• • • Ayn Rand, Chapman University and serial killer love 
Matt Coker, Orange County Weekly - Navel Gazing (CA) The Fountainhead  Image  Inaccurate  The Mother of Objectivism and author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged "is the 28th notable figure to have a bust dedicated on the campus of Chapman University," reports Chapman Now. [....] [I]t's a good bet Rand is the only Chapman bustee whose first love dismembered little girls.     Share on Facebook

• • • Internal affairs: How Ayn Rand followers rationalize “welcomed” rape 
Amanda Hess, Washington City Paper - The Sexist (DC) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Rand reportedly had this to say about the [rape] scene [in The Fountainhead]: “If it was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation.” But for young people with no practical experience with sex, Rand doesn’t provide any instruction on how exactly to seal the note. If your sex partner is biting you and beating you in the face, how can you be sure they’ve consented “internally”? Between Rand’s idealized heroes and heroines, why is the ideal sexual scenario a violent rape that the woman only privately desires? And for Rand, who was fond of invoking the tautological principle that “A is A,” when is rape not rape?     Share on Facebook

• • • Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian novelist 
Jeff Riggenbach, Mises.org Daily Article Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Personal life  Whatever we decide about whether Rand read We in the '20s or '30s, there's simply no getting around the obvious similarities between Zamyatin's novel and Rand's Anthem. Both are set in the far future in a completely collectivized totalitarian society. Both are told in the first person by their main characters, in We by the mathematician and engineer D-503, in Anthem by the engineer Equality 7-2521. Anthem is the only work of fiction written by Rand to be written in the first person. In We, D-503 meets a woman, I-330, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives. In Anthem, Equality 7-2521 meets a woman, Liberty 5-3000, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives.     Share on Facebook

• • • Individuality, freedom, and superiority: Returning to Ayn Rand’s problems 
Gus diZerega, Beliefnet.com - A Pagan’s Blog Rand's model of the individual is lacking in depth because it does not address how each of us as individuals came to be who we are. She simply takes them for granted as elemental forces of nature. As the African proverb puts it: "I am because we are."     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s books are deliciously anti-statist, but her philosophy is borderline Nazi 
James Delingpole, The Spectator Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Inaccurate  What I find most off-putting about Rand is her hardness of heart. She has a Nietzschean (indeed, borderline Nazi) contempt for human frailty and a total lack of sympathy for the underdog. In her weltanschauung, you’re either a hero (rare) or — much more likely — a mere filler of latrines. Any form of charity, she suggests, is a kind of grotesque liberal indulgence towards people who really aren’t worth saving.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, the philosophy of freedom, and a serial killer 
Gus diZerega, Beliefnet.com - A Pagan’s Blog Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Egoism  Rand's admiration for a sociopathic murderer is an eye-opener as to the moral sensibility that appeals to all too many 'conservative' and 'libertarian' Americans. She was one very disturbed and deeply wounded person, as her biographies show.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s excellent proposal 
Ernest Partridge, Online Journal Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  In Ayn Rand’s sprawling novel, Atlas Shrugged, ubermensch industrialist, John Galt, infuriated over the “theft” of his property by the parasitic government, calls upon his fellow “captains of industry” -- the “producers of wealth” -- to go on strike which, we read, brings down the entire economy. He then proposes that these elite “producers” leave the wreckage of the old “collectivist” order behind and establish their own utopian society. What a splendid idea! I’m all for it! So let’s suppose that each and every CEO of the fortune 500 companies suddenly disappeared, along with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Robert Benmosche of AIG, and all those other bankster executives who claimed $150 billion in bonuses last year. (Supplied, by the way, by us taxpayers). Would the US economy collapse? Well, maybe not.     Share on Facebook

• • • Beast of conviction would be much better protagonist 
Claire Luchette, The Doings Hinsdale (IL) The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Emerson wrote, "...believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men -- that is genius." Howard Roark, then, according to Emerson's criteria, was a genius. He saw his own principles as the only ones fit for architecture and mankind. He sacrificed the need to be admired and took upon himself the burden of originality. In exclusive settings, the one who is outcast but not downcast is the one I find most respectable.     Share on Facebook

• • • Debating merits of Ayn Rand philosophy 
Spencer Case, Idaho State Journal (Pocatello, ID) Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  I think of Objectivism as a kind of intellectual chicken pox; most smart people get it when they're young, but usually it runs its course before causing any permanent damage. Don't get me wrong, I think "Atlas Shrugged" is well worth reading , just not as Holy Scripture.     Share on Facebook

• • • Apple vs. GM: Ayn Rand knew the difference. Do you? 
Don Watkins and Yaron Brook, Christian Science Monitor Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Since the advent of capitalism, businessmen have been denounced for the corrupt actions of a few political profiteers. To help understand that there is a distinction, consider two characters in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged.” In the book, Rand describes two opposite kinds of businessmen – those she calls the “producers” and those she calls the “looters.” The producers, such as Hank Rearden, inventor of a new metal stronger and cheaper than steel, work tirelessly to create products that improve human life. The looters are basically pseudobusinessmen, like the incompetent steel executive Orren Boyle, who get unearned riches by getting special favors from politicians. Their business isn’t business, but political pull.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s character model of a “real man” was child killing sociopath 
Tim McCown, The Examiner Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand's writings have no more business being the guiding principles of our political and economic policy than do Marx's. Sadly a brilliant but extremely mentally ill woman never got the help she needed. But sociopathy is not a solution but a mental illness to be treated. Rand's ideas were given very little credibility when she wrote them and they deserve even less creditability now.     Share on Facebook

