Friday, March 14, 2014

GALT III: THIS TIME IT'S PROFITABLE.

Just as the New York Times has to do its "Neediest Cases" and the Girl Scouts have to sell Thin Mints, so libertarian standard Reason magazine has to pimp every installment of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy. Though Reason's Brian Doherty and Shrugged producer John Aglialoro love capitalism, at least one of them is not quite ready to accept the verdict of the marketplace:
I questioned the business sense of Aglialoro’s foray into filmmaking during a February interview on the set of Atlas III. The first two movies in the trilogy were financial failures, losing him millions. 
“We don’t know that the trilogy will not make money,” he corrects me. "We know Part I did not and Part II did not."
Though I saw the first movie and hoo boy did it suck, I'm inclined to side with Aglialoro -- fuck all these nay-sayers, cowboy, make the movie you know will blow their minds! Alas, Aglialoro appears to incline more toward rightwing human product placement:
To further prime the promo pump, they’ve given guest-casting appearances to what Aglialoro says are “almost 10 personalities who have TV shows or radio shows who have a million plus followers who are going to talk to their people" about Atlas III.
I think they could have saved some money by just having Michael Savage, Tammy Bruce, and Peter Ingemi tour the country with a readers-theater version.

The libertarian-entertainment complex are so eager fro ASIII to succeed, they're even promising to make it less like the source material:
Aglialoro thinks Rand was having an intellectual “bad hair day” when she decided to valorize the term “selfishness,” which he thinks blunts her message of individual achievement through freely chosen market cooperation, not “self at expense of others.” Thus, he tried to make their approximately four-minute condensation of Galt’s speech a bit more inspirational, a bit less condemnatory, than the novel’s version. It ended (from what I could hear) with talk of how you should not in your confusion and despair let your own irreplaceable spark go out and how the world you desire can be won. 
With the speech, says [co-producer Harmon] Kaslow, the “challenge was, you want people to feel good” and so they tried to “accentuate the positive aspects as opposed to presenting things in negative”...
So, basically, it'll be like Flashdance, only hella talky. My favorite part is where Doherty explains the Randian morality of the ASIII Kickstarter campaign:
This led many to assume that asking people to freely support something they valued was in some sense un-Randian. Aglialoro sees it differently, as would anyone who understands Rand. Her novel The Fountainhead is a paean to an artist whose work is not rewarded by the marketplace. Rand believed in the glory of trading value—money—for value—a film the giver wants to see.
I understand why he'd see it that way. Me, I don't get why it's worth anyone's money to propagandize themselves. Well, markets in everything and one born every minute, I suppose.


161 comments:

  1. dmsilev4:10 PM

    I assume that 'almost 10 personalties' is reached by counting in binary.

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  2. El Manquécito4:20 PM

    I assumed it was a word order issue. '10 almost personalities'

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  3. coozledad4:25 PM

    Her novel The Fountainhead is a paean to an artist whose work is not rewarded by the marketplace



    You know who else's art was not rewarded by the marketpl...oh fuck it.

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  4. Spaghetti Lee4:31 PM

    The voices in Glenn Beck's head count as 8 on their own.

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  5. Spaghetti Lee4:34 PM

    Isn't that kind of like making an Ed Gein biopic and stressing that he really, really loved his mother?

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  6. Holy shit, they got the Galt speech down to four minutes? That's how long it would take to read it, if you read each page in four seconds.

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  7. Atlas Shrugged follows Dagny Taggart, railroad heiress/author self insertion, on her quest to have sex with ("get raped by") a series of increasingly powerful men. Also, there's a minor subplot about the economy collapsing because of a guy called John Galt. The title, Atlas Shrugged, is a clever metaphor that one appreciates gradually as the story progresses, until halfway through the story when one character comes out and explains exactly what it means.

    http://www.cracked.com/funny-304-ayn-rand/
    ----------------
    Same old, same old.
    ~

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  8. I'm inclined to side with Aglialoro -- fuck all these nay-sayers, cowboy, make the movie you know will blow their minds!



    You know what? I agree, but with one caveat - if these guys are going to keep making bombs, they need to acknowledge what the market actually does.


    Libertarians all but worship the market on the grounds that it favors what's best, but that's not quite true. The market favors what's profitable. Sometimes they're the same; sometimes they're not. There are a lot of great things that no longer exist because no one could find a way to monetize them. And there are a lot of great things that only exist because someone keeps slapping away the invisible hand.


    You know - like when a film and its sequel both bomb, and yet you still find money to make a third because someone thought it was worth making. Aglialoro is being really optimistic - the first movie was hyped to all hell and still failed to turn a profit, so what are the odds on the third one? It's going to fail, you know it's going to fail, but you're making it anyway because you feel it deserved to be made.


    Look, we all like to complain about the entertainment industry because it favors cheap, stupid projects over smart, quality projects. But they wouldn't do that if the market didn't bear cheap and stupid. If you're making art...hell, even if you're making propaganda, you are fighting the market. And if you're going to keep making these things, I think you should acknowledge that.

