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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
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High Society
Todd Vanderwerff, The Onion A.V. Club
TV series review.If nothing else, High Society should be the final nail in the coffin of Randian objectivism. I have no problem with the idea that people who rise from rags to riches are smart, hard-working, capable individuals. I'd say, in my experience, that that's often the case. I just am not so sure that's the case with their children, who often seem like some of the worst people to ever have lived, if the presentation of them on television is any indication. The CW's High Society is just the latest series to attempt to turn the lives of young, lithe, hot women in the big city into something approaching compelling television.
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SXSW 2010: The Low Anthem
Jesse Ship, Spinner
Anthem
Interview with Ben Knox Miller of the folk rock band The Low Anthem.[Q:] Where did the name come from? [A:] The name comes from an Ayn Rand book by the same title. We didn't realize this until we had been together for quite a while because it was thought up by one of the original members, an old childhood friend, who no longer plays with us. I have actually read the book and I don't like it much at all, so it is a bit strange to have that name, but at least the name is abstract enough to be interpreted in different ways.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
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Letting the left claim the cerebral high ground
Tasha Kheiriddin, National Post (Toronto)
Atlas Shrugged
From bank bailouts to government health care, not in recent memory has socialism garnered such a toehold in American political discourse. Ayn Rand would recognize much of the statist nightmare of her famous Atlas Shrugged in Mr. Obama’s America: government ownership of lending institutions and car companies, increasing demonization of the rich, and an unelected “czar” in Washington for every policy area under the sun.
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What Washington state does about its budget deficit is a taxing mess
Jon Talton, Seattle Times
Americans face a future where even the basic government services they long took for granted are in doubt. This may be heaven for some acolytes of Ayn Rand. But she wrote fiction.
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Bob Barr visits Cartersville
Kursten Hedgis, Six Mile Post (GA Highlands College, Rome)
Inaccurate
Libertarian Bob Barr arrived eight minutes late with smiles and waves for his Feb. 16 appearance sponsored by [Georgia Highlands College]'s Libertarian Club. [....] [He] spoke about the new RFID chips that are placed in passports so travelling will be, as he said with sarcasm, "easier for you." However, he explains this convenience often comes at a price, the ultimate price in his eyes: an individual's privacy. These trends and examples all lead to his main point, for which he quoted Ayn Rand, "The right to privacy is the basis of our freedom and liberty."
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Undermining 1st Amendment from the top
The Times and Democrat (Orangeburg ,SC)
Ayn Rand Center
Don Watkins, an analyst with the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, writes: “You might think this radical call for government control of the media is at odds with the First Amendment and the ideals of its authors. Not according to [Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Officer Mark] Lloyd and his fellow travelers, who portray their vision of a government-funded press as a continuation of the American tradition. The founders, they say, weren’t committed to protecting a profit-seeking press from government control. Instead, their primary concern was making sure the press could effectively educate and inform Americans, and they obsessively sought to subsidize the press in order to achieve that goal.” Lloyd’s approach is dangerous in a country founded on the ideal of free speech, with the founders even writing into the Bill of Rights the guarantee of a free press.
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Not quite a bull’s-eye
Daniel M. Ryan, Enter Stage Right
Personal life
Review of the book Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession, by Frederick Sheehan.[Frederick] Sheehan goes out of his way to highlight Ayn Rand's first impression of [Alan Greenspan] when they met: "'Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?'" (p. 9.) This quote serves as a leitmotif of the book as Sheehan digs into Greenspan's later life. He decided that the other Greenspan – the man who hitched his wagon to Arthur Burns's star early on – was the real Greenspan. The impression he conveys is that Greenspan wasn't even much of an Objectivist, although Sheehan doesn't intimate that Greenspan was drawn into Rand's inner circle out of a desire to rub shoulders with a popular novelist. He presents Greenspan as a man who did believe in Rand's philosophy in his own way, but shed it while ascending the socio-political heights. Like many libertarian critics of Greenspan, Sheehan brandishes "Gold And Economic Freedom" as a reproach – even if he holds his nose a little while doing so.
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From the Martian desk
Gilles d'Aymery, Swans
Atlas Shrugged
When asked how she would "cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare," [Tea Part activist Keli] Carender answers, "Let's see. Some days I'm very Randian. I feel like there shouldn't be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem." ("A Young and Unlikely Activist Who Arrived at the Tea Party Early," by Kate Zernike, The New York Times, February 28, 2010.) Charitable organizations... Is there a mention of them in Atlas Shrugged, the Libertarian bible? Does she really believe in the generosity bequeathed by the Founding Fathers?
