OT: Al Franken

[Product developer]

John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandSNIPtechTHISnologyPLEASE.com> wrote in message news:<nfci80trm3d3htokamauu0a8o28is0ofjv@4ax.com>...

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 04:22:23 GMT, "R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 03:34:51 GMT, "R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com
wrote:

Gee, aintcha kind?

Not really. I make deals with people for our mutual benefit, on an
entirely voluntary basis. A world that consists of purely voluntary
agreements is my vision of Utopia.
------------------------
Sort of like when you threaten their livelihood and they decide
"voluntarily" to not get wages you don't want to give them.

There is no voluntary agreement where people are not equal.

-Steve

But in my Utopia everybody is strong and confident, everything is
competitive on a friendly, sports-like basis, and everybody *knows*
they are equal, even though some people are acknowledged to have
management skills (like the person I work for) or just worker-skills
(like me.) This vision is far beyond worries about class and
economics: it's about everybody knowing themselves for what they
really are, and liking it.

The thing I don't like about Communism is that is must be coercive to
enforce a vision of equality without addressing the realities of
equality. Hence the necessity for killing.

John

This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.

When children bust open a pinata at a birthday party the kid with the
fastest gathering skills gets the booty of candy! The commie kid sits
back lazily and complains that he got nothing because the system was
unfair and favored the rich.

When fish start acting helpless or lazy they get attacked and eaten.

If everyone just took care of themselves ala Ayn Rand everything would
be fine.

I would bet it all that if our resident commie wasn't a frustrated
underacheiving misfit and earned a real income, all the goofy, blame
the rich, diatribes would dissapear.

 

[Tim Auton]

jdurban@vorel.com (Product developer) wrote:
[snip]

This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.

That's why the chipmunks are still living in the trees.


Tim
--
Love is a travelator.

 

[Chuck Harris]

Tim Auton wrote:

jdurban@vorel.com (Product developer) wrote:
[snip]

This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.


That's why the chipmunks are still living in the trees.

What's wrong with living in trees?

-Chuck

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 00:18:37 +0100, Tim Auton
<tim.auton@uton.[groupSexWithoutTheY]> wrote:

jdurban@vorel.com (Product developer) wrote:
[snip]
This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.

That's why the chipmunks are still living in the trees.


Tim

The bees and the termites live in trees, too. Sorta nullifies the
point.

John

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Richard Henry wrote:

"R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com> wrote in message
news:4088A50E.75F9@armory.com...
Richard Henry wrote:

"R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com> wrote in message
news:408843CE.3D66@armory.com...

The proper definition of Communism is that of a system where there
are NO privileged rich people, and in both Russia and China that
wasn't true, there were and are very rich people at the top running
it, which makes both of them merely varieties upon the same theme
we see in the USA, rich shit thieving and stealing from those who
labor in their place so they don't have to work, and who make less
than they should so that the rich can live large instead of the
laborer's families living just decently, having health insurance,
and having the full measure of what they have earned.

Can you cite a recent example of a successful Communist state?
-----------------------
It's a small planet, not big enough for fair statistical examples,
and history was just invented last week. Grow up. We lived in a
Communist State of Nature in tribes of 30-50 for 100,000 years,
or we wouldn't be here.

We didn't used to be nearly so accomplished, not fleet of foot,
sharp of tooth, powerful of muscle, nor could we smell or see worth
a damn, nor did we have petroleum or metallurgy, we had to survive
by our social ability to organize and run toward ANY danger to the
VERY LEAST of us in order to to seal the social contract and live
as the FIRST species with a Shared Awareness.

And we had to do so with nothing but rocks and sharp sticks and
attitude!! And still we made every other predator terrified of
us by 100,000 years ago.

Now THAT'S one VERY powerful Communist Social Contract!

Nobody said, I don't wanna defend your ass, just mine!
They would have found themselves ALONE and then DEAD!

We have quite literally EVOLVED to live Communistically.

O.
K.

I'll take that as a no.
----------------------

You SHOULD take that as a YES! The Human Species!

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Chuck Harris wrote:

R. Steve Walz wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
Granted, but I'm stealing from myself, so it's OK.
John
--------------
Nope, you aren't. That's just a lie you tell yourself, based on
finders-keepers-muggers reasoning you've been brainwashed with,
like telling yourself no one will notice if you steal. One one
raised in a tribe could ever think that way without spontaneous
desperate guilt and shame. You are merely a collector of funds
because the rich thieves do that so they can lie about where
the money all goes.

-Steve

I see it all now Steve: In your view, the only reward for working
verrrrry hard for the collective is to get lots of food, and become
verrrrry fat.

No other form of compensation is acceptable. Right?

-Chuck
-------------

What? You need a wafer-thin mint or something? ;->

No, the labor that needs to be done by everyone, especially the rich
parasites fresh to the labor market, is the production of consumer
goods, not merely quality food, but VCR's, TiVos, Monitors, Computers,
Stereos, better refigerators, washing machines, dryers, homes,
building materials, furnishings, industrial tools and robots, etc.,
and gradually re-educate the work-force to maintaining robots and
automated manufacture and farming/husbandry.