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  9. Aglialoro thinks Rand was having an intellectual “bad hair day” when she decided to valorize the term “selfishness,”


    martin heidegger: "oy vey, tell me about it!"

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  10. petesh5:36 PM

    I first read "eager fro ASIII to succeed" as "eager for ASCII to succeed" and was going to push back hard.

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  11. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person5:44 PM

    Aglialoro thinks Rand was having an intellectual “bad hair day” when she
    decided to valorize the term “selfishness,” which he thinks blunts her
    message


    I always thought that pretty much *was* her message. Also too, a BHD lasting 50 years would have to set some sort of cosmic record...

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  12. Warren_Terra5:45 PM

    OK, Atlas Shrugged Part III it might not pan out financially, but Atlas Shrugged Part IV is going to be a gold mine.


    You heard it here first!

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  13. PulletSurprise5:48 PM

    EBCDIC 4evah!

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  14. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person5:49 PM

    Some of the forever-14 crowd are probably positively yearning for that speech, since they have it memorized, and plan to lip-synch it right there in the theater, and later at AS all night DVD parties, and karaoke...

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  15. |>

    |_/

    _|

    ……

    ………

    ………………………………………

    ……….

    ………. >(‘> >(‘>

    ………. >()))*>

    ……….

    http://blog.3bulls.net/archives/2704#comment-146041
    ~

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  16. Warren_Terra5:53 PM

    One aspect of this saga that I find hilarious is that they've spent a lot of money to produce these films, with a constantly changing cast and crew from episode to episode.

    Meanwhile, the legions of dedicated aficionados attracted to other stories, such as Robocop, merely have to announce an idea and people all over the globe work really hard and contribute their own filmed scenes to the project, unselfishly and out of love for the vision of the thing - and the result is, again, a retelling of a familiar story with a constantly changing cast and crew. Only, in that case, it can be awesome, not an unwatchable film-festival of drear.

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  17. montag25:56 PM

    I just had to pop over to the SourceWatch page at the link to check out Reason's funders. And, wouldn't you know it, the whole right-wing, barking-mad bunch is there--all the Koch foundations, the Olin Foundation, the Zombie Joe Coors Castle Rock Foundation, all the Scaife money pits and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

    It's like everyone of America's famous fascists has given money to this rag, and they still can't turn a buck in profit.

    No wonder they're cheering on "ASIII." They're even bigger losers than the movies are.

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  18. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person5:57 PM

    Ayn Rand isn't beloved by generations of sociopaths for being a forerunner to Tony Robbins.

    Oh, the beloving went both ways, rest assured. While Rand was "developing her philosophy" in the late '20s, she became infatuated with a serial killer named William Hickman, and he shows up in her notes, with clear admiration. Objectivists try to downplay that by saying "she was young then, just finding her way". Indeed she was, guys...

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  19. montag26:00 PM

    And, still, after all that, no one gets laid.

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  20. PulletSurprise6:06 PM

    “We don’t know that the trilogy will not make money,” he corrects me. "We know Part I did not and Part II did not."



    Libertarianism: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

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  21. montag26:09 PM

    Hey, if he was even up to the level of making bombs, these days, he'd have a defense contract.

    This guy can't even make money with a 100% gin-you-whine con game targeting some of the lamest, most emotionally stunted people on the planet. He can spin this artiste business all he likes. He's still just terrible at grifting. And filmmaking.

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  22. PulletSurprise6:10 PM

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tKucGwIzuak/UvvDtCteHnI/AAAAAAAABIU/Ab2v3RawCto/s640/td4d592_sideshow-bob-steps-on-rakes-o.gif

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  23. Jay B.6:10 PM

    “We don’t know that the trilogy will not make money,” he corrects me. "We know Part I did not and Part II did not."


    "In other words," he said, leaning in and grabbing my leg. "That chicken isn't going to fuck itself."


    Welp, that's fiat currency for you. Always fucking the little guy.

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  24. PersonaAuGratin6:16 PM

    The 50-year BHD may explain her proclivity for goofy headwear.

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  25. montag26:23 PM

    Hell, I figured Part Three was going to be the speech.

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  26. What is almost 10? 9 1/2?

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  27. Tone down the selfishness message in Atlas Shrugged?

    Well, you know, someone pointed out that the "inner city" male might take that to heart.

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  28. Gabriel Ratchet6:32 PM

    Or just one person plus the voices in their head.

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  29. Ellis_Weiner6:34 PM

    Well, that--plus the part when, after Galt says, in the speech, something like, "If you come for us, we will resist you," and they come for him, he immediately surrenders.

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  30. What did Einstein say about insanity again?

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  31. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person6:38 PM

    I know screencaps can be misleading--see "Bush is gay!"--but, dang, she looks like a mannikin, or an alien in a really bad '50s Sci-Fi movie.

