The guy who is an Ayn Rand devotee, who has built a company on libertarian principles, is Koch Industries.

http://www.amazon.com/Science-Success-Market-Based-Management-Largest/dp/0470139889/ref=sr_1_1/103-4619088-7075048?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187901405&sr=1-1

One would think true devotees would know this, and would already be working there (it's quite a large private company, one of the largest in America).

Posted August 23, 2007 4:37 PM by Valuethinker

Sorry URL too long

Charles G. Koch is the author, the book is The Science of Success, Market Based Management

Posted August 23, 2007 4:39 PM by Valuethinker

Being reared on steel sounds uncomfortable.

Posted August 23, 2007 4:42 PM by Serge

Serge #3: Given the nature of the Randroids I've encountered, I'd say they were reared on crap.

Posted August 23, 2007 4:47 PM by Fragano Ledgister

So, uh...is this where the Bioshock thread is going to be, then?

Posted August 23, 2007 4:51 PM by Skwid

Fragano... I've never read Rand, but, if the Gary Cooper movie is any indication, I'm glad I didn't.

Posted August 23, 2007 4:51 PM by Serge

Valuethinker @1
One would think true devotees would know this, and would already be working there.

Agreed, or as Avram says, working for themselves.

The guys who email Reardon Metal wanting jobs are just wannabes. They want someone to give them the whole Objectivist dream, without realising that it's about taking*.

Love the irony of the John Galt stuff, though.

-----
* Whether or not you approve of that.

Posted August 23, 2007 4:56 PM by abi

This irony reminds me of this classic cartoon, the Bob the Angry Flower sequel to Atlas Shrugged. Worth reading even if you haven't read the original.

Posted August 23, 2007 5:02 PM by Stephen Frug

Reardon Steel was a fake name for Steve Pearlman's company while it was in stealth mode - it was a fake name, to throw peole off the track. I worked about a block away at the time.

I should ask him if he's a libertarian.

Steve is best known as founder of WebTV (which he sold to Microsoft for a hefty chunk), but I knew him at Apple before that. He pissed off a lot of people there by doing something they told him was impossible - which made them have to follow through on their promises to manufacture and sell it if he finished it on schedule

Posted August 23, 2007 5:08 PM by Allen Baum

My background in Objectivism is kind of thin, but as far as I can tell, if you believe your interests would be better served by being an employee rather than an entrepreneur, then that's the right thing to do, according to the philosophy.

Posted August 23, 2007 5:10 PM by Johan Larson

Atlas's Rug? Is that similar to William Shatner's?

Posted August 23, 2007 5:15 PM by Serge

Serge #6: Like Avram I've tried to read Rand, and failed.

Posted August 23, 2007 5:18 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Serge #6: Like Avram I've tried to read Rand, and failed.

Posted August 23, 2007 5:23 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Abi @7: They want someone to give them the whole Objectivist dream, without realising that it's about taking.

I don't think it is, actually. I think it's more about being able to ignore people.

Posted August 23, 2007 5:28 PM by Avram

I went through a Rand-reading phase in (no surprise here) my mid-teens, and I do seem to recall that there are positively portrayed minor characters that are assistants etc. of the genius. Which means that there is room in the philosophy for several kinds of roles. Of course, I do not find it that unlikely that Rand was a bit more thoughtful than your average fandom Randroid...

Posted August 23, 2007 5:28 PM by Per Chr. J.

Fragano... My favorite scene from the movie version of The Fountainhead is at the end, as Galt's girlfriend takes the elevator to his very tall and very phallic building, and her look of adoration as she sees him astride the summit, fists on hips, gave me such a Skyscraper Envy...

Posted August 23, 2007 5:31 PM by Serge

In spring of 2003, I was an uninterested, ignorant, completely apolitical (and in hindsight dangerously masochistic), but incredibly stubborn teenager.
I spent that summer reading Atlas Shrugged, first out of morbid curiosity of this book that I had never, ever heard anything good about, then as that wore away I continued to the end purely out of spite: I would not let the book beat me.
It gave me mental scars that I will carry with me until I die. And it turned me from that uninterested, ignorant, apolitical teenager into a dedicated life-long (so far) liberal.
Since Atlas Shrugged was by far the worst book I've ever finished*, I don't expect I will ever read anything else she wrote in my life.

Apart from actually having read the book, though, I don't have much experience with objectivists. I've never actually met one. I have friends who have, though, and from what I'm told they sound exactly like what I would expect from having read the book.
This story you show here also sounds exactly like what I would expect from them. Egad.

*: Not the worst book I've ever tried reading, however. That dubious honour belongs to Slavegirl of Gor (morbid curiosity, see above), which I quite simply could not bring myself to finish. By page fifteen I could literally feel myself dying inside.

Posted August 23, 2007 5:42 PM by KristianB

I've read most of Rand's fiction, most of her essays and a number of her letters and found everything I read stimulating, even when I didn't agree with it, which was often (I'm a progressive Democrat with strong socialist tendencies).

One of the things I enjoyed most about her work was her astute use of personality types as character models. I knew who Ellsworth Toohey was the moment he entered the story, and seeing him there helped me to better understand people I had known in life. The same was true with many other characters in her work. Granted, both Howard Roark and John Galt are a bit two-dimensional for my taste and often serve as mouthpieces for her ideology, but much like Milton's “Paradise Lost,” I think Rand's stories have more interesting devils than they do heroes.

I also think there's a great deal to be said for achievement and individuality, even though Rand says it much the way Zarathustra does and so is off-putting (“If you cannot help them to rise, help them to fall faster!”). Still, I appreciated her challenge to the reader to work hard, enjoy the fruits of that work and not allow oneself to be dragged down into mediocrity or groupthink.

I am not comfortable with the “Randroids” I've met or read about (what a great turn of phrase!), since I think they've taken her work as a license to pillage and damn the consequences (and perhaps she did indeed mean it to be taken that way). But I confess that I do have my Reardonesque days, and on those days, I am more wholly an individual, and that can't be a bad thing.

Anyway, there's my two bits, or my apology for Ayn Rand, or whatever. =)

Posted August 23, 2007 5:48 PM by csmaccath

I worked a couple blocks from a Rearden Steel office in Palo Alto. I didn't get the reference, though, never having read any Rand.

In Omaha there is a John Galt Boulevard, so at least the question "where is John Galt" has an answer.

Posted August 23, 2007 5:51 PM by Mark Gritter

#16: Roark, not Galt. [ /nitpick]

Posted August 23, 2007 5:51 PM by Jon Meltzer

Heh. Yeah, I noted the name, too, when I heard it on the news after the fire. Of course, I heard today that John Galt has been fired, which also answers the question "Where is John Galt?"