Once we eliminate the privilege of the indolent rich, and make them
work like the rest of us, wecan also eliminate those jobs the rich
have had us doing that only keep track of what the poor owe the rich,
eliminating most accounting positions and sending those workers back
to be retrained into production workers making things everyone actually
NEEDs, and most of us will be far richer in buying power than we have
ever been before, given that new infusion of people into the labor
force of actual production, instead of meaningless paper make-work to
support and manipulate the illicit privileges of wealth!!

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[R. Steve Walz]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 04:22:23 GMT, "R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com
wrote:

Not really. I make deals with people for our mutual benefit, on an
entirely voluntary basis. A world that consists of purely voluntary
agreements is my vision of Utopia.
------------------------
Sort of like when you threaten their livelihood and they decide
"voluntarily" to not get wages you don't want to give them.

There is no voluntary agreement where people are not equal.

-Steve

But in my Utopia everybody is strong and confident, everything is
competitive on a friendly, sports-like basis, and everybody *knows*
they are equal, even though some people are acknowledged to have
management skills (like the person I work for) or just worker-skills
(like me.)
----------------

Your "vision" is merely your lie. Yours is the delusion of the
slave-master, that his slaves surely love him because they suck
up to him. He never really gets it that they would kill him if
they could get away with it.

This vision is far beyond worries about class and
economics: it's about everybody knowing themselves for what they
really are, and liking it.
--------------------

They don't.

Nobody has to be other than fair to everyone else, whether they
like it or not. In my "Utopia" nobody will be deliriously happy,
they just won't be tortured economically by others who are greedy
and thieving. They will no longer have to worry about being evicted,
ever, for ANY reason. If they want to skip work, they can, they
simply won't get anymore food till they do. They get to work for
what they want, piece by piece, doing real productive work to make
the things everyone wants, and to order whatever they want next,
and those orders become the list of the goods the People order to
be produced next!

The thing I don't like about Communism is that is must be coercive to
enforce a vision of equality without addressing the realities of
equality. Hence the necessity for killing.
John
----------------------

The only thing that is required is fairness to everyone, even if some
minority doesn't WANT to treat others fairly. You seem to be one of
those elitests who think you somehow deserve better than everyone
else, and entirely without any justification.

There will always be greed and selfishness, but the only important
thing to do about it is to suppress it violently and make it totally
impossible for it to succeed. We do that now with our laws, we just
don't do it to everyone!! We will change the law.

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[Jim Thompson]

On 23 Apr 2004 15:47:52 -0700, jdurban@vorel.com (Product developer)
wrote:

[snip]

If everyone just took care of themselves ala Ayn Rand everything would
be fine.
[snip]

My favorite author.

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Product developer wrote:

This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.
-----------------------

Animals who are mechanical/non-conscious, like bees, are merely
programmed. Small mammals who live individually are also simply
instinctive and don't know anything consciously, and thus are so
stupid that they can't manage a systematic communal effort that
would make them much more powerful and secure.

But the animal that is chief species on this planet, homo sapies,
has become so by being smart enough to cooperate and to act as a
group, and they have a reality that is literally a shared mind
among them that they all dwell within mentally.

When individuals of this species are raised without other human
contact they behave like lower degenerated animals with no human
nature, they never learn to talk or express ideas, and they die
very early.

When children bust open a pinata at a birthday party the kid with the
fastest gathering skills gets the booty of candy! The commie kid sits
back lazily and complains that he got nothing because the system was
unfair and favored the rich.
---------------------------

Nonsense. Communists are as industrious as anyone else. You're merely
propagating a myth that the impoverished uneducated social parasite
is the communist, when they aren't anymore communist than the rich
parasite is. They're just as GREEDY as the rich parasite is, or maybe
even LESS so!

When fish start acting helpless or lazy they get attacked and eaten.
----------------------------

Those are sick or dying, they are eaten because they're slow, not
because they have abandoned some "virtue" and aren't doing a good job.
Again, you spew balderdash.

If everyone just took care of themselves ala Ayn Rand everything would
be fine.
--------------------------------

She's dead, she must not have taken very good care of herself.

That's total garbage, and Rand was a fucking crank, just like you.
The greedy always try to wrongly and malevolently justify their greed.

I would bet it all that if our resident commie wasn't a frustrated
underacheiving misfit and earned a real income, all the goofy, blame
the rich, diatribes would dissapear.
-----------------------------------

My income is just fine, thanks. If I thought you were worth it to
prove it to you, your pitifully wrong little political fantasy would
collapse around you like a house of cards.

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Chuck Harris wrote:

Tim Auton wrote:
jdurban@vorel.com (Product developer) wrote:
[snip]

This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.


That's why the chipmunks are still living in the trees.

What's wrong with living in trees?

-Chuck
--------------

Try it next winter.

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Chuck Harris wrote:

R. Steve Walz wrote:

Steve wants a pay-check too, but he doesn't think he should have to
work for it.
--------------
You've never read a single thing I've said then, lying asshole,
I believe that people who don't work should be denied access to
FOOD!

-Steve

Who decides how much work I have to do to be *allowed* to be fed?
---------------------

The rest of us who ALSO have to.

Does the amount and quality of work I do have any relationship to how
well I will be *allowed* to live?
-----------------------

The amount IS the only measure of work. It's judged by the hour by
your fellows believing you made the same honest effort THEY did.