    What year would that pic be from? Because, in fairness, a lot of silly hattage was worn in the '20s and '30s...

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  32. redoubtagain6:39 PM

    You know, insisting on making a third version of a film that didn't make any money the first two times is the exact opposite of "let the market decide".

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  33. TGuerrant6:42 PM

    http://postimg.org/image/qbhocbbbx/

    From "The Longest Daycare," set in the Ayn Rand School for Tots that debuted in "A Streetcar Named Marge" ... on Fox.

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  34. GlockPalin6:45 PM

    almost 10 personalities

    ...shared amongst 37 people.

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  35. GlockPalin6:49 PM

    Isn't "Atlas Shrugged Part IV" just a bunch of millionaires reenacting the Donner Party in the hinterlands of Colorado?

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  36. PersonaAuGratin6:49 PM

    No idea when, though she looks fairly young.

    BTW, I think every decade has had some silly hattage...

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  37. TGuerrant6:52 PM

    Her uncanny natural talents made her a shoe-in as a Shriner before she was shirty-shix.

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  38. TGuerrant6:56 PM

    And how far back can you start to meas--


    Oh, umm, sorry, wrong thread.

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  39. M. Krebs6:56 PM

    And what kind of dipshit refers to people--or even celebrities-- as "personalities?"

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  40. TGuerrant6:57 PM

    We can watch if we pay in the bitcoins?

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  41. M. Krebs7:05 PM

    Maybe it's five people, but only four of them suffer from dissociative personality disorder.

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  42. satch7:18 PM

    One of the subtexts of A/S is that the Heroic Producers always act strictly in their own self interest, but somehow never slip over the line into criminality. They got what they got because they EARNED it, without help from anyone. I remember a passage from A/S where Hank Rearden's brother Philip asks Hank for a job, and Hank asks him what he knows about the steel industry. Philip says that he's willing to learn if Hank will teach him, and Hank exclaims "Nobody taught ME, I learned it all myself." And of course, there's Howard Roarke, who actually went to architecture school, but claims the only things he learned there he taught himself. Rand's characters completely negate the interconnected web of humanity that passes along not only technical knowledge, but the learned societal norms that constitutes civilization. Christ, no wonder she created a generation of psychopaths.

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  43. mortimer20007:24 PM

    According to their Form 990, the Reason Foundation took in a little over $9 million in 2011 and had expenses of $8.7 million, and only $205,000 of that went to Nick Gillespie. So what on earth are they spending the money on? I asked facetiously. And it's all tax-exempt of course because they're spreading the Word.

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  44. mortimer20007:25 PM

    I don't understand. If they want to lose money, then forget Atlas
    Shrugged
    why not just lose money making the Libertarian Paradise
    movie of their dreams? You know, the story of the ultimate Free to be
    Me-Topia, where everything works perfectly thanks to the elimination of
    government, planes don't fall out of the sky despite no FAA, fire
    departments charge by the hour, moochers are eradicated along with the
    taxes that paid for them, luncheonette owners can freely refuse to serve
    those people and those people are
    finally free to go fuck themselves, and all is bliss. Or maybe it's
    just the story of a man and a dream: He Said
    Seastead!
    . Whatever. It's gotta be better than this Galt crap.

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  45. M. Krebs7:28 PM

    What he means is "not self at the expense of other successful capitalists."

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  46. Damn, every body else logged on and made the joke I was going to make. Pays to get up pretty early in the morning around here.

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  47. Spaghetti Lee7:36 PM

    It's like wingnut welfare. Given all the money that Koch, Scaife, et. al. are able to blow just on subsidizing right-wing opinion outlets, it's amazing the sheer constancy with which they subsidize absolute shit. What would the likes of Ben Shapiro or Joel Pollak do with their lives if they didn't have these sugar daddies.

    And that holds just as true for the less obviously dependent ones. Rush Limbaugh is a living god to his admirers, but his crap lasted for like a month on Monday Night Football before he talked himself out of a job. (Although I'm still not sure why they thought that was a good idea in the first place, but so it goes). They're like little micro-organisms that can't survive outside of the petri dish. They depend entirely on each other for support. And they complain about collectivism and how liberals encourage laziness. What a life.

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  48. You guys are so sweet! Do you think that Agliaro didn't make any money off this gig? You haven't heard of The Producers, have you?

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  49. That hat is a dead ringer for the one Greta Garbo pines for in Ninotchka.

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  50. Thin strips of objectivist jerky. Or jerks. I often get confused.

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  51. Spaghetti Lee7:40 PM

    Note also the ever-present Cruella de Vil-style cigarette. Occasionally in this universe, poetic justice really is served, like a woman who spent her whole life claiming that smoking is a sign of power and independence dying of lung cancer after spending 8 years on Medicare.

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  52. I think they really think they are forcing Hollywood to recognize them by doing this. Its the moviemaking equivalent of the spite vote.