A: Out on his ass.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:03 PM by Michael Weholt

It is not true that all Rand fans would feel compelled to be CEO of whatever business attracts them. The character of Eddie Willers is meant to demonstrate people of good will and average talents. There is a place in the Rand universe for people who have no desire to run the world.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:11 PM by Scorpio

I'm afraid that I did read Atlas Shrugged, as well as a few of Ayn Rand's philosophical screeds (thinly disguised as serious essays), and fell for it completely. I espoused objectivist philosophy everywhere I went, disdained charity, proclaimed enlightened self interest, etc.

Then I turned 18, and saw what a load it was.

These days I liken the objectivism as akin to communism, in that it's a lovely idea but utterly impractical and absolutely unworkable in a world made up of human beings.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:13 PM by Richard Crawford

I have a friend who joined Rearden Steel when it was a startup. I interviewed there, but having read Atlas Shrugged before the interview, I had to find a polite way to say, "The name of your company fills me with dread for your prospects."

In retrospect, I'm glad the deal didn't work out.

p1. The name of the company was, in fact, Rearden Steel, not Reardon Steel. It changed its name to Moxi Digital when it came out of its so-called "stealth" mode.

p2. Steve Perlman, the guy in question, left the company when it was scrambling for operating funds just before it got bought by Digeo. There's probably a story there that remains untold.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:16 PM by j h woodyatt

KristianB @ 17... Ayn Rand wrote Slavegirls of Gor?

Posted August 23, 2007 6:18 PM by Serge

Oh, and it would be good to mention the Objectivism Mockery Page at this critical juncture.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:18 PM by j h woodyatt

Ack. Those links were all good when I looked last (admittedly a couple years ago). It's sad that quality objectivism mockery has such a short shelf life.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:21 PM by j h woodyatt

Jon Meltzer @ 20... I stand corrected. And Roark's building stands. I am so envious of its rigor.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:22 PM by Serge

Serge @25: No. Just no. No, no, no Rand/Norman Atlas of Gor crossover mash-ups. Step away form the keyboard.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:32 PM by NelC

NelC @ 29... Bah humbug!

Posted August 23, 2007 6:43 PM by Serge

I, too, will confess to a teenage infatuation with Ayn Rand; this was mainly due to a teenage infatuation with the band Rush. ("2112" was practically Anthem set to music. Anthem will take you all of 1.5, maybe 2 hours to read, unlike The Fountainhead, which I struggled through thinking it was the book "2112" was based on. Oops.)

(Not to be confused with the song "Anthem," on the album previous, which probably was based on The Fountainhead, in three-verse miniature. With rockin' guitar riffs and way high vocals that are fun to screech along to.)

When the novelty of pissing off my parents with Randisms faded, so did my interest in Randisms. My infatuation with Rush, however, is still going strong. (Eeee! My Snakes and Arrows T came in the mail! Eeee!) Because they rock. Their lyricist also apparently outgrew Randism... sometime around 1977, I think.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:44 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Recently I watched The Fountainhead. Knowing Rand had been mentored by Cecil B. DeMille, and wouldn't let anyone change a syllable of her screenplay, I just had to find out how her arid prose style and pitiless logic would translate into a film.

The weird result: it's a proper movie -- there's a story, dialogue, scenes that "turn," a good musical score, visual sophistication, moody lighting, and the young Patricia Neal in a chic black dress -- but all the characters are from Mars. They're inhuman. They're psychologically bizarro. Logical and motivated, yes, but if I met a batch of robot sociopaths like that in real life I'd flee screaming.

And how about that seduction scene? [shudder]

Posted August 23, 2007 6:45 PM by Lloyd Burchill

Nicole #31: In tenth grade Anthem was one of my required summer reading books. My mother was furious, as I would have been in her position.

I just thought it was dumb, and I was pissed that, if they were going to make us read something SFnal, it couldn't be something that was any good.

Posted August 23, 2007 6:59 PM by ethan

I'm sorry, I'm letting Rush-fandom down with my inaccuracies. That would be "an album previous," not "the album previous," as the song "Anthem" came two albums before the song and album named 2112.

Thank you. I shall geek out elsewhere now. (Wearing my spiffy new T.)

Oh. And Bob the Angry Flower makes me giggle. "What? NOBODY remembered to bring an inexhaustible labor force of ROBOTS???"

Posted August 23, 2007 7:00 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Lloyd: And how about that seduction scene? [shudder]

You're too kind. But then I didn't see the movie. For all I know, that scene might not have been 100% pure rape in the movie. (No! Don't dash my illusions! Leave me some hope for humanity!)

Posted August 23, 2007 7:03 PM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Scorpio @22: But didn't Eddie end up stranded in the middle of the desert? I always thought he didn't survive the book... which pissed me off, as he was my favorite character. (/relurk)

Posted August 23, 2007 7:08 PM by Ab_Normal

I became obsesed with Rand during a six-month period or so in college. I eventually choked on her disdain for altruism, and spit it all out.

She served as a useful antidote to Communist sympathy during the mid-20th Century, but these days the West's biggest problems seem to be, on the one hand, religious fanaticism, and, on the other, big business run wild. And Rand can be used as an apologist for the latter.

She's fighting a battle against Communism, but nobody believes in Communism anymore, not even the Communists. So reading her is like reading an anti-Jacobite tract.

Posted August 23, 2007 7:45 PM by Mitch Wagner

According to the Times story, the John Galt Corporation was a really stupid outsourcer, or a mob front. In either case, the company itself wasn't much more than a PO box.

I suppose an orthodox Randian would rename them the James Taggart Corporation.

Posted August 23, 2007 7:57 PM by Jon Meltzer

From what I've heard and read, she strikes me as the literary and philosophical equivalent of acid reflux.

Still, I am determined to read Atlas Shrugged one day. I have a copy. Just, you know, so I can say I read her, I understand her and I still don't agree with her. I haven't managed more than four pages yet, but I'm a persistent cuss and I'll do it in the end.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:01 PM by Zander

Serge #11: No, but it really held the room together, dude.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:24 PM by tonyk

Serge #16: Now that is.........interesting.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:25 PM by Fragano Ledgister

KristianB at #17 writes:

> *: Not the worst book I've ever tried reading, however. That dubious honour belongs to Slavegirl of Gor (morbid curiosity, see above), which I quite simply could not bring myself to finish. By page fifteen I could literally feel myself dying inside.

My old university had a seperate recreational library, run by a cabal of hip young feminists punk haircuts. One day they stopped a couple of us and said they'd just been given a box of SF books, and since they knew we were SF readers, could we sort out the good and bad stuff?

We obligingly sorted, and told them to tear the Gor books in two and throw them in the garbage right now. They gave us the sort of look librarians give people who suggest they mutilate books, but after we urged them to open the books to a random page and read, I think we came to a meeting of minds.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:31 PM by Steve Taylor

Ah, you are all missing the real point. The question is not "Who is John Galt?" but rather "What is John Galt?" Once you answer that question, grasshopper, you will understand why all those Objectivists are waiting around for someone to found Rearden Steel. It is the same reason why all the titans in the book waited to go on strike until John Galt told them to.