If your answer is yes, you are describing capitalism.
------------------------

If YOU think it's that simple, then you're a simpleton.

Capitalism is "finders-keepers-stealers" the only ones
who get rich are those who don't actually work. This
steals buying power from those who actually do.

If your answer is no, I will work the barest minimum
amount I can to get by. The quality of my work will
suck.
-Chuck
----------------------------

If you imagine that you'll keep your job that way then you'll be
digging bad ditches in the rain and cold and be old before your
time for your laziness.

If you think my Communism has no "incentives" then you forgot ALL
about the NEGATIVE ones.

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Chuck Harris wrote:

R. Steve Walz wrote:
Chuck Harris wrote:

No, they feared the "mob" because the mob is almost always
wrong. The mob (aka the majority of citizens) is very mercurial
in what they "believe". All it takes to cause them to over
react is a cataclysmic event, or a highly charismatic leader.

-Chuck

--------------
Sure, but the People aren't some mob, that's baloney.
-Steve

Oh, but they are!
------------------

Nope, people can be, the People can never be.

Put a large group together, after some cataclysmic event
and give them a charismatic leader to help them to *decide* what to
do, and you will have murder in the streets. It has happened
time and time again through out history.
-----------------

Sure, but it results in all the varieties of capitalism and feudalism
we have seen, it will never result in Communism.

If the US were a true democracy, we would have nuked the middle east
after 9/11.
-Chuck Harris
------------------

I agree absolutely, we'd have nuked Mecca, Medina, Riyadh, Teheran,
Bagdadh, Kabul, Islamabad, Damascus, Amman, Cairo, and a few others
with 10 kTonners, and then taken over the oil, cut off all trade with
Islamic nations, and blockaded them with booomers, and set about the
systematic destruction of all Mosques on earth by laser-guided bombs
in our own good time, and burying every media outlet in the middle
east with jamming and alternate broadcasts.

Then we'd target ANY and ALL demonstrations in the streets with
fuel-air bombs and fragmentation clusters, and encourage everyone
of the Islamic bent on earth to kill themselves or be converted
to secularism because we are going to gas them to death if they
don't.

Then over the next 50 years we would pacify each small area one
at a time by cordoning it off and killing anyone resisting or who
has a weapon and taking the weapon. Then we would issue IDs and
require every single person to be where we say they should be or
simply execute them if they don't. They will work for themselves
to better their lives and support themselves under OUR direction.
They will not be allowed to go anywhere that hasn't been swept
clean for our safety. We will prefer killing thousands of them
to losing even one of our own.

Their kids will be schooled by us and the homes will be bugged
and monitored randomly for parental brainwashing efforts, which
will be rewarded with immediate execution. In 50 years Islam
would be a filthy word, nothing more. That's what any religion
should get when it can't control its idiots. Any religion that
spreads nonsense and death DESERVES to be OBLITERATED!

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[Roger Gt]

X-No-Archive: yes
"R. Steve Walz" wrote
: Product developer wrote:
<snip>
: > If everyone just took care of themselves ala Ayn Rand
everything would
: > be fine.
: --------------------------------
: She's dead, she must not have taken very good care of herself.

Rand was born on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She
moved to the United States in 1926 (arriving February 18) and
became a naturalized US citizen on March 13, 1931. She died of
heart failure on March 6, 1982 in New York City.

So she lived to 77...
She would be 99 now if she had survived NYC!

Better than average.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Roger Gt wrote:

X-No-Archive: yes
"R. Steve Walz" wrote
: Product developer wrote:
snip
: > If everyone just took care of themselves ala Ayn Rand
everything would
: > be fine.
: --------------------------------
: She's dead, she must not have taken very good care of herself.

Rand was born on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She
moved to the United States in 1926 (arriving February 18) and
became a naturalized US citizen on March 13, 1931. She died of
heart failure on March 6, 1982 in New York City.

So she lived to 77...
She would be 99 now if she had survived NYC!

Better than average.
------------

Nope, for that time merely average.
She was a hopeless crank who wrote the kind of books loved by
adolescents who never again get their guts up to read many other
books after that, having exhausted their mind and hormonal supply.

Which is why, like comic books, her stuff is the only thing they
have ever "read". Most people who know of her books think she's
an idiot, prating irrationally at every turn and asserting her
notion of supposed "objectivism" that simply isn't, and is more
obviously subjective and biased than anything else.

-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[R. Steve Walz]

R. Steve Walz wrote:

Roger Gt wrote:

X-No-Archive: yes
"R. Steve Walz" wrote
: Product developer wrote:
snip
: > If everyone just took care of themselves ala Ayn Rand
everything would
: > be fine.
: --------------------------------
: She's dead, she must not have taken very good care of herself.

Rand was born on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. She
moved to the United States in 1926 (arriving February 18) and
became a naturalized US citizen on March 13, 1931. She died of
heart failure on March 6, 1982 in New York City.

So she lived to 77...
She would be 99 now if she had survived NYC!

Better than average.
------------
Nope, for that time merely average.
She was a hopeless crank who wrote the kind of books loved by
adolescents who never again get their guts up to read many other
books after that, having exhausted their mind and hormonal supply.