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  53. Spaghetti Lee7:44 PM

    And what would Our Lady of Perpetual Spitefulness think of the bitcoin phenomenon anyhow? She'd probably look at the recent speculation-fueled market crash and criticize the power players for not pulling the rug out sooner.

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  54. Tiny Hermaphrodite, Esq.7:53 PM

    Such a great movie. Saw it as a kid, fell in love with it. And romantic comedy is normally not my kind of genre.

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  55. M. Krebs7:55 PM

    Same here.

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  56. Warren_Terra7:58 PM

    This means they must have taken out the bit on the 63rd page of the oration where Galt addresses the reader directly and gives them a coupon code they can use for buy-two-get-one-free Cheetos if they've actually stuck with the speech for that long instead of skipping ahead.

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  57. Tiny Hermaphrodite, Esq.8:00 PM

    I'm sorry, I must correct you here. She had lung cancer surgery in 1974 (while still denying the smoke cancer link). She then signed on for SS and Medicare two years later (of course she deverved it unlike the typical moocher). In 1982 she died of heart failure.
    She allegedly said or wrote that "We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality." She managed that feat for quite some time.

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  58. Tiny Hermaphrodite, Esq.8:02 PM

    I'm sure the Atlas Shrugged porn parody will be profitable at least.

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  59. M. Krebs8:08 PM

    The porn knockoff of The Fountainhead would be much easier to come up with a title for.

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  60. Tiny Hermaphrodite, Esq.8:09 PM

    Upvoted for using objectivist jerky.

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  61. M. Krebs8:11 PM

    Is that a fez she's wearing?


    Those eyes, there's something strange about those eyes.

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  62. Or, the very manly men take the women when and where and how they want them. Because those women, don't ya know, are simply panting to be taken.

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  63. M. Krebs8:18 PM

    How on earth are they tax exempt? Because they put "Foundation" in the name?

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  64. M. Krebs8:22 PM

    See, the problem is that they'd have to come up with their own ideas for that sort of thing.

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  65. JennOfArk8:39 PM

    ...they think they're the superiors and think they deserve to be rewarded like the characters in the book are.



    I've always found that an affinity for Rand is close to 100% accurate in predicting a pedestrian and unoriginal intellect, as well as being at least 100% accurate in revealing poor moral character.

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  66. JennOfArk8:40 PM

    ...but somehow never slip over the line into criminality.

    One of many tells that this is a work of fiction. Bad fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

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  67. RNegron8:49 PM

    nine and three quarters.

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  68. RNegron8:55 PM

    “almost 10 personalities who have TV shows or radio shows who have a million plus followers who are going to talk to their people"
    Little do they know that those '10 personalities' all talk to the same million people. So we are not talking about 10 pers X 1mill people. we are talking about 10 pers talking to the exact same 1 mill people.
    Good luck with that!

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  69. JennOfArk9:21 PM

    I kind of already started writing that a few days ago in comments, in my Putin/Palin story.

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  70. JennOfArk9:33 PM

    Tastes like stoat.

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  71. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:35 PM

    Limbaugh's TV show, of which I saw part of one episode, also didn't fare so well. His schtick is custom made for radio, and his personality is, too. You're dead on about the Petri dish, he doesn't function well outside his extended family of nutbars, where his awesomeness is taken for granted. In his early days at WABC, he would periodically have some Liberal dude whose name I forget on air for a short "debate". That didn't last long, and I don't think he's come even that close to actual debate since then. I think he's have an actual breakdown if forced into one.

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  72. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:38 PM

    You'd think the crew that did the Palin spoof would be on that.

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  73. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:38 PM

    I dunno, "Atlas Shagged" was pretty easy...

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  74. Tiny Hermaphrodite, Esq.10:40 PM

    His face is also made for radio. Seriously, dignity looks different.

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  75. Tiny Hermaphrodite, Esq.10:43 PM

    Hm, if you think about it, one will conclude that Atlas Shrugged is already a kind of fetish porn. Also explains it's mainstream failure (as a movie).

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  76. Uppsies for He Said Seastead!

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  77. Derelict11:02 PM

    I want to paint this comment like one of my French girls.

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  78. Derelict11:07 PM

    If, by "women," you actually mean "own right hand."

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  79. Derelict11:11 PM

    I assumed it was missing punctuation: "almost-10 personalities."

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  80. tigrismus11:38 PM

    as would anyone who understands Rand


    She certainly had no issue with receiving support, whether the Social Security administration valued her or not.

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  81. Spaghetti Lee12:34 AM

    That "It's my money in the first place!" thing cracks me up. Yes, dear, and you are discovering that you actually need that money in old age, just like they said you would. Good thing it's actually there, huh?



    The only way it could be about 'principle' is if someone's principles included 'never, ever admit to being wrong.' Which for most libertarians is already true, so yeah.

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  82. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person12:35 AM

    They'd have to be minted out of Virtual Rearend Metal, or whatever that stuff was...