I will also note that I find the prose of Atlas Shrugged no more off-putting than Tarzan, Skylark of Space, or Conan, the Barbarian. It's really just a matter of making sure you read them before you are 15.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:38 PM by James Killus

i read the action philosophers! issue on ayn rand. i consider that sufficient.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:43 PM by miriam beetle

I never tried Objectivism. (I read the Illuminatus trilogy first, which made it hard to take anything of that ilk seriously.)

In college, I once had an Objectivist explain to me that quantum mechanics was wrong. Or possibly an abomination, or possibly just awful -- I forget his conclusion. I recall his *reasoning*, which was that if an electron couldn't have both a position and a velocity, then there was no longer any such thing as truth or fact or reality.

That was a long time ago. Perhaps he changed his mind. I certainly never heard that he abjured the use of lasers.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:53 PM by Andrew Plotkin

Sometime in the mid-eighties fate directed me to a meeting of Israeli objectivists, where I was told that the new objectivist state would be planned.

It was a hot summer evening, and the meeting was held on the breezy roof of a rather university-townish house.

Two major questions were discussed, as I recall: first, if there is a lifeboatload of people going through the ocean and one of them has to go, should it be the little old lady or the able bodied men; second, what is the proper color and design of street signs in a real objectivist state.

The latter got considerably more discussion (with far more nuanced views) than the former.

It cured me of any affection for the books, which I had read a couple years earlier in their (marvelous) Hebrew translations. The English source simply does not live up to the translated glory of the Hebrew.

It is quite possible that the appeal of the books (when I read them, and we're talking *early* eighties here) had to do with living in a sort of Eastern European-style interpretation of a socialist society (low on individual choices; low on freedom; high on bureaucracy and quite unclear about rule-of-law and there being any problem with nepotism). The notion of rewarding only the best-at-greed (and to hell with the other 99.999 percent of humanity) really loses its charm when you meet that kind of person and realize that you can't stand 'em...

Posted August 23, 2007 9:11 PM by Dena Shunra

If you had trouble with Rand's prose style, Avram, it was probably (IMNSHO) because it sucked, not because of any personal issue.

For all of her cultish following, she really couldn't write fiction worth a darn, nor plot anything that wasn't guided by an obsession with being proven right.

Posted August 23, 2007 10:23 PM by Josh Jasper

I prefer not to squander my recreational reading time on books with despicable characters. That's why I hurled Lord Foul's Bane across the room to smack into the wall. As a journeyman curmudgeon, I also treat unicorn cuddling fantasies the same way, of course.

Posted August 23, 2007 10:41 PM by Earl Cooley III

#48: despicable characters protagonists

Posted August 23, 2007 10:44 PM by Earl Cooley III

#31 I, too, will confess to a teenage infatuation with Ayn Rand; this was mainly due to a teenage infatuation with the band Rush.

There's some odd stuff knocking around the interwebs about that. Never realised the connection back in the day, must have been obtuse.

#8 This irony reminds me of this classic cartoon, the Bob the Angry Flower sequel to Atlas Shrugged. Worth reading even if you haven't read the original.

Worth reading *instead of* the original.

Posted August 23, 2007 11:00 PM by Adrian Smith

Adrian @ 50 said: Worth reading *instead of* the original.

Yes, but it doesn't last long enough to keep me entertained even for one commute to work (even counting a couple of re-reads and some giggle time in between). For a better autopsy of the life, work and philosophy of Ayn Rand try Matt Ruff's excellent Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy.

Posted August 23, 2007 11:40 PM by Paul Duncanson

Sewer, Gas & Electric was brilliant, and I am very sad that the person who recommended that book to me also said nothing else the author had done was nearly as good. The polka-dot submarine, especially, I cannot possibly forget.

It also managed to make Ayn Rand an entertaining and sympathetic person, which I was entirely surprised by.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:00 AM by Fade Manley

Earl, my walls are freshly-painted, so no throwing books. I put them in a bag to take to the library where the Friends of the Library will sell them and buy something nice for the library (we got new tables, chairs, and carpet in the community room a few years ago).

Posted August 24, 2007 12:09 AM by Marilee

Fade Manley: It wasn't quite as incredibly brilliantly awesome as Sewer, Gas & Electric, but I found Matt Ruff's first novel, Fool on the Hill, pretty damn entertaining. I say try it out.

Bluey Kapirigi, the aborigine woman who's hauled out of Australia once a year to play Rosa Parks in a TV movie version of her life, is the element of Sewer, Gas & Electric that stands out strongest in my memory. I should read that book again. So durn good.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:10 AM by ethan

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: the whole problem with Objectivism and the concept of enlightened self-interest is that so damn few people are enlightened. And very few of them are bosses of anything.

A long time ago I made a bet with myself. If I could open a book of Rand's essays at three different, randomly-chosen pages and read a paragraph (or two if they were short), and feel as if just one of those chosen paragraphs made sense, I'd read the book. I didn't have to read the book.

The reason I was even interested in trying was that when I was a teenager I kept meeting people who touted Rand to me. I was born and grew up in Philadelphia in mid-century, when Rand was living there, and there were a lot of people who'd met her and a lot more who wanted to gossip about her. It seemed worth at least trying her writing. Oh, well, can't be right about everything.

Incidentally, if even a quarter of the gossip that was current then about Rand was true, she was a heartless bitch with a taste for sexual liaisons with her younger disciples. More than one at a time according to the stories.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:30 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Sewer, Gas & Electric was brilliant, and I am very sad that the person who recommended that book to me also said nothing else the author had done was nearly as good.

That person telling you such a thing was the literary equivalent of snootily announcing "Oh, I USED to like [obscure band] before they sold out and got popular." Go read Set This House in Order, you'll feel much better.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:35 AM by mythago

I went through a Rand phase many years ago, though never really quite as a convert. Her life story is absolutely tragic, centering around first trying to build a philosophy of individualism and thinking for oneself, and then attracting a creepy cult-like following of people who happily let her do their thinking for them. Irony is often funny, but an individualists' cult is just a bit much.

For all that, she had some fantastic insights, and IMO wrote some very good books. Most humans don't work the way the protagonists in her novels worked (for example, the smart people I know do not all like the same music, art, drama, architecture, etc.), but there is an aspect of some of her characterization that is very real, and very powerful. The spirit of a Roark or Reardon is part of pretty much everyone, when they're really with themselves doing something they know very well and really love.

Now, I've spent a lot of my time as an adult with genuinely brilliant, accomplished people--creators in the sense that Rand would have loved. And they're all over the map--they're kind and petty, quiet and boisterous, sensitive to beauty or indifferent to it, religious and indifferent to religion and actively hostile to it, left wing and right wing and anarchist and indifferent to politics and moderate and green and libertarian, etc. In short, the picture of how those people would interact in Galt's Gulch is absolutely silly and wrong, and it's quite possible to be a brilliant creator who's nervous all the time, or short and fat and ugly, or uncertain or dead wrong about all kinds of other areas of their lives.