• • • “A despicable hatchet job, by a clueless non entity, pretentiously posing as a degenerate scum 
Roger Kimball, Pajamas Media Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  I never made it through either of Rand’s two big novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. To enjoy either, I suspect, you had to have encountered Rand in adolescence, when so many of life’s lasting enthusiasms are forged. In recent years, a few friends have urged Rand on me, and I dutifully tried both novels more than once. Each time, I found myself oscillating between fits of the giggles, at the awful prose, and irritation, at the jejune philosophy. Among the many reasons I am thankful to Whittaker Chambers, his having rescued me from making further attempts to scale the Everest of Atlas Shrugged comes high on my list. His review of the book in an early issue of National Review is a masterpiece of literary demolition and moral interment.     Share on Facebook

• • • Denying Objectivism 
Nikola Milanovic, Stanford Progressive (Standford U, CA) Capitalism  Egoism  The reason Rand’s viewpoint is so dangerously misguided in the modern world is because it rests on the faulty underlying assumption that the state people are born into is justified. In his paper, Altruism in Philosophical and Ethical Traditions, Will Kymlicka argues that people today are seen by the Western world as free and equal, and that they therefore deserve equality of opportunity. [....] I loved objectivist libertarianism because it made me feel comfortable about my privilege. I read just about all of Rand’s work and attended seminars on her philosophy. It was easy to accept my abundance of opportunity as a right, but it didn’t quiet a nagging thought in the back of my head: I shouldn’t feel so deserving of being privileged. Like Kymlicka assesses, it’s easy to accept gross inequalities without batting an eye when they are viewed as natural. Objectivists accept them the same way feudalists accepted serfdom, the way Sharia law accepts the subjugation of women, the way India accepted castes. Viewed as the natural order of things, objectivism justifies inequalities that are the result of systematic injustice in how our societies and economies are organized today.     Share on Facebook

• • • The philosophy of me (first and only) 
Mike Lux, Huffington Post Egoism  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand/Glenn Beck -- the glorifiers of selfishness, cruelty, and the lions eating the weak -- have become the dominant players of modern day conservatism. Let's hope they never take control of our country.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand - Can this historical cult celebrity be recycled? 
Allan Powell, Herald-Mail (Hagerstown, MD) Atlas Shrugged  Rand was a powerful and very articulate writer. However, she cannot be accused of word economy. The closing lines of "Atlas Shrugged" are on page 1,069, when she has her platonic form, John Galt, utter what was intended to be the final, perfect statement of her theme. "I swear by my life and very love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for me." These are the words of an ego-inflated city boy who would have collapsed on the wooded, rugged trails of an earlier day.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, hugely popular author & inspiration to right-wing leaders, was admirer of serial killer 
Mark Ames, AlterNet Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.     Share on Facebook

• • • Biddle: Capitalism only moral system 
Carolyn Briggs, Badger Herald (U of WI, Madison) Capitalism  Egoism  Image  A lecturer hosted Monday night by the University of Wisconsin Students of Objectivism asserted capitalism is the only moral social system. Craig Biddle, author of “Loving Life” and editor of “The Objective Standard,” said capitalism is widely acknowledged as the most practical social system. He said most people agree the freer a society is, the wealthier and better off it will be. He thinks it is also extremely moral.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand and the limits of individualism 
Will Munsil, State Press (AZ State U) While Rand’s philosophy is in the end a cold and lifeless one, her supporters are right to oppose the ravening leviathan of statism that she saw as the inevitable end of modern liberalism. To the extent that Rand’s writings open the minds of young people to a worldview outside of the predominant leftism of the campus, they are valuable. But hers is not a philosophy to build a political movement around, or to build a life around. The Randian, individualist myth rests on a fundamental mistake. Markets without morality, individuals without community, liberty without order — none of these are enough.     Share on Facebook

• • • Literary smackdown: Ayn Rand, awesome or awful? 
Willy Blackmore and Billy Pacholski, Chicago Tribune - Printers Row Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Alan Greenspan was an Ayn Rand disciple in the ‘50s and brought her hands-off, anti-regulation ideas to the Fed, which didn't pan out too well. Neither Greenspan nor Rand are totally responsible for the Great Recession, but it seems that Rand’s thinking was one of the many causes for our near financial collapse. Yet somehow a lot of conservative politicians still thought it was logical to talk about “going Gault” — a la “Atlas Shrugged” — in the early days of the Obama administration when ideas for the stimulus bill were first being batted around. And I really don’t buy Rand’s “altruism is evil” philosophy.     Share on Facebook

• • • To 1L’s from an upperclassman 
Sam Thomason, The Docket (George Mason U, Arlington, VA) Atlas Shrugged  Humor.John Galt was an idealistic young man who aspired to perhaps the most joyous and beautiful of all vocations - that of the ballerina. Unfortunately, his abundant facial and chest hair rendered his choice of vocation impossible. Instead, young Mr. Galt chose to become a lawyer. He began his legal career as any aspiring attorney should - by ruthlessly pursuing his self-interest, negative externalities be damned! But this reckless individualism seemed unfair to him and John Galt began to worry that it oppressed the community around him. What about the externalities caused by his actions? Ought the fundamental dignity of man deserve some basic compassion?     Share on Facebook