Which is why, like comic books, her stuff is the only thing they
have ever "read". Most people who know of her books think she's
an idiot, prating irrationally at every turn and asserting her
notion of supposed "objectivism" that simply isn't, and is more
obviously subjective and biased than anything else.

-Steve
---------

Check this out:
-Steve
-----------------

Let's Just Call It Subjectivism

by TheGline.com

Without trying very hard, every once in a while I run into someone
who is a ferverent Ayn Rand fan. No better way to talk about
Objectivists, really, except as fans of Ayn Rand. God knows the
philosophy isn't tenable enough to be considered livable, and the
only reason I balk at calling them a religion is because they'd
bulk tiny against far more humane beliefs. Calvinist Christianity
had more going for it than Objectivism.

I've never liked Ayn Rand. Perhaps hate is the wrong word for what
I feel -- too emotional. Despise would be better. I despise what
the woman stands for, and what she made herself into.

Rand was a novelist and self-styled thinker who promoted a philosophy
she titled "Objectivism." She wrote two major novels and a whole
slew of minor works of both fiction and nonfiction, but her major
impact has not been literary; rather, social.

I can sum up what's wrong with Objectivism in one sentence:
Objectivism is a philosophy by, and for, the sociopathic at heart.

It is not even a true philosophy, but a method of justification,
from which people can draw excuses to support their actions.

"Greed is good"

What is Objectivism, exactly? It's a philosophy that places human
self-worth and achievement above all else -- including, apparently,
sanity. The much-quoted Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone's insightful
Wall Street summed her philosophy in the simplest terms possible:
"Greed is good. Greed works." Good, sure, but for whom? And who
does greed work for, and against? Rand writes tracts to excuse
greed for the ones who wield it, and also provides them with a
convenient scapegoat.

After all, Ayn Rand did it all the time. She was the textbook
student of her own philosophy. She carried on an affair for many
years with a younger man while her husband slid into alcoholism.
She ostracized anyone who disagreed with her, branded anyone who
took exception to her personal behavior as a traitor, and so on.

People who say that we should separate Ayn Rand the writer/philosopher
from Ayn Rand the flawed human being do not seem to understand that
Rand's philosophy and writing were direct extensions of who she was
as a person: embittered, paranoid, self-important, and insanely
jealous of anyone who was awarded merit she felt they didn't deserve.

Who was the scapegoat in Rand's mind? The radical left, it seemed --
the "parasites" who advocated socialism, the same socialism that had
seemingly turned Russia into such a pesthole for so many. Eventually
the definition of who constituted a "looter" -- her word for anyone
who practiced an altruistic way of life, whether or not they chose to
recommend it to anyone else -- was expanded to include anyone who
wasn't on her side in no uncertain terms, a move which belied the
real origins of her philosophy and its true intentions. Whether or
not she knew it, Rand had reinvented fascism and made it palatable
for an American audience, given it a veneer of capitalist positivism
and free-thinking Outward Bound uplift. But fascism it was, and
fascism it remained. The word "looter" became the metal spike onto
which she could jam any enemy, like the bills of lading in a
pawnbroker's office.

Most of the people who dig Objectivism are not people who would
normally benefit from a healthy dose of self-reliance, but antisocial
rich-kid types who need something sufficiently middlebrow to justify
their sense of being misunderstood geniuses. (I always felt genius
was a label applied from the outside, and one to be resisted to a
degree. If people call you a genius, that says more about them than
it does about you. If a whole bunch of people call you a genius, that
says a good deal about the
society you live in. If everyone calls you a genius, you're either
a genius or you've got a really good publicist.)

The Fountainhead

Rand's first major exposure to the public was not her novel We the
Living, a surprisingly desperate book (for her) which had many flashes
of real value, and an appropriately cynical ending. It's best read
as a book written in the shadow of Stalin; outside of that, it loses
a great deal of its immediacy. The book which did bring her into the
public eye was her follow-up, The Fountainhead, about the "non-
conformist" architect Howard Roark and his struggles against the ...
you know the next word, don't you? Establishment! (Objectivism, for
all its crowing about being a philosophy of the living, is anti-
society, anti-humanity and downright anti-life as well.)

I disliked The Fountainhead when I was young, and if anything I
dislike it even more today. The thing I hated most about the
book when I plowed through it in high school was how dishonest
it felt. I'd already grown wary of people trying to sell me on
nonconformity, and the book seemed like the motherlode from which
a great deal of that drivel had been mined. Not that I
wanted to conform, mind you -- just that all of the talk about
nonconformity around me at the time had the air of a strawman
argument. I didn't consciously choose to stick out like a broken
thumb, I just did, and the few times I tried to choose not to
stick out only made things worse. The Fountainhead was like a
sop to my neuroses about being "weird." I didn't like being
that way, but I didn't have much of a choice. Being encouraged
to "embrace" it was like telling a man with a broken leg that he
can walk if he just thinks about his leg really hard.