And yet, there's a piece of that brilliance and creativity and driving will that Rand captures really well. I don't know that I can explain or justify that, but it's true.

All IMO.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:47 AM by albatross

Bruce #55:

As far as the sexual liasons go, there are a bunch of stories about one particular affair. I don't know whether there were others. (I don't really know the one widely-reported affair happened, since I wasn't around, but it seems to be widely attested, including by two people who were directly involved.)

Enlightened self-interest is supposed to be at the root of her moral system. That doesn't mean you expect everyone to be enlightened all the time, anymore than putting Christ at the root of your moral system means everyone must be a biblical scholar.

The natural way to think of a moral system based on self interest is that you want rules (or decision algorithms, I guess) that guide you in improving your long-term self-interest, in the broad sense of trying to further your values. I don't think this quite gets you to a useful moral code, though, since you can construct circumstances in which the self-interested thing to do contradicts all moral intuition you might have, and would be judged despicable even (I think) by Rand. (Wesley Mouch was presumably acting in his own self interest, frex.)

Posted August 24, 2007 1:03 AM by albatross

Josh @ 47: Yeah, as someone who read both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugs," I didn't react violently against Objectivism--okay, you want to be selfish, thass cool. My biggest objection was to the fact that I could have taken a red pencil to the thing, stripped down Rand's turgid sentences and absurdly overly-detailed paragraphs, and created a version of "Atlas Shrugs" that would be, at 200 pages (instead of approximately 1072), a much better book.

Whether or not a shorter, more readable "Atlas Shrugs" would be a good thing for the world is an entirely different question.

Paul, Fade Manley, ethan, mythago@51,52,54, 56: Damn, damn, damn! I was going to be all cultist and cool and be the first person to mention Matt Ruff. I was seven comments too late. Seven comments away from brilliance!
But yes--highly, *highly* recommend both "Sewer Gas Electric" and "Fool on the Hill," which has one of my favorite lines of all time:
As George is onggyvat gur qentba gbjneqf gur raq bs gur obbx, naq nabgure punenpgre fhqqrayl pbzrf gb gur erfphr, the demented story-teller/God Mr. Sunshine yells, "Jung vf guvf?! Jung vf guvf Qrhf Rk Znpuvan penc?!"

On the plus side, I am the first to note that Ruff has a new book out, called "Bad Monkeys." This is news because Ruff only publishes a new book once every seven years.

Matt Ruff's page

Posted August 24, 2007 2:42 AM by Greg M.

Greg M. #59: If it makes you feel any better, I had completely forgotten that Ayn Rand was in that book. Somehow. God, I need to reread it.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:52 AM by ethan

I had completely forgotten about the Gor books. After looking up a few at Amazon, I'm pretty sure I read some of them in high school. I'd like to think I was high-minded enough to find the world they depict abhorrent, but at 15 or 16, probably not.

I think I read The Fountainhead about the same time that I read Norman's books. Apparently it left me with about the same lasting impression as they did.

Posted August 24, 2007 3:06 AM by Linkmeister

albatross @ 58

My own behavior and that of just about everyone else I know leads me to believe that there's isn't enough enlightment around for enough of the time that it makes sense to base an ethical system on it.

The insuperable problem, I think, is that because we're humans, time-bound and mortal, we just can't know what's really in our best interests. All of our decisions are necessarily made with too little information and too little understanding of the long-term consequences of our actions.

I keep thinking that the major difference between us and some hypothetical race of post-humans is that they get to see farther into the chaotic future and so make better decisions, maybe even find a way to create an ethical system that allows them to judge each other's decisions objectively. But I understand the math of chaotic dynamic systems; the problem of predicting them is exponential in the distance in the future of the predicted events. Reminds me of some physicists from Los Alamos who founded a company about 15 years ago to predict the stock market based on chaos theory. One of the big financial houses was showering them with money. A few years ago I heard they had gotten to average prediction times of 30 seconds to a minute. So with a great deal of work they might get to two minutes in their lifetimes. But the backers were happy; they can make hundreds of millions of dollars a year with a one-minute average prediction time.

Posted August 24, 2007 3:14 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Bob the flower is all very well, but you have to see the genius that is "Aslan Shrugged": Introduction and The Wardrobe - keep following the next post, theres more, but if I link them all I'll get put in moderation. Best literary mashup since Ho! for Hogwarts

Posted August 24, 2007 4:59 AM by Kevin Marks

I once bought both Dhalgren and Atlas Shrugged for a quarter each at a Friends of the Library sale. Debbie Notkin remarked, "That's two big books -- one of them good." We decided that many people would agree with the remark, but that there might be a bit of dissension over which it was. (Debbie, as I, went for the former.)

I read Atlas Shrugged mainly in order to understand allusions to it made on rec.arts.sf.written. I can't imagine voluntarily reading it again.

Posted August 24, 2007 6:24 AM by David Goldfarb

Dena Shunra

Israeli Objectivists sound like a contradiction in terms. They'd all move to America to evade military service.

One of the things that makes Israel work, I think, a highly individualistic society, but with the collective ethos of universal military experience?

On Rand generally, there is a devastating portrait of her in 'Old School' by Tobias Wolf. With her entourage of young men, hanging on her every word.

Posted August 24, 2007 7:13 AM by Valuethinker

I've never read any Ayn Rand (nor seen The Fountainhead), but she and I share a birthday.

Well, not *share* exactly. She had it first, and now I have it. Ha!

Posted August 24, 2007 7:47 AM by candle

I used to read quite a lot of Rand, and reread it, too. And the books she recommended like Cyrano de Bergerac and Facial Justice[1] were worth finding. Micky Spillane and James Bond weren't. I was reading Lewis and Chesterton and Heinlein at the same time. I suspect I liked the authoritative voice as well as particular things about the various points of view. I probably still like authoritative styles (which doesn't mean I agree with everything said), or I wouldn't be hanging around here.

To my mind, Rand was right about a lot, and wrong about a lot. You guys can probably take care of what's wrong, so I'm going to cover something of what was right.

She was on to something with her detestation of sacrifice, and the issue didn't die with Communism. I'm hearing more than a little of it in defense of the Iraq war--if you say it's going badly, there's a reasonable chance you'll get told "Look at how wonderful the soldiers are for sacrificing so much. More has to be lost so their sacrifices won't be in vain."

She was right about the desire to do good work, and I can't think of any other writer who's been as clear about how much people who want to do good work suffer if they're in a situation where they can't do it.

I know a sane objectivist--has her own company, does creative work in it, and doesn't spend time on the spiteful side of the philosophy. I also know at least one person whose life was pretty certainly made worse by taking objectivism seriously.

A small thing: I may be the only one here who kept hearing Tinky Halloway whenever Scooter Libby got mentioned--she was knowledgeable enough about American culture to expect someone with a doofy WASP nickname somewhere in a government scandal.

albatross, I don't think Rand got a cult by accident--she was more than a bit of an intellectual bully.

