Atlas Plugs
Ayn Rand was not a fan of libertarians, who are apparently just above hippies and anarchists.
21 Responses to “Atlas Plugs”
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October 22nd, 2012 at 8:57 am
It’s funny, her talking about plagiarism. All her “ideas” were Nietzsche for girls. She paraphrased him and watered him down. Considering that he was a syphilitic weakling hypochondriac and she was an adulterous alcoholic drug addict, I suppose they would have made a good pair. She really loved straw men, though, didn’t she? False straw men. Who said that libertarians agree that the end justifies the means? Atlas Shrugged is basically an argument against impossible straw men that could exist only in her Swiss cheese of a brain.
October 22nd, 2012 at 9:09 am
As near as I can tell, she was just butthurt that she wasn’t able to bilk them.
October 22nd, 2012 at 9:20 am
Above?
October 22nd, 2012 at 10:13 am
Ever get the feeling that the only one Ayn Rand liked was Ayn Rand?
October 22nd, 2012 at 10:16 am
She was the Donald Trump of so-called political philosophers. It’s always about themselves, and always somewhat less classy than you had hoped for.
October 22nd, 2012 at 10:41 am
More of a professional grumpy old person,than anything else.
October 22nd, 2012 at 11:15 am
I’m a little disappointed in the depth of the anti-Rand scholarship around here. Over in academe, it’s been practically a cottage industry since 1971.
nk, you should forget about Nietzsche and look into Ernest Bramah, Isabel Paterson and Garet Garrett.
After John Hospers’ surprising loss, I was an LP county chairman. I had to live through the Harry Browne years, when the big tent found room for the LaRouchistes. Frankly (and sadly), all her “clown show” talk turned out to be, like her gaze, oddly prescient.
October 22nd, 2012 at 11:48 am
Thank you, comatus. I rejected Nietzsche as I was reading him, but he is fun to read in the Walter Kaufmann translations. Edward Abbey is the one who still strikes a chord in my libertarian harp. From “The Brave Cowboy”: I don’t need identification, I know who I am”.
October 22nd, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Atlas Shrugged is basically an argument against impossible straw men that could exist only in her Swiss cheese of a brain.
_________
I’d hardly call the villains in Atlas Shrugged strawmen. To me they’re fantastically and depressingly real.
Obama as Wesley Mouch, maybe Warren Buffett or the GE CEO as James Taggart, no Cuffy Meigs as of yet but events continue to unfold.
October 22nd, 2012 at 3:30 pm
nk is a statist. We learned this in his posts supporting the government mandate on swimming pool wheel chair lifts for hotels.
Nothing against him personally, but I would expect him to reject “Atlas Shrugged” at it refutes his governmental philosophy.
October 22nd, 2012 at 3:49 pm
I’m with comatus – Rand-as-regurgitated-Nietzsche doesn’t work very well.
In fact, I’d love to hear nk tell me how she got John Galt (and his actions) from Nietzsche.
I’m not a fan on Rand’s, but I’m also afraid she’s mostly right about the libertarian movement, which is totally amateur hour*.
(As for the “anarchists and hippies” thing, remember that the quote was from 1971 – 40 years ago.
And the anarchist bit is probably related to her conflict with Rothbard … who arguably was an anarchist, or close enough to one for the label to be not grossly unfair.)
(* I just voted here in Oregon, and the LP couldn’t even be bothered to get voter’s pamphlet entries for all of their State-level candidates.
Yeah, it’s $750 or so.
No, not doing it proves the Party’s either too marginal to bother with, or too amateur to support seriously.
In a fit of pique I voted for them anyway, in most cases, but they’re sure as hell not going to get any support from The Random Average Guy without bothering to get a profile for the candidate in the pamphlet.)
October 22nd, 2012 at 4:35 pm
I always thought of the Libertarians in Atlas shrugged as the People living out in the middle of nowhere but close to the old 20th century motor company manufacturing center and Complaining how things were great at one time but now they did not even care how to get them back to that greatness…
October 22nd, 2012 at 4:56 pm
To be fair, the biggest problem facing the libertarian movement in government is that most people who are libertarians have zero interest in government beyond saying “leave me alone”. It’s hard to build a political party when the only ones who are interested are generally either a) only interested out of self-defense, or b) people looking to take advantage of a third party to advance their own agenda.
In other words, the people you want to be in government are the ones who don’t want to be in government.
October 22nd, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Libertarians had always been on Ayn’s shit list since Rothbard left ( or was booted from ) her NYC “Collective”, her own ironic name for her group.
Greenspan left for similar reasons.
Ayn tolerated no independent though in her group.
October 22nd, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Thought, sorry.
October 22nd, 2012 at 6:45 pm
I do not favor pool lifts because I am a statist. I favor them because I am a feeble old man. I am going Galt on the nearest resource available — the government tit — and to hell with the rest of you untermenschen. 😉
May Nietzsche and Rand rest in peace. I will not fight with my friends here over what they said.
October 22nd, 2012 at 7:50 pm
To give Rand her due, after Aristotle’s students threw that plucked chicken over the Academy wall, he wasn’t welcome back there either. Philosophers (even diligent students of it) are notoriously hard to get along with. Guilty. Rand had that part down pat, for sure — I met her once. They tell me Spinoza was off the wall, and you didn’t want to shoot pool with David Hume.
Some of Rawls’ students at Harvard had a joke about [non-Rothbardian] anarchists, the only kind we had in the 60’s and just about the only kind we have now. They said they were Temporary Anarchists — they wanted to get rid of what we had now, all right, and then immediately replace it with something a whole lot worse.
For all but a decade or so of the last century, anarchist was shorthand for communist. In her student years, Rand would have known some of the people who made that so. I don’t hold that as a prejudice on her part, crotchety as her expression of it may have been.
October 22nd, 2012 at 8:06 pm
I think Rand may have been talking about Edward Abbey. He was kind of libertarian-cowboy-hippie-ecoterrorist-peacenik. If you guys have not read him, “The Brave Cowboy” was made into a decent movie, “Lonely Are The Brave” with Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau.
October 23rd, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Abbey is equally beloved by the “Monkey Wrench” branch of the Animal-rights Eco-fasciosts, and they don’t discriminated between corporations and people who work for corporations any more than the #OWS anarchists actually support “less State/more Freedom.”
October 23rd, 2012 at 6:38 pm
Shorter nk: Feed Me Seymour…
In light of some of the usual made-up BS being passed off in here about her person (not her ideas; hardly anyone risks engaging her on those), I don’t blame her for slamming such “critics”.. Everyone always assumes that she started the fight; I don’t.
The real joke here is that the Rothbardian/anarchist/Zero Hedge wing was supposedly booted out of the mainstream libertarian movement some time back, according to a longtime libertarian I know here in Vegas. (Where are the charges of “Stalinism” and “cultishness” over that, I’d like to know). With an Objectivist now running Cato and Yaron Brook speaking at Freedom Fest, it’s pretty clear that while much remains the same (in the ad hominem department, particularly), much seems to have changed over the past two decades as well.
October 23rd, 2012 at 7:16 pm
He may have coined the term “monkey wrench” for ecoterrorism. I read his book, “The Monkey Wrench Gang”, and that’s what it was about.