Fallacies about “Palestine” 
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Objectivist author  | “Peace” with the Palestinians is also a fallacy. As Ayn Rand succinctly put it, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.” And the Palestinians are a tribe poisoned by generations of racial and religious hate. It is a population of nihilists, of zeroes. They are ruled by a terrorist organization that has declared Israel illegitimate and a legitimate target for eradication.      View blog reactions

• • • Cortlandt Homes, Redux: Why John Agilardo’s Adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Novel Atlas Shrugged Fails 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Image  |Objectivist author  | Esthetically, the difference between the novel and the movie is the difference between Michelangelo’s “David” and a Hummel figurine. Or, in terms of literary accomplishment, the difference between the Empire State Building and a 7-11 convenience store.      View blog reactions

• • The symbiosis between Islam and multiculturalism 
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The Fountainhead  |Objectivist author  | Multiculturalism has spawned such fashionable but insidious notions as “cultural diversity” and “cultural relativism” which merge into a bewildering kaleidoscope of trivialities, the great and the exceptional rendered equal to the base and the mediocre. “Enshrine mediocrity,” noted one of Ayn Rand’s most pernicious villains, “and the shrines are razed.”      View blog reactions

• • Lara Logan and the drooling beast 
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The Fountainhead  |Objectivist author  | “…I know the kind of terror it is….Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me – it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice – your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own….” –Steve Mallory to Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.      View blog reactions

• • Burning the Koran is self-defeating 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Objectivist author  | The Koran can no more automatically influence a person to become a Muslim and/or a jihadist than Atlas Shrugged can automatically turn a reader into an intransigent champion of reason, individualism, and capitalism.      View blog reactions

• The scarecrow of “violent language” 
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Objectivist author  | Since long before Barack Obama was elected president, no Republican, no member of the Tea Party, no conservative, no libertarian, no Objectivist, no prominent “anti-government” activist has ever advocated assassination or even an armed rebellion against the federal government. The best of these individuals has simply reminded the administration and Congress of the proper role of government in as forceful language as possible – note that the term is forceful language, not forceful action.      View blog reactions

• • The incontrovertible dead-end of Islam 
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Objectivist author  | As Ayn Rand might have put it: “You can’t have your mystic of muscle and deny him, too.”      View blog reactions

• “2081”: Philosophy in motion 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | The authorities order [his] broadcast stopped, but Harrison Bergeron has a device that overrides the kill signal and rebroadcasts the program (shades of John Galt’s broadcast in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged).      View blog reactions

• Burning the First Amendment 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | Pastor [Terry] Jones had a fundamental right to burn his Korans. They were his private property, or his church‘s. It was his or the church’s money. His gesture was loony, not “counter-productive” as some pundits have claimed, but rather a futile protest against the Ground Zero mosque and Islamic terrorism. It may have even been a bid for publicity, which he certainly garnered. What about burning Bibles, or copies of Mein Kampf, or Das Kapital, or even Atlas Shrugged, or the Harry Patter novels? The same principle applies. Freedom of speech is inherently linked to private property. If property is regulated, controlled, or abolished, then, by extension, so is speech. This is what Obama, Cass Sunstein, and the FCC are creeping up to in wanting to regulate the Internet through “net neutrality.”      View blog reactions

• • “Emotionalism” and the Ground Zero mosque 
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Objectivist author  | What is an emotion? Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher, noted that “There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards,” and also that, “An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man’s value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man’s reason and his emotions—provided he observes their proper relationship.”      View blog reactions

• • • The fatal links of servitude 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Individualism  |Objectivist author  | I have always questioned the fearful reluctance of conservatives to champion the likes of Howard Roark and John Galt, or to acknowledge that they are the fundamental models of what this culture needs more of. I have always suspected that these heroes represent a morality as much a perilous nemesis to conservatives as they represent to the Obamas and Pelosis of the world. Roark and Galt are deemed “too extreme” examples of individualism. But in the final analysis, their “extremism” is precisely what makes living and innovation and progress possible, and their freedom to live and act for their own reasons are primary requisites, not families, churches, or society. No productive individual honestly acts out of a sense of family, church, or society. If he claims he does, he is deceiving himself and perpetuating a fraud.      View blog reactions