One thing that might be tragic: I believe she was driven to write by things that made her deeply angry, and once her books were really successful, she was able to insulate herself well enough that she didn't feel the need to write more fiction.

[1]Satirical sf. I remember the bit about a woman who's lower lip was just a little too full. Since plastic surgery was frowned upon, she was expected to always be sucking her lip in a little whenever she was in public. And people were supposed to do ritual dances whenever certain words were mentioned.

Posted August 24, 2007 8:18 AM by Nancy Lebovitz

I used to be regularly amused when I walked past the Objectivist table in the Student Union, with the big yellow banner on it: "10 million copies sold!"

Posted August 24, 2007 8:44 AM by Bryant

Nancy @ #67: re suffering caused by being prevented from doing good work: Dorothy Sayers said a lot about that, as "doing good work" was a linchpin of her theology. (e.g. "Why Work?" in Creed or Chaos?, 1949)

Posted August 24, 2007 8:45 AM by Lila

I have read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and Anthem (in that order, in fact); I must admit I skipped Galt's 80-page speech in AS, but I think I absorbed enough from the entire rest of the book to have a grasp of its themes.

I got precisely two useful ideas out of those three books. One was that sometimes you fight because you want to lose; you want to prove that your opponent can beat you. This may have something to do with my sexual proclivities, and is likely not widely applicable.

The other is about the funniest, most obscure joke in all of film. Because you know, Dagny Taggart's grandfather was the one who built the railroad her brother was mismanaging. And in Blazing Saddles, set about two generations before AS, the idiot railroad-construction foreman ("Gosh, Mr Lamarr, you use yer tounge prettier'n a $20 whore") is named "Taggart". I almost hyperventilated.

Posted August 24, 2007 9:20 AM by Carrie S.

Rand can be truly helpful if you're a girl in your teens and are feeling the weight of social pressure to be "good," i.e. self-sacrificing.

How many of you have seen Pan's Labyrinth? A wonderful movie in many ways, but it has a classic Plucky Girl as its heroine. I can't do the Rant Against Plucky Girls nearly as well as Sharyn November. Suffice it to say that Plucky Girls seldom get to be plucky on their own behalf, and their reward almost never involves continuing to have adventures.

The alternative story is the one where you fall in love, get married, and never have any more adventures.

Then Ayn Rand comes along to tell you that continual self-sacrifice will leave you with nothing of your own, and that you can love your work. If you're a girl who's had a certain kind of upbringing, that message can change your life.

The flip side is that at best it's just a corrective, not a philosophy you can live by. It can have weird effects on people who have boundary issues. And if you swallow it whole and then find out that no amount of trying will make the world work the way Rand says it does, it's a system that has no forgiveness in it, and a large vocabulary of abuse for those who falter.

My theory of why Rand reads so strangely: Mary Sue novels usually have only one or two Mary Sues in them. Rand wrote novels in which every positive character has the Mary Sue nature. Causality gets very strange indeed.

Regarding the movie: yes, the characters are inhuman. But you have to love the scene where she's fantasizing about Howard Roark and he appears in a little thought-balloon above her head, wielding his mighty jackhammer. You can't say the image is suggestive -- it's far too blatant for that.

Posted August 24, 2007 9:33 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I finally read Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago; what I found interesting about the book was the contradiction between the philosophical message and the emotional message. The philosophical message is that people should be free to do whatever they want with their property; the emotional message is that people like Rand heroes ought to run the world and everyone else should suck it up and deal.

I'm not surprised that the books read better in Hebrew than in English. Rand's emotional message is very similar to the "we are throwing off the chains of the decadent emasculating past and building a new glorious future, yay us" spirit of old-fashioned secular Zionism.

Posted August 24, 2007 9:33 AM by Seth Gordon

Valuethinker @ 65

Israeli Objectivists sound like a contradiction in terms. They'd all move to America to evade military service

That line really needs a rimshot after it. Opens up a whole new area of standup comedy: Catskill Summer Sabra.

"Praise the borscht and pass the ammunition. I'm here until the incoming warning, folks."

Posted August 24, 2007 9:39 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Seconding the recommendation of Set This House In Order. I loved it but inexplicably had not looked into other things Matt Ruff has written. Thank you for pushing me to correct this oversight.

Posted August 24, 2007 9:40 AM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Nancy Lebovitz @ 67

The Scooter (Lewis) Libby case got a double dose of name silliness: the reporter on the story for NPR was named Libby Lewis.

Posted August 24, 2007 9:44 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Teresa @ 71... The alternative story is the one where you fall in love, get married, and never have any more adventures.

...unless you're Rachel Weisz in the 2nd Mummy movie where, not only does she get into even more physical action, but she has a kid who's so smart that he does try to build a better mousetrap.

Stupid jokey comment aside... I can see how Rand would have helped a young girl out of social expectations. One alternative is to project yourself into a character who's not of your own gender, but who is just as alienated from everything and trapped in expectations. Mister Spock, anybody?

Posted August 24, 2007 9:56 AM by Serge

Enlightened self-interest, hmm? While I haven't read Ayn Rand, I had my own "epiphany" about enlightened self-interest. Way back in college, I read two well-known books advocating ESI, both first published about the same time, and I read them both in the same week. Upon realizing that they were pretty much pitching the same message, I stopped taking either of their creeds too seriously.

Those two books were: (1) Robert Ringer's Looking Out For #1, and (2) Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible.

Amusingly, LaVey later abandoned his Church of Satan, specifically because nobody actually wanted to explore and practice ESI, all his "congregants" just wanted to dress in black and mill around looking sinister. (IIRC, this was before Goths as such.)

FWIW, I consider that ESI is the natural counterweight to "tribal loyalty". Either by itself will lead you into stupidity. But consider them as two reasonable but conflicting purposes, and each can serve as a check on the other.

Posted August 24, 2007 10:04 AM by David Harmon

Serge (76): Spock, definitely.

I could almost envy girls these days having Xena and Veronica Mars and all of Joss Whedon's female characters to choose from.

Posted August 24, 2007 10:05 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

78

Teresa

Almost all the Ayn Randians I encounter are entirely self serving men.

She seems like a knock-off of Nietzche, and not a good one at that.

And of course Nietzche anticipated both fascism (some pretty fascist sexual imagery in Atlas Shrugged) and Bolshevism (a handful of disciplined men who could overturn Russia by conspiratorial and ruthless politics, rather than the wet noodle version of Menshevism).

Posted August 24, 2007 10:15 AM by Valuethinker

Teresa @ 78... And they also have most of Eureka's female characters, even Jack's daughter.

Posted August 24, 2007 10:37 AM by Serge

Teresa @ 78

Yeah, you could envy if they didn't also have JLo and Britney and Lindsay, and whoever the latest almost-corpse-thin mid-teen nautch dancer is.

Posted August 24, 2007 10:50 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Teresa@71: I can't do the Rant Against Plucky Girls nearly as well as Sharyn November.