The book's problems are twofold: it introduces one of the most
oversold characters in all of fiction, and then places him in a
stacked deck. The only reason Howard Roark comes away looking
good from The Fountainhead is because Rand surrounds him with
people who are even worse. A friend of mine who reviews bad
movies as a hobby has a term for this: he calls it "The Law of
the Designated Hero." A lot of bad movies have someone who's
intended to be the hero or protagonist, but who are such jerks
that we wonder why the movie doesn't realize how ill-equipped
they are for the role. Roark's "rebellion," infantile and
pointless as it is, gets rewarded thanks to the closed-ended
construction of Rand's idiotic moral universe.

As someone who has the occasional pretense towards being a creative
artist, I'll 'fess up right now that the last thing on earth
I want is to emulate Howard Roark. The only reason Roark doesn't
wind up as an alcoholic, ulcered wreck sucking a gun in a
damp basement apartment is because Rand writes fiction through and
through. The idea that someone of Roark's repulsive
personality should be an artist or a successful one at that is a
fiction of the basest stripe. Sure, some artists are assholes, but
if we're dealing with ideals, then why stick someone as repellent as
Roark on a pedestal?

Rand also has no idea how to make us believe Roark is much of an
artist -- she rhapsodizes endlessly about his work, but
doesn't have a clue how to demonstrate that his work is in fact
good. She talks her way around the issue and sets up a whole
platoon of straw men to either praise or damn his creations
depending on where they stand in her (tiny) moral universe. One
of the drawbacks of Rand starving her universe of genuine moral
complexity is that it makes her characters -- and her
universe, for that matter -- flat. No one has any existence in her
books except as either a mouthpiece or a manufactured
opponent to her outlook. If that was the point, then it was a very
ill-chosen point indeed.

Roark is Rand's "ideal man," all right: a self-absorbed sociopath
who still has to justify his vile self to others. Hence the
ten-page courtroom monologue at the end, which makes it clear that
Roark -- and many of Rand's characters, who pontificate
similarly -- aren't nearly as confident in themselves as we would be
led to believe. Hence lines like this:

"If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By
asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people.
Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you
stand it, not to know?"

Why ask? Because that's often the only way you do know. A person
who never asks other people if they're doing the right
thing is not a paragon of moral power who draws upon only himself
for the right answers. He's an idiot who's depriving himself
of the chance to use his mind to evaluate what perspectives other
people have to offer. And who knows -- sometimes they
may even be right, too. Just because you ask other people doesn't
mean you're honor-bound to implement what they say.

"You don't have to care what other people think" is the most
boiled-down version of this attitude I can produce. A better way
to put it would be: "You don't have to put credence into what other
people think." Meaning that you can still hear them out,
but that whether or not you invest anything in what they say is up
to you. There's nothing there that requires one becoming
an Objectivist to implement. The unspoken assumption that by asking
someone else for their opinion you are therefore bound
to put it into action is insanely literal-minded. But Rand was
never really a champion of using one's own mind, anyway. She
was championing a philosophy of applied sociopathy.

Roark never tries to figure out if he's right -- he just IS. Rand
built him from the ground up to be right, and inserted him into
a world that ultimately vindicates him. The most interesting thing
about Roark how little genesis there is in his thinking: there's
just the Randian world-view, fully-formed like Athena from the head
of Zeus, from page one. Barring that oddity -- which
would be doubly nifty if Rand had been aware of it -- he's a
thundering boor.

Atlas Shrugged

The Fountainhead was a mess, but the follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, is a
two-hundred-car freeway pileup. It is quite possibly the
single worst successful novel ever written, a work of Edward D.
Wood-ian awfulness that doesn't have the saving grace of
being good-naturedly funny. Loathing of humanity drips from every
page. The book is not suffused with the joy of life that
Rand claims to be an advocate of, but sadistic, self-important
gloating masquerading as noble purpose -- a genuinely sick book
written by a genuinely sick human being. (For the record, I also
consider Naked Lunch to be the product of a sick mind, but
with enough self-awareness and insight that it redeems itself.)

Atlas Shrugged takes place during an undetermined period of American
history -- it was written in the Fifties, but it reads like a
retro-Thirties SF novel, since the most important mode of
transportation in the book is the railroad. Everything appears to be
on the verge of breaking down. Dagny Taggart, the female railroad
magnate who serves as the book's heroine, is struggling to
keep her empire together in the face of economic collapse. She
eventually catches wind of an elite group of industrialists and
thinkers -- Prime Movers, if you will -- who have decided that they
aren't going to stick around to watch the world fall apart,
and have abandoned their responsibilities to the world in favor of a
secret desert hideaway. She joins them and finds they are
led by John Galt, a man who's name has become something of a popular
catchword after he refused to allow his super-efficient
engine to be exploited by the "undeserving." After some
sub-action-movie heroics, they emerge from their hideaway to reclaim
the world which has conveniently been destroying itself for them.
The end. (If you don't feel like reading the book, you could
always sit through the movie.)

Rand's characters aren't merely cardboard; they're stamped out of
sheet metal. None of them has a function outside of
providing a mouthpiece for her ideals, whether pro (clumsily) or con
(even more clumsily). This leads to some of the most
atrocious dialogue in history, culminating in a massive speech by
Galt that drones for dozens of pages with no end in sight.
But in no other book is Rand's contempt for the human race plainer,
even when she is allegedly showing up the dominant moral
screed.

