Posted on 04/24/2011 10:07:56 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Ayn Rand is recapturing the hearts of American conservatives. The Cold War writer’s individualist philosophy is back in fashion among the Republican faithful. Her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged has just been released as a movie and while critics call it slow and two-dimensional, Tea Partiers are queuing around the block to see it. Something about Rand’s take-no-prisoners prose strikes a chord with people exasperated by Obama’s tax-and-spend liberalism and desperate for a road-map to liberty.
But Ayn Rand is not a natural pin-up for American conservatives. Her individualism went beyond libertarianism. It was an exciting, revolutionary mix of greed, atheism, materialism and the Marquis de Sade. It comes as no surprise that the 1960s Church of Satan lifted most of its high-camp gospel from Ayn Rand.One of its acolytes notes with approval that, “Rand’s philosophy rejects as ethical accepting the sacrifice of another to one’s self … The Satanic view sees as ethical the reality of domination of the weak by the strong.”
The story of how Rand fell out with the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard is instructive of her anti-conservative temperament (many versions exist; this one is attributed to Rothbard’s protégé, Prof Harry Veryser). In 1958, Rothbard and his wife JoAnn Schumacher
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
People dress up all sorts of things in "Christian" robes. I think GK Chesterton explained it best when he said “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” It's easier to be greedy and lazy than it is to be a disciple of Christ. Actually, it's easiest to not consider Him at all, which is why so few people do.
I meant to read it when it came out, but it slipped my mind. I was discussing Millard Tydings with another FReeper the other week and that reminded me to finally check the book out. Sad but true, as you said, that by the time of the Wheeling speech in 1950, permanent damage was done. It was just a perfect storm of willful Communist infiltration, bureaucratic incompetence and bungling, naivete, friends-protecting-friends, see-no-evil, and Democrat partisanship that put us into the fix we’ve been in ever since. Makes one wonder where we’d be today had we never had the FDR & Truman Administrations to enable this horror. A Free China, a Soviet Union that might’ve fallen decades ahead of time, no Communist spread in S.E. Asia or elsewhere, Cuba, et al, the cultural rot in this country... no situation where Emperor Zero could’ve claimed his throne... incredible just to imagine.
Here's another example... Ayn Rand fan spells out appreciation in world's largest book ad
It's right at the beginning with "existence exists".
And Ethan Clive Osgoode said: "Ah, so Christians are the enemy. I see. "
If you had simply explained that anyone pointing out the history of Christianity was an enemy of Christianity, I never would have bothered to contradict you.
Those who "loot and mooch" deserve to die of self-imposed hunger and exposure.
So far, in these Galt threads, the only thing the Randians have been proposing to do is to run off into the desert and wait until their enemies starve themselves to death or die of exposure. That's an impressive plan. The islamists won't know what hit them!
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