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  83. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person12:43 AM

    No, it tastes like cardboard, unless you get the BBQ flavor, then it tastes like BBQ flavored cardboard. It's marketed as "Turkey Jerky". I bought some once. Yuck.

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  84. DocAmazing1:23 AM

    When do the Yetis come in?

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  85. davdoodles1:44 AM

    I guess if they could use the word "Reason" with a straight face, the next tep must have been almost inevitable.

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  86. Tehanu1:45 AM

    "That "It's my money in the first place!" thing cracks me up.
    Me too. Apparently none of them ever realizes that "money" only exists within a society that defines its value. I often wonder how long any of them would last if they had to eat their money or make clothing out of it or use it to insulate their houses in cold weather.

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  87. smut clyde1:59 AM

    Winston Churchill?

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  88. davdoodles2:08 AM

    People who are cool about losing money repeatedly are rarely if ever the people that are, themselves, losing anything. My guess is that Aglialoro hasn't risked a cent of his own money in any of these movies, and was the first one to be paid for his "services", probably before the first scene was shot.
    .

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  89. PorlockJunior3:23 AM

    Cf. Objectivist Jerky (referenced somewhere above).
    Since not everyone is familiart with *all* Internet traditions,
    http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/09/26/tax-frenzies-and-how-to-hose-them-down/

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  90. PorlockJunior3:28 AM

    And I'm the result of thre twisted eugenics
    Of this family of inbred schizophrenics,
    The end of a long long line of bats!
    I design [insane laughter] women's hats.
    -- "Anatole of Paris", recorded in the 1940s by Danny Kaye.

    They kind of had a reputation then.

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  91. smut clyde3:46 AM


    The libertarian-entertainment complex are so eager fro ASIII to succeed, they're even promising to make it less like the source material:



    I imagine they asked themselves, "What would Ayn do? Would she co-opt someone else's work of creative propaganda and completely reverse the central message in the hope of making it profitable losing less money and conveying a different message?"
    "Of course she would," is the answer. "Selfishness dictates it. If she didn't want someone else twisting her propaganda, serves her right for dying."

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  92. BadExampleMan3:46 AM

    There's an article somewhere in Salon's archives written by a younger cousin of his. She says he's a really great guy, kind to his family, not pretentious, etc. etc. I'm sure Hitler's dog could've written the same kind of encomium. (Or is that mecomium? I can never remember...)

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  93. BadExampleMan3:47 AM

    Hey! Fezzez are cool!

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  94. smut clyde3:47 AM

    And because you people keep going on about Ninotchka, I've borrowed it from the library for the Frau Doktorin and I to watch tonight.

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  95. smut clyde6:07 AM

    She allegedly said or wrote that "We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."


    Via the Gazoogle, I see that it is a much-repeated quote, almost a litany. Bitcoin enthusiasts seem to be fond of it; also goldbuggers, conspiracy theorists, preppers and Stormfront. All none-overlapping groups no doubt.

    None of the people repeating the incantation bother to provide a source for it, and it doesn't really seem to matter for them who originated it, almost as if the ritual repetition serves mainly as a shibboleth of membership. Ayn Rand should have said it and that's what counts.

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  96. montag27:18 AM

    And, of course, your capitalists have to be virtuous because you need that contrast to help show that the government is entirely composed of corrupt criminals.

    So, yeah, bad fiction. Or, Punch and Judy show day at the asylum.

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  97. montag27:20 AM

    "Paul Ryan, come on down!"

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  98. montag27:23 AM

    And they'd save money with it, too. They could just splice in the jackhammer scene from the original movie and have no gap in the plot or the meaning whatsoever.

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  99. Come back and tell us how you liked it. If you did. If not? You sre dead to me.

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  100. montag27:52 AM

    So, he has investors? Who would invest in this tried-and-true money loser? Oh, wait, you mean all those guys at Reason magazine. Okay, got it.

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  101. montag28:01 AM

    Oh, sure, he's just misunderstood. He's just an excitable boy.

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  102. smut clyde8:05 AM

    Viewing was postponed. I'd hired several videos, and the Frau Doktorin opted to watch "Antiviral" first.

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  103. A yeti8:14 AM

    ANY TIME WE LIKE.

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  104. smut clyde8:18 AM

    The thing about the quote is that it provides absolutely no guide to whether what one is ignoring is reality or not. It is sententious and content-free, providing little except a warm glow of superiority over people who don't share one's views. A perfect slogan for a Motivational Poster.

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  105. smut clyde8:20 AM

    What is this "morning" whereof you speak?

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  106. montag29:11 AM

    With regard to the effectiveness of wingnut welfare, over the long term, it has worked. All of my tangential experience with lefty groups shows them to be issue-specific and always short on funds, so, if they don't see results right away, the money gets cut off. Not so with the fatcats and their foundations. They took Lewis Powell's recommendations to heart, and they were out for blood after Goldwater's loss. They started pumping money into think tanks, PR firms, speakers' bureaus--and candidates. Virtually all of it was flim-flammery, shite in a bucket, but even when they didn't see immediate results, they kept on funding the bozos who would say--with conviction--what they wanted them to say.