As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in
half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one
is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only
outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the
only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver,
the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor,
the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not
question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of
their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them
by a negative, by the fact that they are 'non-you.'

The Randian answer to this, of course, lies in the absolute opposite
approach: Judeh Verreckh!

The only remotely human character in the whole book is Eddie
Willers, the Everyman who somehow manages to get through
the entire book relatively unscathed (he even survives the various
apocalypses that claim most of the rest of the world). Rand
makes him worship Dagny, who isn't interested, and then leaves him
in the desert to die -- presumably because he didn't force
his will on her the way Howard Roark did with his women. His lack
of "assertiveness" does him in.

At the end of the whole mess, she spits out at the reader in a
postscript: "And I mean it." Genocide, sociopathy, sexism --
she means it? The only sane response is to shut the book and drop
it in the trash. The only difference between Atlas
Shrugged, The Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf is in their choice of
scapegoat -- and sometimes not even that. All of them have
the same refrain: "Everything will be just fine once we get rid of
those miserable bastards!"

It's no accident that Rand has millions of anonymous (and therefore
disposable) people murdered at the end of Atlas
Shrugged, and had a select clutch of her uebermenschen rise from the
desert sand to remake the world. The book's heart is
the fiercest shade of Aryan Blue, a fevered Armageddon dream where
the unrighteous are wiped from the face of the earth by
those who will themselves to be gods. Rand probably didn't even
realize it herself, but her fevered fantasy of wiping the world
clean of "parasites" and then letting the Chosen Ones take over is
pure Endloesung. Guilt rains down equally on the innocent
and criminal in her world; the one true crime is not being one of
the moneyed elect.

I'm not saying that it can't happen. It came damned close to
happening in the middle of the 20th century. The fact that it can
happen, and does, makes it all the more repellent. When Rand has
the masses exterminated, she forgets that every man,
regardless of his station, is also part of a crowd. Contempt for
"the masses" is thinly-disguised self-contempt. Seen from the
right angles, anyone can be (and is) part of a mass, and no amount
of running and hiding can distance you from that. Once
the burning wheel starts rolling it crushes everything in its path,
and consumes all who ride with it as well. Atlas Shrugged is
Auschwitz with a happy ending.

...The rest of the story

This brings to mind something I once put together for an essay I
never completed on fascism. The problem with any fascist
philosophy is that it is not for anyone, really. It is adopted in
self-defense, as a reaction or a way of offsetting potential
criticism of one's present or future actions. Fascism is a
justification, and a rather shoddy one at that, since the ones you are
crushing can just as easily adopt your justifications without having
a leg to stand on either.

The ones who compose such excuses for themselves today never really
imagine themselves under the bootheels of the people
also penning it tomorrow. They always believe, mistakenly, that
they can keep the horde at bay, forgetting that they are their
own horde. Once you're one of the beasts, you never leave the
pack. Fascism is about everyone else being the prey, and
never wanting to believe that the other guy might be thinking the
exact same thing.

Fascism is also about the worship of force as the prime motive of
life, rather than reason or cooperation. Hitler renamed it
"will," but force it remained. Rand claimed to abhor violence, yet
advocated that the state (the state she also abhorred for
having the nerve to collect taxes!) be the final repository for
force. This little internal contradiction never bothered her,
apparently. Presumably she was talking about a rational,
Objectivist state, nothing like the ones we have now -- although
we're left without a word as to how such a state could be formed or
maintained. I guess she never figured it was her problem
to tell us how to do that.

Internal contradictions were the stock-in-trade with Objectivism.
It was impossible to avoid them, since the whole thing was
not about creating a sustainable way of life or even a philosophy to
defend free trade and free thought. Objectivism consists
of selfishness for dubious present gains, rather than altruism for a
more sustainable future gains for both yourself and others.
In game theory, such a strategy would be discarded, since it would
leave everyone dead fairly quickly. Another reader summed
up most of the way the contradictions broke down like this:

While about on a walk, one sees a child teetering on the brink
of a well, about to fall in. One such as myself would
naturally seize the child to prevent her from perishing.
However, according to Objectivism, one should allow the child
to fall to her death, both for fear of dirtying one's suit, and
because the charity of such an act would be degrading
to both involved.

Most Objectivists would probably answer this statement with
spluttering outrage: Of course an Objectivist would stop the child
from falling in, they just resent being forced to do so, etc., etc.
The question of where the force comes from is an open one.
If they're talking about the coercion of behavior implicit in social
morals -- if you rob a bank, you go to jail, etc. -- then there
squirming on the hook ends in nothing more than a rejection of being
social creatures.

Once again, Objectivism is sociopathy writ large. In place of the
strawman of pure altruism, Rand erected a statue to an equally
unreal (not unrealistic) pure greed. Rand's rhetoric of personal
responsibility rings quite hollow when the "responsibility" in
question is not much more than a matter of satisfying one's tastes.
I'm reminded of a vulgar passage in a 1950's novel that
explained how existentialism meant "you do as you goddamn please."