Is there a non-rant way of explaining "plucky girls"?

Posted August 24, 2007 10:53 AM by Greg London

Sorry, forgot: obrant: "Hey, godamn kids, get off the lawn!"

Posted August 24, 2007 10:54 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

"But you have to love the scene where she's fantasizing about Howard Roark and he appears in a little thought-balloon above her head, wielding his mighty jackhammer. You can't say the image is suggestive -- it's far too blatant for that."

Exactly right, and it's one of the things I love about King Vidor's directing. The sexuality is so concrete, palpable and unapologetically over-the-top. You start to smile, it feels like it's meant to be camp, then you notice the imagery is too grounded to be campy. You see the same magic in Duel in the Sun (In Color).

I think Vidor does something pretty amazing in The Fountainhead - he finds something sublime in Ayn Rand.

Posted August 24, 2007 10:54 AM by Smurch

I vaguely remember reading Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and We The Living while I was a kid.
I think I remember thinking that I have no idea what the author was ranting about in Atlas Shrugged. We were poor, see, and afaiwc then, it was just about a bunch of rich people squabbling.
The only one I connected to was We The Living, and all I remember about it is that it was a love triangle, they were poor and oppressed, and it ended sadly. And was there something about a red keychain or bauble or something?

Posted August 24, 2007 11:03 AM by mayakda

I read Anthem years ago and it took me about 45 minutes to finish. Since I knew nothing about Ayn Rand, to me, it read like a tract for Hitler Youth, especially with the tall, blue-eyed and blond hero and heroine. I thought it was trash and never was tempted to read Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. My DH reassured me I didn't miss much.

Posted August 24, 2007 11:17 AM by lou

I always use The Fountainhead to check on anyone who introduces themselves as a libertarian. I ask them if they take Rand's dating advice, too. If they get the joke and laugh, they're a human being I can deal with.

If they don't get it, I suspect psychopathology.

Posted August 24, 2007 11:21 AM by BigHank53

albatross at #57:
(for example, the smart people I know do not all like the same music, art, drama, architecture, etc.)

well, maybe that's less likely to be true in the mid-twentieth century. In the '50s or whenever, there was less media to choose from, so people were more likely to have all seen the same media.
Watching the movie Goodnight and Good Luck, for example, a character says "have you seen the editorial in the paper?" and they've all read the same paper. Today a similar bunch of people would be less likely to have read the same paper. Also there's a scene where they all go to the tavern and the tavern doesn't have printed menus and ads on all the tables the way a similar place would today.

Posted August 24, 2007 11:52 AM by Erik Nelson

I'm just going to stand by my comment on Metafilter a month or so ago:

Imagine the Objectivist version of Burning Man. 30-odd thousand Randroids - people for whom capital goods are fetish items - all out in the desert at once. How many do you think would know the difference between an AC and a DC motor? On what day do you think they'd resort to cannibalism?

Posted August 24, 2007 12:12 PM by Avery

>> 17 KristianB
>> 61 Linkmeister

Is Houseplants of Gor as good as Norman's stuff?

Posted August 24, 2007 12:14 PM by yuubi

"well, maybe that's less likely to be true in the mid-twentieth century. In the '50s or whenever, there was less media to choose from, so people were more likely to have all seen the same media."

I think this was a shot at one of Rand's more easily mockable persistent rants--that people who liked the wrong composers or the wrong writers (god forbid you like Tolstoy) or didn't smoke cigarettes (seriously!) were in some unexplained manner evil and anti-human. This was because Rand arrived at all of her preferences and pleasures via the unimpeachable philosophy of Objectivism. Therefore anyone who arrived at competing pleasures must be "putting their emotions before their rationality" or following some competing philosophy. Both of which disqualified you from being a human being, of course.

I read through Atlas Shrugged in high school at the behest of a friend. Quite enough for me, thanks. Though judging from bullet point plot summaries like this of The Fountainhead, I don't really need to because they're both the same book.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:21 PM by Tristan Palmgren

I see that I'm going to have to pick up more Matt Ruff books after all. This is a compelling reason to finally dig up a copy of the lease so that I can get a local library card, and see how this city's book request system works; I already desperately miss the Carnegie library system in Pittsburgh.

If I'm trying to read multiple works by an author, I usually read through everything they've written chronologically. Do any Matt Ruff fans here know if this might be a particularly good or bad idea? (I would not, for example, suggest that a new Pratchett reader start with The Colour of Magic, and I nearly didn't read Christopher Moore because I tried to start with Practical Demonkeeping.)

Posted August 24, 2007 12:34 PM by Fade Manley

#91
"putting their emotions before their rationality"

well, doesn't everybody?

Rationality is essentially a bolt-on to the pre-existing build that is already human nature. Even Eric Raymond says so, and he's a laissez-faire libertarian.

Rationality is something people learn once they already have some pre-existing personality in the first place. Teaching somebody rationality is like putting skis on a dog. He's still a dog.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:47 PM by Erik Nelson

#90: I love that.
But yeah, Houseplants of Gor is a frighteningly accurate depiction of his style, and probably of far greater literary merit.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:48 PM by KristianB

Teresa @71, your answer works well for Valuethinker @65.

As you pointed out, it's a *wonderful* book for people who are "feeling the weight of social pressure to be "good," i.e. self-sacrificing."

When self-sacrifice is just about certain to be useless and pointless (double whammy in a young woman threatened by conscription into the Israeli military, which worked as a sort of pimping-for-officers service in additions to its primary role as international PR).

As to Valuethinker's "Israeli Objectivists sound like a contradiction in terms. They'd all move to America to evade military service" - that word "evade" has some loudly roaring undertones.

Evade service, eh? Interestingly, most of the self-described Objectivists at that particular meeting had done military service. They were mostly headed for the U.S., though. The prevalent mindset was that Americans make easier marks for their schemes. (It worked pretty well, too; for a decade or so, the prevalent dream among that-sort-of-person was to have an American venture cap fund their start-ups. Not "building a great company" or even "building a functional company" - finding funding via a plausible pitch.)

Anyhow, the entire "evade military service" trope overlooks the fact hat half the boys (and more than that among the girls) doesn't do military or any other service in Israel. It overlooks the cynical use made by politicians of this pretty-much-unpaid workforce (I believe the conscripts are paid about $50 a month nowadays. Their time is valued accordingly.)

Posted August 24, 2007 12:53 PM by Dena Shunra

Tristan #91: They're definitely not the same book. What can I say? "If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like." For whatever it's worth, I liked Atlas Shrugged much better than The Fountainhead, and have reread it a few times. (I'm not an objectivist, BTW.)

And yes, having all the good guy characters identical on matters of art and religion and politics and literature and music was silly. Spider Robinson has about 5% of the same disease, just enough to be annoying.