    In a little more than ten years, they very nearly had, in the Reagan administration, the government they'd always wanted. By the `90s, their ideas, that were seen as fringe and near-psychotic in the `60s, were mainstream. People who were previously viewed as cranks and crackpots were getting significant face time on television and space in the press.

    Today, the Village has been completely taken over by right-wing Republicans and their ideas, even though those ideas don't fucking work for ordinary people. Some of that, certainly, began with the Reagan White House bringing over Walter Raymond from the CIA in 1984 to run their "perception management" program, which managed to hide no small amount of skulduggery by intimidating journalists, largely by equating skepticism and criticism of the administration to unpatriotic belligerence or, in some cases, treason. That worked so well that it opened the door to the crackpots. Hell, by the late `90s, the mainstream press was slavishly quoting Drudge and every nitwit on the Fox News Channel every day. Now, it's practically every hour.

    They've created, co-opted or outright seized every news source they can (Commentary, for example, used to be a well-respected somewhat lefty magazine full of ideas--now it's little more than the Podhoretz foghorn of diatribes), because they've got the money. They simply cannot win on the basis of intellectual rigor or the soundness of their ideas, because they're designed to benefit a few billionaires. But they can win by wide and deep propaganda, intimidation, co-optation, threats and faux populism, and they've been doing all those things relentlessly for fifty years. And they have the money to keep on doing it because we no longer tax them in any effective way--because they gained that advantage thirty years ago.

    I saw an interesting quote yesterday:

    “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” -- Frederic Bastiat


    The politicians they've bought and/or intimidated have accomplished the former. The nitwits at Reason and thousands of other opinion outlets, the useful idiots in the Tea Party, etc., have been--guided by the hands of a few terrible and wealthy men--reshaping the psychological landscape of the country to accomplish the latter.

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  107. El Manquécito9:56 AM

    I'd like to meet this comment up in the stacks for some research.

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  108. So, not a romantic?

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  109. So what you are saying is that its like an SAT score for assholes? A high score tells you more about where the person is coming from, than where they are going?

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  110. Hey, if Atlas Shrugged III has at least one musical number as catchy as "Springtime For Hitler," I'll have to go and see it.

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  111. susanoftexas11:23 AM

    Aglialoro's company was worth $36.54 million in 2007. Let's assume that his company's worth hasn't changed very much since the 2008 crash; the economy must have hurt them but in 2011 they sold $130 million worth of equipment.

    But they settled a judgment for $26 million to a woman crushed by one of their machines in 2012. The company avoided bankruptcy but it was a close thing; she was first awarded $65 million.

    Aglialoro lied when he said the total cost for all three would be $20 million. Part I, he said earlier, cost about $20 million (including option) and made less than $5 million. He said he planned to use the profits to make Part II but had to make a private debt sale instead; he only raised $16 million of the $25 million he wanted. Part II made a little over $3 million. Part III, according to an article in Reason, will have a production and advertising budget of $8 million and, going by history, will make about $2-3 million.

    It's interesting that Aglialoro and Reason are underplaying how much he has spent. The only way libertarians can convince themselves they are independently successful is to lie.

    Reason's Brian Doherty said:

    "Hostile jokers on the Internet who haven't bothered to read Rand and understand her as some sort of prophet of profit above all seem to find a snickering irony in these filmmakers following their muse. The entire point of her 1943 novel The Fountainhead was of the prime importance of the creative artist, who should and will do the work they want to do, whether or not the world rewards them for it. The Atlas film project, whatever your opinions of its merits, is in a very Randian spirit all the way."
    True, except for one little problem. Rand's heroes didn't make crappy products. Everything they did was the best of its kind, even if the base looters and moochers refused to recognize it. Even libertarians don't call the movies great examples of filmmaking art. It's hard to convince the world of your superiority when you can't prove you have any.
    Which is why they become Koch-fed hacks. Money isn't as good as innate superiority but it's the next best thing.
    Also, too: one source I read said Nick Gillespie made about $200,000 a year, which means boy editor P. Suderman and his wife are far richer than he.
    (sorry for the length, folks)

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  112. Yep... if society ever really crashes, they're going to be astonished to learn that even the gold that Glenn Beck conned them into buying won't be any help. Imagine trying to buy a loaf of sawdust bread with 1/12 of an American Gold eagle.

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  113. susanoftexas11:28 AM

    I saw that too; he was sweating bullets and couldn't improvise. He's a one trick show pony who can only rant insults, if a pony were bloated, self-indulgent venomous addict.
    Which they might be; who knows what goes on under the braids and ribbons?

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  114. cleter11:28 AM

    Yes. Hari Seldon went space-galt and left Trantor for Terminus with his crew of encyclopedia doofuses to start The Foundation and avoid the Galactic Empire's ruinous moocher taxes.

