Posted on 01/05/2005 11:22:24 AM PST by annyokie
"Atlas Shrugged" was made especially haunting when put in perspective of the Clinton administration and its star characters (there is even a person in the book that says things much like Robert Reich with a similar position).
The National Review has helped encourage conservatism for years. Let's keep their work alive.
If Chambers had lived until now, he could have found several more to rival it.
Not to mention the miasmatic monologues of the MSM, which are much worse than in his day (and they were bad enough then!)
...The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism...
The blind pig snuffles up an acorn.
Similar because they are the same.
Ayn's description is perfectly apt.
Whether Communists, Fascists, Progressives or whatever, they are all socialist looters, and their useful idiots, moochers.
I first read Atlas Shrugged in 1968 at about the age of 17. This is probably the most common age of someone's becoming a dedicated and committed Randian. But the Rand-Branden split occurred at about this time, so my enthusiasm was somewhat muted.
At any rate, through Rand I become interested in philosophy, politics and economics, so on the whole I would regard her influence as having been beneficial.
I recently read a book on the Great Depression and the New Deal. The setting of Atlas Shrugged reads like it came out of the pages of the early part of the New Deal. It had the same vile little bureaucrats trying to control their sections of a sinking ship, oxymoronic names for government offices, the same friends and friends of friends of the President being put in charge of things they had no knowledge of and a general direction of poisoning anything which could have cured the problem. Atlas Shrugged wasn't set in the future from the 1950s. Its setting was the early 1930s.
I agree, especially in the context of Rand challenging the liberal orthodoxy that was forming at the time and continues to suffocate so much learning and innovation in this country.
However, like so many puritanical philosophical movements, it got taken over by those who wished to create a new religion, filled by those who worshiped the reasoning of Ayn Rand to the point that they became unable to reason on their own.
I read The Fountainhead while I was in hospital recovering from a tragic miscarriage. I found it to be inane and over-the-top. I never made it through Atlas Shrugged.
By the time I read "Atlas Shrugged", I was already a conservative and thus, found the book to be dull and repetitive (since I already agreed with many of Rand's premises).
I disagreed with her blind assertion that taxation isn't necessary. Given the times we live in (and her too), to think that a nation's military can survive without tax dollars is foolhardy at best. I for one am glad that a large portion of my tax dollars goes toward creation and maintenance of the world's greatest military force.
Agreed. Whittaker was a hero. I never warmed up to Ayn; struck me as cold; and that little cult she had going - kinky!
"To the best of my knowledge about Miss Rand, she seduced her charge, Nathaniel and was no better than Clinton in being tyrannical with her flock."
She also got her husband to leave his then-wife-and-family for her. Not much of a role model.
Have you read Sam Tannenhaus' biography of Chambers? It is fascinating. Rand was a piker compared to Chambers.
Agreed. Awfully murky. I never could get behind her ideas.
ping
Reformed commie. Read Sam Tannenhaus' biography and get back to me.
Getting back to you now, don't care.
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