BigHank #88: That's good. Though I have to admit, while I wouldn't try Roark's approach to Dominique (isn't that supposed to end with "and then you go to jail?"), the ride on the blue-green rails at 100 MPH+ would definitely qualify as a nice first date! Damnit, building the John Galt line *ought* to get you laid.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:57 PM by albatross

95: really? Somehow I wouldn't have thought Israel would have a lot of spare troops just sitting around doing nothing.
My impression is that most of them spend all their spare time working on the business plans for their tech startups, which certainly beats the "when I get home/childhood sweetheart/white picket fence" conversation most war movies involve.

Posted August 24, 2007 12:59 PM by ajay

Big Hank at #87: (Rand's dating advice)
I just noticed that one thing that showed up in the Google ads on this thread page was an Ayn Rand dating service.

I guess the "speak of the devil" principle applies to Google ads.

Posted August 24, 2007 1:07 PM by Erik Nelson

Teresa #71:

I agree that it's not a philosophy you could live by (or at least that I could live by). Rand made some wonderful observations, like the whole circular-firing-squad nature of an ideology of self-sacrifice, or the raw primal power of a creative mind going full blast, or the deep desire to hear "good job" from someone you really admire, when you're just flat out of the league of the normal people you deal with all the time.

It had a big effect on me, and immunized me against some of the dumber common ideas, and gave me another way to think about all kinds of things. There are moments when I definitely identify with Dagny or Roark or Rearden.

Posted August 24, 2007 1:09 PM by albatross

Bruce #62:

I think we're talking past each other here. Consider any moral system where you guide your behavior based on some rational attempt to accomplish something in the world. That could be maximizing self interest, maximizing global well being, maximizing number of people praying, maximizing God's happiness, etc. For any such system, you will have to try to make predictions about the future consequences of your actions. Recognizing the impossibility of perfect predictions doesn't seem to me to change that.

Is it possible to weigh actions based on their likely impact on your future well being? Pretty clearly it is, even though you can't predict everything. So then it seems reasonable to use that imperfect predictive ability to accomplish your goals, right?

Posted August 24, 2007 1:24 PM by albatross

Ajay @97

Your perception of the Israeli does not tally up with what I heard from the actual soldiers in it. One of my favorites is the reservist (conscripts automatically turn into reservists after their first run of service; this one was Ivy League educated to graduate level) who was called up for a month, annually, to guard a gate in an unfenced base. That's typical for the kind of "sitting around, doing nothing" that Israeli troops are used for. The budget was about $50 a month, that's what it cost the powers that be. That's how they valued the soldier. The cost to the reservist, whose business, family, etc. were compromised during that time is not taken into consideration. Hence, self-sacrifice.

Especially taking into account the difference in experiences across genders and ethnicities therein. What I heard ended up pushing me over the edge into the firmly held belief that if Israel/Palestine don't reorganize their resource-sharing really soon, the place will bleed to death. Or spontaneously combust.

As to whether a goal of "figuring out how can I get money for a company that someone else may make profitable, maybe" or "going back to a white picket fence" is more honorable, that is up in the air. The latter is clearly less interesting for outside viewers, but I'm not sure that an interesting life is what people yearn for.

You write as an external observer, which seems to me to rather objectify the people involved. They're human. They have hopes and dreams and ideals and dignity, just like everyone else.

Posted August 24, 2007 1:26 PM by Dena Shunra

George Clinton is a lot more fun:

"She like it hawd.

She like hawder.

Hawd as steel and steel gettin' hawdah, etc.}

"Hard as Steel" George Clinton & P-Funk:

T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. ("The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership" --1996)

Love, C.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:01 PM by Constance Ash

95

Dena, I wasn't trying to criticise the Israeli military.

I had assumed (for men) that Israeli military service means driving a tank into The Lebanon, and getting AT14s launched at your back by Hizbollah (like Danny Grossman's kid).

Or patrolling the streets of the West Bank at 4am, looking for some Hamas operative and hoping you don't get blown up doing it?

The problem being then, that it never goes away-- you've got another 18 years, 2 weeks a year, of this once you're 22. That's a heck of a 'self sacrifice' for anyone, and I would think an Objectivist would find that objectionable. In a Randian framework, we ought to use mercenaries like Blackwater to do that stuff?

Agree that most of military service is dead boring. I think the low end jobs are stopping and searching Palestinians at checkpoints, etc? I didn't know about the issues of women in the Israeli military. The US Army certainly has a serious problem with coerced sexuality.

I also didn't realise that non-compliance was as high as 50%. My colleagues, almost inevitably, were either in specialised communication units, the air force, or search&rescue/commando units. I guess if you want a business career in Israel, you need that on the CV.

Agree with Israelis wanting just to get funded, not just to build good businesses. There's too much of that out there but not just Israelis.

Israel could be a Western European country, even a member of the EU, if only we could get you inside of the pre 1967 boundaries (not sure about the Golan, it seems to me its strategic value to Israel is far greater than its cost to Syria, but Syria will never sign a Peace Treaty without it).

Don't know if you read Martin Van Creveld's book 'Defending Israel'? A good read. He is over reliant on 'the revolution in military affairs'-- it won't all be missiles and drones. But he points out that by occupying the West Bank, Israel has surrounded its people with their enemies.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:03 PM by Valuethinker

95

Dena

A bit further. My salient revelation on Israel (wrong or right) was sitting next to a chap named Adzel, from Manchester, who had fought in '49, was on the beach that day Hagganah destroyed the Stern Gang arms ship from Canada.

Adzel was a follower of Merutz (sp?). And he said to me that if Israel continued to have enemies within its frontiers it was doomed. It could survive having hostile nations on its borders, but having the Palestinians inside its boundary was what weakened and destroyed Israel.

I thought, from an allegedly far left party, this was such a brilliant statement of foreign policy realism. A key to strategy is to understand your own weaknesses, as well as the other guy's strengths.

Of course this is taken to mean 'transfer' (aka ethnic cleansing) by those on the Israeli right, and by your Moldavian minister of national security (Avignor Liebman?spelling>). And Sharon of course played games with it (sticking the wall where it could never have international recognition).

But what is killing Israel (I think) is that it has turned itself into a garrison state. Your enemies are not 'out there' they are inside your (extended) frontiers and they have absolutely nothing to lose by opposing you.

Keeping the motivation of soldiers who are basically running a giant prison camp must be a very difficult thing.

What we do about Hamas' rockets on Sderot (?) I don't know. But I believe, nation to nation, even Israel and Hamas could deal-- there might be some very bad days, when rockets are replied to with artillery barrages (that's what countries do, when they fight)-- once it had a state, Hamas would then have the problems that all states have (if we piss off our neighbours, they kill us, wholesale).

Israel is in the perfect place to bargain now-- it has no real external threats (that threaten its existence) and it all the cards. Waiting will mean waiting until the day when it has fewer cards and the other side may have less incentive to seek a deal.

(sorry about all the spellings? if it's any consolation, I can't spell the name of the guy in Iran, either)

Anyway that's my view, from 2000 miles away...