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  115. cleter11:40 AM

    Oh, I'm sure this thing will do boffo box office at the multiplex at the Mall of Seamalia.

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  116. susanoftexas11:41 AM

    Rand was slick. Dagny keeps her hands clean by handing over all the paperwork for the John Galt line to James, so he has to deal with getting permits etc, a process that Rand has depicted as full of corruption.
    And when Dagny needs supplies she can't get legally, she just bribes and bullies people until she gets it. This is fine because it's an example of her iron will and everyone else's weakness, but when others do it it's socialist corruption.

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  117. PulletSurprise11:53 AM

    I think that the reason that they don't is the perverse pleasure they get out of proselytizing. And by this, I mean proselytizing for the sake of proselytizing, not for the sake of winning allies. I honestly don't believe that they give a shit about converting others to their position, because there's no margin for smugness in anyone agreeing with them.

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  118. He changed Rand's rant? He's gone and alienated the only audience he ever could have hoped for.

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  119. Daniel Björkman12:08 PM

    True, but I think that the hypocrisy is actually built into Rand's original philosophy.


    As these twits quite correctly points out, Rand does show that some things are good without being profitable, and that some things are profitable without being good. The problem is that whenever something is good *and* profitable, she claims that the latter is proof of the former, whereas in other cases it's just further proof that evil communist philosophy has corrupted good, money-grubbing Amurrrrkan values.


    Objectivists worship selfishness and profit, everyone knows that. What a lot of people miss is that they explicitly worships "the right sort" of selfishness and profit. Whenever their ideals lead to something bad, they reserve the right to claim that the fault is not with their ideals but with the world that has perverted them. Just like whenever someone does something Objectivists don't like, they feel free to condemn it, because while they howl constantly about freedom, they don't mean the freedom to do what you want to do, they mean the freedom to freely decide to do what they want you to do.

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  120. What if they acquire a gulch and nobody goes Galt?

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  121. L Bob Rife12:10 PM

    Lets.. Do... The Tax.. Cut.. Againnnnnn...

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  122. glennisw12:10 PM

    I'm pretty excited anticipating this. Are we going to have Victoria Jackson, Pat Boone, and the Noodge talking up ASIII? That would be fabulous!

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  123. mortimer200012:15 PM

    To be clear, Gillespie earned $205,000 in salary from the Reason Foundation alone in 2011. This doesn't include earnings from speaking engagements, Happy Days conventions, Hugo Boss catalog modeling, Fifth Beatle autograph sales on Ebay, and all the usual libertarian grifting. Like the Sudermans, he's vastly overpaid thanks to libnut welfare from the Koch Kids, because it sure beats having to work real jobs under the ruthless capitalism they advocate for other people.

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  124. Daniel Björkman12:17 PM

    Well, to be quite fair, I think Dagny was meant to be misguided in trying to run any kind of company in the Evil Socialist Dystopia. The message is that you should not try to play the game even a tiny bit, but instead take your genius and go off and hide until the looters are so desperate for you that they'll beg you to come back and let you arrange society exactly the way you want it.


    Which is not really a good message, and certainly not a mature one, but even so.

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  125. susanoftexas12:23 PM

    I want to buy this comment a leather jacket and hang on its arm.

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  126. susanoftexas12:36 PM

    Yes, Rand always tried to have everything both ways; Dagny had to learn to leave the corrupt world behind but when she used the corruption to her advantage it was just further proof of her superiority.

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  127. susanoftexas12:41 PM

    Yes; in the book she can eliminate anything that might contradict her philosophy; her heroes are always superior. In real life Randians have to rationalize failure.

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  128. PersonaAuGratin1:26 PM

    True. If only Ayn's parents hadn't done it without the fez on...

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  129. MRC2102:38 PM

    A little too over-turned flower-pot for Ninotchka. Her hat was much more whimsical -- a combination of an over-turned funnel and a smaller version of one of the nuclear towers from The Simpsons. The thing is, Ninotchka knew it was a silly hat, but she'd never owned anything purely silly and un-functional in her life, so she loved it. Ayn's hat could actually double as any one of a dozen functional kitchen containers and probably did.

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  130. Shakezula2:55 PM

    They're going to give the facade of the Temple of Fuck You Jack I Got Mine a makeover, huh? Turn those Galtian Gargoyles into Self-Actualized Saints.

    I predict the Randroids will outshriek the Christians who've lately been subjected to the dual outrages of Noah and NTG's reboot of Cosmos.

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  131. M. Krebs3:33 PM

    Outstanding summary, montag.

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  132. TGuerrant4:56 PM

    When the guest-casting mania of Magic Christian becomes product placement... I wonder, are the personalities also investors?

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  133. smut clyde5:29 PM

    Do obtuse angles count?

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  134. TGuerrant5:57 PM

    Maybe they've figured out they need to maximize the licensed product sales in advance of the film's release.

    And if the soundtrack's got some hits on it, the revenues from it could be substantial.


    The lyrics can come straight from the novel - they just need to get the melodies right.


