[bert]

.....Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it.....

Well put. As a blind individual now variously called leftist, Rat and Looter you are led astray by not only your inability to see, but by your total misunderstanding of the world. Intellectual vacuity describes your rant. You were as wrong then as you are now.

[zook]

"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber — go!'"

I love Ayn Rand. But that's a funny line!

[nopardons]

bttt

[Allan]

...that the good life is one which "has resolved personal worth into exchange value,"
"has left no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest
than callous "cash-payment."

UG says almost exactly the same thing in almost exactly the same words.

Is there a connection here?

[NMC EXP]

Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc.

It seems Chambers had quite a bit of sympathy for the "looters".

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly.

Translation - Chambers did not think that socialism was all bad. Further only the ignorant see socialism vs private property rights as a black vs white issue.

According to Chambers a little bit of socialism is OK - right there in the gray area otherwise known as the mushy middle.

[Capitalism2003]

Atlas Shrugged is a masterpiece.

Chambers is an idiot.

[eleni121]

Anyone who could write these words must be insane:


I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make
those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object...Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves 'pro-life.'

Ayn Rand

[Beckwith]

I have read Atlas Shrugged three times over the years.

It's my favorite book.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are allegorical fairy tales, not great literature designed to examine the human condition. They are a warning against the subordination of the individual to the state, and an example of some of the subtle ways that subordination can happen without the state's victims realizing it. Someone pointed out above how Kant inspired Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - which I think is exactly right. Rand will never inspire the formation of a dictatorship, other than maybe a Silicon Valley software company headed by a rabid Objectivist. My favorite part is reading her villains' plans to do evil in the name of good and realizing just how closely they match the plans coming out of the likes of Daschle, Pelosi, Boxer, and Kennedy today.

Rand's dialogue is almost as bad as George Lucas's in The Phantom Menace, true, and Objectivism has huge holes, but name one philosophy that doesn't. A lot of the criticism on this thread is akin to criticizing Cinderella because the coach turns into a pumpkin at midnight.

[M Kehoe]

$

5.56mm

[BunnySlippers]

Bookmarking ... also looking for link later. Thanks!

[Aquinasfan]

A superb essay and analysis of Rands pseudo-philosolphizing.

Miss Rand acknowledges a grudging debt to one, and only one, earlier philosopher: Aristotle. I submit that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche.

I wonder whether she even read Aristotle. There seems to be very little Aristotelean influence on her thought.

[hosepipe]

Well there you have it.. Whittaker Chambers was a moron...
He missed the whole story.. trying to make a novel a political syllabus.. Eventhough it is said he recanted communism but probably the bent for utopia was in him.. Dialectic materialism is a strong drug.. look at Teddy Kennedy, Kerry, the CLintons, McLaim, Pelosi, Bob Dole.. and way too many more.. Even most news anchors are high as a kite on that drug.. The open honesty of a moron is quite refreshing when you look at the democrat party as it is today..