feh...Truth is truth, no matter the source. Conservatives are smart enough to find the diamonds and discard the dirt when it comes to ideas.
It also amazes me that the Left doesn’t think we know who Ayn Rand was...as if these revelations are simply earth-shattering!
This article on Rand is written with a pen full of acid. But it’s interesting nonetheless.
Why does this keep coming up as an issue? She was a vulgar, crude, ugly, grandiose and cruel person. Who she was doesn't really have much to do with what she created.
If we conservatives insisted on our artists being decent people...well, then we'd have no art at all.
feh...I think Mr. Lewis would be well-advised either actually to read the novel he's criticizing or at least to read the newspaper he writes in now and then. At no point in American history have corporations ever enjoyed Randian economics or laissez-faire economics either, and no, they're not the same thing. Corrupt government intervention on behalf of corrupt corporations encompassed at least half of Atlas Shrugged, and Rand was precisely correct about that abuse's sources, motivations, and ultimate outcomes. That part isn't speculative fiction, we're living it.
Nor does her catchphrase "moochers and looters" refer merely to "unproductive" members of society as Lewis suggests. It refers to knowing leeches who game the system. The difference is made crystal-clear and only a determinedly inattentive reader - or a BS artist - could miss it. Rand had her faults as a novelist but her portrayal of he villains was brilliant and exquisitely uncomfortable for the real-life moochers and looters who read it.
“Lewis shows that business writing can be fun and interesting as well as informative,” a panel of SABEW (Society of American Business Editors and Writers) judges wrote. “The writing is clever, witty and visual. He has the tempo and timing of a good comedian.”Al, you really are a comedian! How many hundreds of your most admired authors abused far worse drugs and alcohol than Ayn Rand!?
Wait a moment, I suppose we had better approach this from the opposite direction. Name five of your most admired authors of all time that did not abuse hard drugs or alcohol!
Ayn Rand staying awake on speed while butt smoking cigarettes sounds absolutely tame compared to names such as Thompson, Cheever, Bronte, Hemingway, Maupassant, Cassady, Poe, Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, King, Carroll, Dowson, Wolfe, Thomas, Fitzgerald, Burroughs, Kerouac, Capote, O. Henry, Chandler, Williams, Coleridge, Wilde, Baudelaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Huxley, Browning, Bronte, Scott, ad infinitum, using Laudanum, Absinthe, Cocaine, Alcohol or various other illicit paths to personal literary Nirvana.
I always thought a great name for a libertarian blog/journal/whatever would be “Atlas Hurled”. Not as in vomited. As in “shrugging off the world just wasn’t forceful enough, so....”