Posted August 24, 2007 2:16 PM by Valuethinker

Bruce Cohen #81: Yeah, you could envy if they didn't also have JLo and Britney and Lindsay, and whoever the latest almost-corpse-thin mid-teen nautch dancer is.

Lindsay now, sure, but they also have the Lindsay of Mean Girls, which is just about the best movie a teenage girl could ever watch. They also have Christina Aguilera, who turned into one of the almost-corpse-thin crazy types, and then pretty quickly said "Fuck this, I have better things to do," and got her wits about her. She's a fantastic role model. They've also got Pink, who I think does a great job reconciling the appeal of the Lindsay-Paris world with simultaneous resistance to it. Kelly Clarkson makes a habit of singing about independence and talking about how she doesn't care to lose weight. On TV, in addition to the ones Teresa named, they have Claire from Heroes. I don't think the world of a teenage girl is by any means ideal, and often the good is less out in the open than the bad, but more and more positive images are coming all the time.

Fade Manley #92: I've only read two of his books, but they were the first two. I think the chronological system would work just fine. Just make sure you do read Sewer, Gas & Electric.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:19 PM by ethan

yuubi @ #90, as I said, I haven't read them since HS years (1960s), but I can still recognize the similarities in the Houseplants of Gor link you posted.

Now I'm wondering how the scenario written there would work if combined with Little Shop of Horrors.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:26 PM by Linkmeister

John Norman's Fountainheads of Gor... I dare not think what such fountainheads would be shaped like.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:29 PM by Serge

ab @36 -- Eddie ended up on a "frozen train", but I always figured that if the train crew had someplace to go, the rest of them probably could manage the same. I don't see it as the death of Eddie. He would not just sit out there and expect to be rescued.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:36 PM by Scorpio

ethan @ 105: Sewer, Gas & Electric is the only I've read, on the strong recommendation of a friend. (Who basically said, "Don't bother with any of his other stuff, but you have to read this book.")

I am planning on picking up more of those books now. Even if they don't reach the same madcap height as that one, I can't imagine such a brilliant author wouldn't be at least good in his other works.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:42 PM by Fade Manley

" In the '50s or whenever, there was less media to choose from, so people were more likely to have all seen the same media."

What? No! There were many more cities with separate, independent, papers that disagreed with each other than there are now! The Internet is not the sole and original fount of difference.

Also, when there was less mass media there was a bigger market for local stuff, which varied whether it meant to or not; rep houses, local music scenes and dance styles, tailors' shops, etc. *Homemade* culture, too.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:47 PM by clew

Bruce Cohen (#55): "Incidentally, if even a quarter of the gossip that was current then about Rand was true, she was a heartless bitch with a taste for sexual liaisons with her younger disciples. More than one at a time according to the stories."

Not just stories: Documented in an excellent biography of Rand, The Passion of Ayn Rand, by Barbara Branden, which was made into a TV movie on Showtime. I don't have any memory of the TV movie, but I remember thinking it was very good.

I remember a few snapshots from the book: Rand grew up in a privileged, middle-class household in Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th Century. Her teen years were very similar to a middle-class teen's life in America today: Parties, school, hanging around with friends.

Except society was collapsing around them. This was the Russian Revolution. The kids had records, and nice clothes, and friends, and parties, but no food. They were literally starving in the middle of luxury.

She came to America. Like many refugees, then and today, she came from a privileged background and found herself in America with nothing but intelligence and willingness to work. And that was enough. She got a clerical job with a movie studio in Hollywood, and, to her horror, began to see the American Left become sympathetic to the Russian Communists who'd (in her mind) destroyed her home.

And she also had contempt for Americans who saw physical possessions as a means of asserting status. This was at a time and place when private cars were still luxuries, but becoming more common. She had a conversation with a woman who said she'd want to have a car as long as very few people had cars, but if everybody had cars, she didn't care. That didn't make sense to Rand: Either you want to have a car or you don't want to have a car. Who cares if other people have one?

Branden says Rand's adult life was shaped by being a physically unattractive, fiercely intelligent, outspoken woman at a time when such a person was viewed as a freak of nature. Branden says that the tragedy of Rand's life was that she was born too soon -- there was no place in mid-20th-Century America for a homely, fiercely intelligent, outspoken woman -- Rand would have had an easier life, and therefore have been less ruthless, had she been born decades later.

I think Branden is right on that point. Physically unattractive, fiercely intelligent women have an easier time of it today. It's still a hard life, though.

I don't remember Branden mentioning numerous sexual liasons for Rand with young male admirers, but I do remember one: With Branden's husband, Nathaniel. Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand didn't even have the decency to sneak around: They announced the affair to the entire objectivist organization that Rand founded, said that their love was true and Objectivist and rational, and that their respective spouses had to suck it.

Despite Barbara Branden having valid reasons to hate Ayn Rand, her biography comes off as fair and objective, and was praised for that when it was published. I can't help thinking, though, that Barbara Branden got her revenge on Ayn Rand: She made Rand look pitiable, and Rand would have hated that.

Dena Shunra (#95): "for a decade or so, the prevalent dream among that-sort-of-[Israeli] was to have an American venture cap fund their start-ups. Not "building a great company" or even "building a functional company" - finding funding via a plausible pitch.)"

It's not just an Israeli thing - that was pretty much the modus operandi for many tech companies during the dotcom boom.

Posted August 24, 2007 2:48 PM by Mitch Wagner

Valuethinker @103, I responded by email; no point in derailing the thread with *that* issue. I think the salient point is that Rand's ideal of individual self-attainment was indeed the point for those Israeli Objectivists. (And I am an American, not an Israeli.)

Mitch @111, the "let's seem how much venture cap one can drain out of the marks" is pretty un-Objectivist, isn't it? (Which was my point.)

Posted August 24, 2007 3:02 PM by Dena Shunra

Deanna, I'm no expert on objectivism, but I'd say the point is debatable.

Posted August 24, 2007 3:12 PM by Mitch Wagner

Fade Manley #109: Ooops--I somehow conflated what you said with what...er...someone else said about having read something else by him.

And the prize for "vaguest sentence" goes to...

Posted August 24, 2007 3:22 PM by ethan

Mitch @113

I propose that Objectivists are all bent out of shape about attaining excellence.

Let us subdivide Objectivists into "the ones who are committed to excellent achievements" and "the ones who are committed to excellent earnings".

It seems to me that first variant would be more into building railways and paper mills and banks so forth; the second would be more into building hedge funds and pay-day loan offices and so forth.

Excellence at the game of Milk the Marks is a sort of excellence, I guess. But it didn't get much billing in Rand's books.

Posted August 24, 2007 3:32 PM by Dena Shunra

Dena #115: I'd like to hear from someone more knowledgeable about Objectivism than I on the subject.

Although it seems to me that Rand might argue that the venture capitalists in this instance were Anti-Life (isn't that what she called the enemies of Objectivism, and her villains like Ellsworth Toohey?) and therefore deserving what they got.

Posted August 24, 2007 4:58 PM by Mitch Wagner