    And they could use The Personalities as back-up vocalists and have them repeatedly sing the slogans that appear on the merchandise.

    I mean, try this to the tune of "One that I Want" or "Footloose":

    By the grace of reality oot, oot, ooooot
    and the nature of li-li-life,
    man
    ev-er-ry man
    MAN MAN MAN
    is an end end end in himself, oot, oot, ooooot
    he exists for for for his ow-own sake, oot, oot, ooooot
    and the ach-ach-achieve-a-ment
    of his own hap-hap-happiness is his
    high-high-highest moral purpose, oot, oot, ooooot




    Damn - those oots really make it. The Kochers need to start paying ME the big bucks.

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  135. freq flag6:32 PM

    George W. Brush?

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  136. freq flag6:38 PM

    Oh fantasy, free me!

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  137. freq flag6:50 PM

    You never did "The Kenosha," kid.

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  138. Jaime Oria7:34 PM

    When I hear people talk about buying gold in the event of the Collapse, I think back to that scene in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and doubt that it's the goldbug who'll be doing the pouring...

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  139. Jaime Oria7:36 PM

    So who's the analog for The Mule in this scenario?

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  140. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person8:13 PM

    Wow, like, crazy, man...

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  141. It's "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" on a personal level- "failure is your fault, success is my doing".

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  142. Halloween_Jack10:48 PM

    Two clues: they hate him and his ears stick out a bit.

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  143. Halloween_Jack11:02 PM

    I really don't think that these "personalities" will be the draw that they expect, given that they already tried that with the first film, which featured an actor best known for playing a character with a definite libertarian bent, who uses a "miracle" technology in his business, is constantly beset by a meddling bureaucracy and threatened by another political entity run by a collective. If Trekkies won't bite for that, who will? Trust me, we'll watch fucking anything with Trek actors in it. (And that's never minding the other popular geek franchise that Shimerman was involved in, or the one in which he plays the leader of an actual libertarian "paradise", although of course things don't turn out so well in that one.)


    But no, by all means bring Megan Fucking McArdle in for this one. That'll put butts in the bleachers!

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  144. Cato the Censor1:21 AM

    Gillespie pulls in over 200K a year? For working at Reason? A job a half-wit could do in his sleep? Wingnut welfare is sweet!

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  145. Tagny Daggart5:13 AM

    And "Dagny Does Galt Gulch" would actually be pretty faithful to the novel.


    Whenever I read about Men's Rights Activists whining about women always seeking out "high-value alpha males" and leaving their nice-guy selves unlaid, I figure most of them probably read Atlas Shrugged and really believed that all women act like Dagny Taggart, who trades up from a wealthy playboy to a wealthier industrialist to the King of Galt Gulch...

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  146. Tagny5:19 AM

    Not to mention, in the book Rand can dispose of any inconvenient facts that get in the way of her A=A world, and so there are no elderly, no infirm, no sick, no disabled; no children; no race or discrimination; and no environment to be harmed by the smokestacks of Rearden Metal.


    Even our own heartless capitalist class at least recognizes that these things exist, though they class them as "externalities" and disown any responsibility for what happens to them, in Randian fashion.

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  147. Wm Kiernan10:05 AM

    Buttcoin.

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  148. Mickey_Zellberg1:23 PM

    Atlas movies tanking, bitcoin bubbles bursting...its rough out there on a libertarian...

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  149. PopeFrancis691:35 PM

    If Nick Gillespie is the libertarian Fonzie, McArdle must be the libertarian Erin Moran (of the Getabrain Morans).

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  150. PopeFrancis691:36 PM

    Or at least the Fiscal Finger of Fate.

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  151. PopeFrancis691:37 PM

    Even worse, it's just Glenn Beck's 10 personalities.

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  152. Superiors and Inferiors… that's Ayn Rand's philosophy in a nutshell alright. I remember that in "The Fountainhead" she referred to these two groups as the "Prime Movers" and the "Second Handers."


    That's what make Rand Paul's habit of plagiarism so funny to me. It's almost as though he were trying to prove that he is one of those "Second Handers."

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  153. Or blowing up housing projects with dynamite...

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  154. Daniel Björkman3:04 PM

    Yes, but I'm sure they'll be fine. Every problem is an opportunity in disguise if you just have the right manly intellect and the right manly work ethic, after all! :P

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  155. DocAmazing4:44 PM

    Don't you mean "It's hard out here for a simp"?

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  156. AngryWarthogBreath5:31 PM

    In the world I picture, Atlas Shrugged Part IV details Galt's Gulch fighting off an alien attack.


    I think it'll work in the marketplace. The success of Saw, Hostel, and Wolf Creek show that audiences love watching vastly outmatched groups slowly being butchered over a period of hours.

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  157. LittlePig7:06 PM

    He Shells Sleestacks by the Seastead?

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  158. LittlePig7:09 PM

    Gak! Coulda lived without that image. Bleah.

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