Objectivism doesn't deserve to be called a philosophy -- it's more
like est or Dianetics, a motivational system that taps into
emotion, rather than reason. What Rand knew -- or believed she knew
-- about the history of philosophy and history in
general was either incredibly inaccurate or so ad hominem as to be
worthless as serious discussion. Her discussion of Kant, in
my opinion, constitutes character assassination. I'm a little
surprised the amount of sheer meanness, the level of flat-out
bullying and sadism in her non-fiction hasn't been discussed more,
but people who wonder why Rand is not taught in
philosophy courses should look no further than this particular
fact. This meanness squares perfectly with her habit of
scapegoating everything that wasn't exclusively about her.

There is a difference, and a profound one, between individualism and
sociopathy. Individualism is about not having to depend
on any one person in particular, and allowing everyone in general to
help you. Sociopathy is when you depend on no one, and
want no one to depend on you. If no one ever says "Thank you" in
one of Rand's books, it's most likely because she could
never speak those words herself. (I am reminded of the Star Trek
episode "The City on the Edge of Forever," in which Kirk
says to Judith Keeler that "Let me help" is just as important as "I
love you" -- maybe even more so. He speaks of a classic
work of fiction to be produced on that theme. I am still waiting
for it to be written, myself.)

Rand does not tap into self-esteem or even appeals to reason as the
cornerstones for her work. She chooses instead to mine
scapegoating, self-importance, arrogance, greed -- many of the same
things that a certain German paperhanger and his
cronies tapped into with horrible ease. In the Germany of the
Twenties and Thirties -- rife with depression, desperate, hungry,
isolated from the world -- it worked. In postwar America, it seemed
mostly a bizarre curiosity, and never took hold with the
same horrid fervor.

Connections, more than tenuous ones, exist between Rand and the
Marquis de Sade. Both wrote voluminous tracts attacking
with varying degrees of success many of the largely unquestioned
principles of the day. Both were fascinated by
sadomasochistic behavior -- Rand covertly, Sade overtly. Both
harbored violent, pathological resentment against the world
that rejected them. Both despised religion and denied the existence
of God (not that denying God is a bad thing, but that
they were consistent on this point). Both tried to make the world
fit their beliefs, with predictably horrible results.

Incidentally, I have found that by and large people who despise
children intensely are generally consumed with a high level of
self-hatred. In the child they see all the things that make them
uncomfortable: innocence, naďveté, fragility. Both Rand and
Sade shared this. In other words, all the things they would rather
not have in themselves. No children are ever mentioned in
any of Rand's books, and despite much vigorous (and unplanned) sex
between lovers, no one ever gets pregnant. (Sade also
found children repulsive and pregnancy abhorrent; he once described
how a woman's breast was not good for anything but
wiping one's backside. Rand doesn't come quite that close.)

One common explanation of Objectivism's incompleteness is that Rand
never had the chance to develop it completely during
her lifetime. I disagree. I feel that Objectivism came into quite
full flower while she lived, and that its state of disarray was
simply a product of its nature. In plainer language, there was
nowhere for it to go. It comes as no surprise to me to see
subjects like "Are Psychopaths [Sociopaths] Non-Objective
Pragmatists?" in Objectivist journals. Said essay conveniently
ignores the fact that sociopaths are by and large irrational,
impulsive people who will use any pretext, including the semblances
of logic and reason, to exploit others. Like Ayn Rand did.

Why, then, does Objectivism continue to command an audience?
Probably because, like Dianetics or fundamentalist
Christianity, it offers seductively easy answers to thorny social
questions: poverty, morality, ethics, social organization. It
reassures us that we can have our cake and eat it too, even if it
gives us diabetes.

----------------------
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 05:31:51 GMT, "R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com>
wrote:

------------------
I agree absolutely, we'd have nuked Mecca, Medina, Riyadh, Teheran,
Bagdadh, Kabul, Islamabad, Damascus, Amman, Cairo, and a few others
with 10 kTonners, and then taken over the oil, cut off all trade with
Islamic nations, and blockaded them with booomers, and set about the
systematic destruction of all Mosques on earth by laser-guided bombs
in our own good time, and burying every media outlet in the middle
east with jamming and alternate broadcasts.

Then we'd target ANY and ALL demonstrations in the streets with
fuel-air bombs and fragmentation clusters, and encourage everyone
of the Islamic bent on earth to kill themselves or be converted
to secularism because we are going to gas them to death if they
don't.

Then over the next 50 years we would pacify each small area one
at a time by cordoning it off and killing anyone resisting or who
has a weapon and taking the weapon. Then we would issue IDs and
require every single person to be where we say they should be or
simply execute them if they don't. They will work for themselves
to better their lives and support themselves under OUR direction.
They will not be allowed to go anywhere that hasn't been swept
clean for our safety. We will prefer killing thousands of them
to losing even one of our own.

Their kids will be schooled by us and the homes will be bugged
and monitored randomly for parental brainwashing efforts, which
will be rewarded with immediate execution. In 50 years Islam
would be a filthy word, nothing more. That's what any religion
should get when it can't control its idiots. Any religion that
spreads nonsense and death DESERVES to be OBLITERATED!

So, what's the distinction between Communism and homicidal mania? It's
too subtle for me.