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Video poker won’t solve anything
Guy Turnbull, Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL)
The Daily Herald recently selected a quote from Ayn Rand for its word puzzle, "The upper classes are a nation's past, the middle class is its future." That says a lot about why change is so difficult.
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Ideas for modern living: Mutuality
Mark Earls, The Guardian (London)
Inaccurate
Many prefer to see human life as one long competitive struggle for dominance. Philosopher Edmund Burke, Darwin's champion Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest") and Ayn Rand (high priestess of the American idea of rugged individualism) are among those who characterise human life in terms of the struggle between individuals for the spoils of humanity.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
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Robbing the GOP of credibility
Mark Davis, Tracy Press (CA)
Atheism
After Aquila’s Feb. 27 column (“Democrats: Fulfilling the Communist agenda”), I realized the brilliance of Aquila’s efforts. You see, Mr. Aquila is part of a communist fifth column that has infiltrated the GOP and is intent on destroying the party from the inside. [....] He tries to misdirect with contradictory quotes from figures of authority. Aquila thoroughly understood that Ayn Rand’s radical libertarianism and anti-communism was also tinged by the strongest form of atheism. Aquila thoroughly understood that Ayn Rand’s radical libertarianism and anti-communism was also tinged by the strongest form of atheism. One of her quotes: “Faith is the worst curse of man, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.” Yet he strategically chose to quote Rand, thus undermining his previous claims about the ungodliness of the communist agenda. With that signal quote, he thereby managed to thoroughly derail any chance at GOP ideological coherence while simultaneously calling into question any commonality of purpose with libertarians.
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BB&T has donated $1 million to High Point University
Winston-Salem Journal (NC)
Capitalism
High Point University said yesterday that it has received a $1 million contribution from BB&T Corp. in support of its entrepreneurship program. [....] Cynthia Williams, a spokeswoman for BB&T, said that the gift to High Point University is separate from the grants given from the bank's charitable foundation for programs geared toward the moral foundations of capitalism. The foundation, established by John Allison, the bank's retired chairman and chief executive, has provided $1 million-plus gifts to at least 10 universities in North Carolina. Those programs typically have had a connection to author Ayn Rand and objectivism, which extols rational individualism, creativity, independent thinking and a limited role for government as a protector of the peace.
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Sports and social justice with David Zirin
Timothy Braun, Austin Chronicle
Atlas Shrugged
[Q:] This June your book Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love will be published. We have two vivacious owners in Mark Cuban and Jerry Jones here in the Lone Star State. Should I expect to be reading about one or both of these men when I review your book? [A:] Well, they both certainly come up because they're never boring. If you are entertaining as opposed to shadowy and nefarious, it goes a long way when we're talking about owners. But the public dollars that went to the Jerry Dome is unconscionable. Cuban is an interesting guy: an Ayn Rand populist, who supports some very dynamic left-wing films and documentaries while simultaneously preaching the gospel of Atlas Shrugged. I wrote about him here.
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Morning must reads—Now that I think about it, Kathleen Sebelius does kind of look like Ayn Rand
Chris Stirewalt, The Examiner (Washington, DC)
Atlas Shrugged
Writers Janet Adamy and Avery Johnson tell us about the administration’s effort to impose health insurance premiums by fiat and a meeting with health insurers summoned to the White House for a whipping that was so over the top that it could have been a scene in Atlas Shrugged.
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A year ago, when the Dow was tanking and the WSJ knew why
Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Jay Bookman
Atlas Shrugged
[The market] closed today at 10,444, up 54 percent from the low noted by the Wall Street Journal. So much for a capital strike. So much for going Galt. Apparently those capitalists think a lot more of Obamanomics than the experts at the WSJ believed.
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Fresh media, stale ideas
Kyle Francis, FFWD
Capitalism
The first Bioshock was an unrelenting satire of video games and the people who play them, set against one of the most creative, thoughtful backdrops ever seen in the medium — a crumbling utopia beneath the sea built upon the principles of (and destroyed by) Objectivism, Ayn Rand's personal brand of hyper-capitalism. It was the first mainstream, multimillion-dollar video game to ever use the mechanics and conventions of the medium to build its themes (basically, will and choice are central to Objectivism, and games, with their fairly limited range of interactivity, rob you of both).