• • • Atlas Shrugged: The Hidden Context of the Book and Film 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |The Fountainhead movie  |Image  | ATLAS SHRUGGED is, after all, an indictment of modernist, enlightenment, Smithian-liberal civilization. To Rand, this “great experiment” has all been one big mistake, doomed to expire from its own internal contradictions. I use that Marxian expression deliberately. For, in significant dialectical ways, Ayn Rand was deeply influenced by Karl Marx—virtually an acolyte, in fact. She kept essentially intact Marx’s scenario of bourgeois decadence, guild protection, capital formation, conspiratorial competition-suppression, class-narrowing business cycles and teleologically inevitable divergence between the worker and owner castes. The chief difference is that Rand - a Russian emigre - stops short at the penultimate phase of Karl’s projection - the moment of pinnacle capitalist consolidation - freezes it and calls it good. Tearing out and throwing away all hints of the next and final stage prophesied by Marx.  

• • Seasteading: Some problems on the way to Castle Sovereign 
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Inaccurate  | If you reject the democracies, will you call them for help when an armed gang comes to simply take over your sovereign land, by right of conquest? Perhaps with the fig leaf excuse of a “revolution” of the proletariat of sub minimum wage servants? Or else, rationalizing that strength, cunning, and will are the only righteous justifications required? (Ayn Rand personally repudiated violence; but those who espouse her core principles don’t always agree with that part.) A Sea State of refugees is the least of many sources of such danger.  

• Revisting Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) 
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Anthem  | Everybody knows the dystopian novelsBrave New World and1984, but few remember Yevgeny Zamyatin’s seminal work,We. The Russian Zamyatin completed We in 1921, a book that was largely written in response to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and his work in the Tyne shipyards during the First World War. The result was a characteristically unique vision of the future, one that in turn spawned the satirical science fiction dystopia genre. There’s no questioning Zamyatin’s influence on 21st Century writers like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut and even Ayn Rand.  

• • The Lifeboat Foundation: A stealth attack on scientists? 
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The lifeboat question is what to do if two people are stuck in a lifeboat with no hope of both of them reaching land, but with some hope of salvation if one of them is thrown overboard. The question—the big dilemma, for the Randians—is whether it would be ethical for one person to kill (and perhaps eat) the other person. If humanity is to be saved, perhaps it would be necessary to…?  

• Defending transhumanism 
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To judge all transhumanists by the wrong ideas of a few is like judging all philosophers by the wrong ideas of Ayn Rand.  

• • Concerning Robert Heinlein 
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Robert Heinlein was hard to classify. If one had to make a political caricature, I’d say he was a compassionate libertarian, in that he believed that humans have an obligation to be both competitively independent and generous. Think of Ayn Rand with a soul…and with some historical perspective. (Yeah, that’s hard to picture, at a fundamental level. But Heinlein proved it needn’t be an oxymoron.)  

• Getting to know Kyle Munkittrick 
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[Q:] Do you consider yourself a libertarian, and if so, how does that fit in working with a politically progressive organization like the IEET? [A:] Oooooh boy. I’m a left-libertarian, which is shorthand for “I support free market economics and limited government, but I think Ayn Rand is crazy, recognize social and institutional disparities, and support liberal social goals, like marriage equality, reproductive rights, and drug legalization.” It’s better to think of me as a liberal who supports free market and small government solutions.  

• On the alleged rightist influence in Italian transhumanism 
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My amateur inquisitors urge that I submit to a “Fiuggi bath”, by which their refer to the congress of their neofascist friends such as Mr. Fini where in the nineties the he disavowed his previous claims [...] and officially converted to an aggressive neoconservatism. I have no interest in such a public cleansing since such ludicrous claims have never concerned me, and because I have no desire to be welcomed into their “creed,” which by the way is much more authoritarian and “moderate” than libertarian, objectivist or anarcho-capitalist.  

• • Are libertarians for intellectual property? 
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Ayn Rand’s defense of [intellectual property] was seriously confused, and she would never have granted that IP so important that it “overrides” “speech and monopoly issues.” IP rights are not an extension of property rights; they quite obviously undercut and invade property rights—a patent gives a right to its holder to legally force someone else not to use their own property as they see fit.  

• Technoprogressives and transhumanists: What’s the difference? 
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It’s not always easy [...] for me to appreciate [...] some of the extreme Ayn Randian dogma that makes up a small segment of transhumanist viewpoints.  

• Simple problems 
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I probably support democratic transhumanism more so than die-hard (cough, objectivist, cough) libertarian transhumanists.  

• Italian Transhumanist Manifesto 
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Capitalism  | A recent [World Transhumanist Association] member poll shows that transhumanists exist of many traditional political persuasions, from the far-left wing to the far-right wing, with everything in between. In terms of numbers, however, a prevalence of self-defined left-wingers can be observed (47% in total), with a preponderance of members identifying themselves as “socialist” or “progressive” as well as small fringes of anarchists (2%) and communists (1%). The libertarians are also numerous (20% the total percentage) with a smaller more radical (Randian-Objectivist, anarcho-capitalist, minarchist) component. Members also exist that support conservative, religious or nationalist ideas.  

•Left BioCon futurist scenario building 
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A response to “Our Biopolitical Future: Four Scenarios,” by Richard Hayes.
[Hayes] sincerely wants the world of 1995 back, when anyone enthusiastic about the medical potentials of genetics or nanotechnology was very likely to list The Fountainhead as their favorite novel.  

•Precarity and experimental subjection 
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Karl Marx argued that “capitalistic accumulation itself… constantly produces… a relatively redundant population of workers… a surplus-population.” The long-valorized former Chairman of the Federal Reserve (and former inner-circle acolyte of the breathtakingly bad market fundamentalist guru cum crappy romance novelist Ayn Rand), Alan Greenspan provided ample confirmation of Marx’s prediction.  

•Huffington Post on enhancement and transhumanism 
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When I was signed up to the Extropians mailing list a few years ago, many of the participants were forthright libertarians of the Ayn Randian variety, and saw no role for the state to restrict their proposals to alter themselves or their children, if the technology became available.  

•Election postgame from the technoprogressive perspective 
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By the term “technoprogressive” above I personally mean, quite simply: I. “progressive perspectives on technoscience and development issues” NOT II. “the latest Randroid, Scientologist, Raelian, Extropian Robot Cult a few white guys have decided is really truly going to Prevail over History because ‘We’ [TM] have found the Way of Ways.”