John

 

[John Woodgate]

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandSNIP
techTHISnologyPLEASE.com> wrote (in <3iuk80t5rdq5m26r5jk3ag5p96q0vq58mm@
4ax.com&gt about 'OT: Al Franken', on Sat, 24 Apr 2004:

So, what's the distinction between Communism and homicidal mania? It's
too subtle for me.

Homicidal maniacs aren't responsible for their actions.
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

 

[Tim Auton]

John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandSNIPtechTHISnologyPLEASE.com> wrote:

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 00:18:37 +0100, Tim Auton
tim.auton@uton.[groupSexWithoutTheY]> wrote:
jdurban@vorel.com (Product developer) wrote:
[snip]
This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.

That's why the chipmunks are still living in the trees.

The bees and the termites live in trees, too. Sorta nullifies the
point.

If you choose to be deliberately perverse and take what I wrote
completely literally then yes, it does nullify the point.


Tim
--
Love is a travelator.

 

[Product developer]

"R. Steve Walz" <rstevew@armory.com> wrote in message news:<4089F753.7EC9@armory.com>...

Product developer wrote:

This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.
-----------------------
Animals who are mechanical/non-conscious, like bees, are merely
programmed. Small mammals who live individually are also simply
instinctive and don't know anything consciously, and thus are so
stupid that they can't manage a systematic communal effort that
would make them much more powerful and secure.

Non-conscious? Programmed? You were out getting high during science
class. You don't think man still operates on instinct along with
acquired learning? It is instinctual to compete for food, shelter, and
a mate. In your world all those instinctual acts would have to be
sepressed.

But the animal that is chief species on this planet, homo sapies,
has become so by being smart enough to cooperate and to act as a
group, and they have a reality that is literally a shared mind
among them that they all dwell within mentally.

The cooperation is born of selfish reasoning, survival. Not a need to
be equal or just one of the drones. Those who dream of becoming
leaders rise up out of crowd while enjoying the benefits that the
"group" provided like security, shelter, and in the real world
freedom.

When individuals of this species are raised without other human
contact they behave like lower degenerated animals with no human
nature, they never learn to talk or express ideas, and they die
very early.

In other words without indoctrination the human relies more on
instinct than social programming. He would act according to natural
law. Survival of the fittest. Case made.

When children bust open a pińata at a birthday party the kid with the
fastest gathering skills gets the booty of candy! The commie kid sits
back lazily and complains that he got nothing because the system was
unfair and favored the rich.
---------------------------
Nonsense. Communists are as industrious as anyone else. You're merely
propagating a myth that the impoverished uneducated social parasite
is the communist, when they aren't anymore communist than the rich
parasite is. They're just as GREEDY as the rich parasite is, or maybe
even LESS so!

Makes total sense. In your world the other kids would have to take the
greedy kid into custody, redistribute his booty to the less capable,
and send him to a special camp to get his head right. You would have
to brainwash the kid to suppress all natural instinct to compete,
which is the essence of communism.

When fish start acting helpless or lazy they get attacked and eaten.
----------------------------
Those are sick or dying, they are eaten because they're slow, not
because they have abandoned some "virtue" and aren't doing a good job.
Again, you spew balderdash.

Not true. An inferior fish can be a mutation like we have many, many
of in society today all guised as Democrat special interest groups.

If everyone just took care of themselves ala Ayn Rand everything would
be fine.
--------------------------------
She's dead, she must not have taken very good care of herself.

So is Aristotle. So what?

That's total garbage, and Rand was a fucking crank, just like you.
The greedy always try to wrongly and malevolently justify their greed.

Rand was a genius. Great minds were often "Cranky".

I would bet it all that if our resident commie wasn't a frustrated
underacheiving misfit and earned a real income, all the goofy, blame
the rich, diatribes would dissapear.
-----------------------------------
My income is just fine, thanks. If I thought you were worth it to
prove it to you, your pitifully wrong little political fantasy would
collapse around you like a house of cards.

Are you designing circuits for a collective? I heard they always pay
late.

I would venture to guess you were brought up in a single parent,
low-income household in a bad neighborhood by a dominating mother. You
never fit in at school and had few if any friends. Your bitterness
grew and you became more reclusive. You searched for answers and found
them reading radical left wing kook doctrines and you found a home
among all the other misfits seeking answers to why they couldn't
compete in a free society. You found that it was much easier to rail
against those "selfish" achievers than to compete against them for
your share of the preverbal pie.

-Steve

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 17:19:43 +0100, Tim Auton
<tim.auton@uton.[groupSexWithoutTheY]> wrote:

John Larkin <jjlarkin@highlandSNIPtechTHISnologyPLEASE.com> wrote:
On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 00:18:37 +0100, Tim Auton
tim.auton@uton.[groupSexWithoutTheY]> wrote:
jdurban@vorel.com (Product developer) wrote:
[snip]
This may sound really simple but the perfect model is natural law. The
only collectives you see in nature is in the ant, termite, and bee
species. You don't see chipmunks collecting nuts for a winter
collective for redistribution to the lazy chipmunk's front. It's every
chipmunk for himself.

That's why the chipmunks are still living in the trees.

The bees and the termites live in trees, too. Sorta nullifies the
point.

If you choose to be deliberately perverse and take what I wrote
completely literally then yes, it does nullify the point.


Tim

Yes, I do, and yes, it does.

John