Thursday, October 25, 2012

NICE PANTS NERD. The election's tight, so the racket is to yell "we're winning" in a loud voice till the votes are counted. (And if you have a little lung power left over, bitch about the liberal media.) We that have free souls, it touches us not, and we take our pleasures where we can. I'm enjoying the brethren's reaction to Obama's Rolling Stone interview -- especially the Ayn Rand bit:
[Obama:] Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that's a pretty narrow vision. It's not one that, I think, describes what's best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a "you're on your own" society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.
Yeah, you can guess. Let's start with Katrina Trinko, National Review's current delegate from the Youth of Today:
Sure, there’s a few libertarians who would love to abolish the safety net and slash government programs. But that’s not the party platform, or what Romney is setting out to do. Not to mention that plenty of conservatives would rather establish a safety net more concentrated, not in individuals’, but in other types of community: church, clubs, extended family.
You know, like in the Middle Ages.
What if Obama had faced Ron Paul or Rick Santorum? If this is your rhetoric against Mitt Romney, what the heck do you have left for those who hold positions even further right?
AKA the "hey, you should see the nutjobs we wanted to nominate" argument.
One last question: isn’t this an extraordinarily lame cover outfit/pose for the cover? 
For perspective, this appears on the same page as Kathryn J. Lopez telling Lena Dunham Republicans aren't "super uncool," she's super uncool, infinity. Man. They all still dream of being backup posers in a heavy-rotation video starring Alex P. Keaton and Der Ahnold, don't they?

Of course at libertarian stroke book Reason Brian Doherty is furious adjusting his spectacles:
Obama Thinks Ayn Rand is For Teens (For Predictably Childish Reasons)
Correction --  furious adjusting his spectacles with one hand, furiously retucking his shirt with the other.
There is nothing "narrow" about Rand's vision except in that it created moral boundaries in which most of the functions of Obama's government would be seen as illegitimate, because they use threats and violence against non-aggressors to achieve social goals.
New to America, are you, Brian?
Nathaniel Branden, Rand's ideological lieutenant in the 1960s, sums up well the problem with most people trying to blithely critique Rand as Obama does. It can be found quoted on page 542 of my book Radicals for Capitalism...
Page 542! So that's why I never saw anyone reading it on the beach this summer.

Hilarious as this is, it's not a patch on what the non-heavily-Koch-funded libertarians are dishing.  The Objective Standard argues with Obama's interpretation:
Rand utterly rejected the notion that one should live an isolated life. She recognized that a crucial way we “develop ourselves” and pursue our rational self-interest is by building strong relationships with other people, whether in business, friendship, romance, or any other kind of life-serving relationship. Rand wrote hundreds of pages about the virtues and benefits of collaborating with others to mutual advantage.
Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, don't it? It's like the Garden of Eden, except that Adam, having rationally decided that the weakling Eve is just slowing him down, kills her, wears her skin for warmth, and then demands that God produce another, worthier partner for him because this is what the genius of the marketplace demands, whereupon God decides the whole thing was a horrible mistake and obliterates the universe. Ah, what might have been.

But listen, it's not all deep analysis. Look at what I found at Objectivism for Intellectuals:


Just because they stim instead of laughing doesn't mean they don't have a sense of humor.

34 comments:

  1. KatWillow11:00 PM

    Ayn Rand: Not garbage, more like toxic waste.

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  2. "Rand utterly rejected the notion that one should live an isolated life."

    Oh, definitely. Somebody has to be the help.

    "Just because they stim instead of laughing doesn't mean they don't have a sense of humor."


    No, that photoshop means they don't have a sense of humor.

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  3. As a big Facebook fan, I see a lot of those HA HA LOOK AT THIS PHOTO WITH BIG BLOCKS OF TEXT ALL OVER IT - IT IS INTENDED TO MAKE A HUMOROUS YET SALIENT POINT thingies every day, and I can tell you that the Objectivism version is way too wordy and doesn't even make any sense.

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  4. [ obligatory orcs quote ]

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  5. So, to sum up, you can tell it's unfunny by all the letter pixels, and from having seen a few 'shops in your day?

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  6. Do I have big problems with Obama? Yes. Does he live up to his own rhetoric? Rarely. Nevertheless--his encapsulation of Rand's worldview there (including the paragraph after the one quoted) is stunningly eloquent, and limns exactly the disease that's consuming the republican party and, I fear, the country more generally. Words are cheap, of course, but I can't help but feel at least a little bit heartened that the President is actually cognizant of this. Gotta start somewhere.

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  7. Nope. Incorrect summing up. Try again.

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  8. Doherty: "Rand's critics who hear only hate and heartlessness in her are
    themselves tone-deaf to peals of glory."


    Gee, that'll make it clear that the Church of Rand is in no way religious.

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  9. montag21:05 AM

    It's also very interesting--in a Ripley's Believe it Not! way--that Rand was a virtual recluse after her days in Hollywood, and that she praised the group that met in her NYC apartment (the ironically self-named "The Collective") by saying that they were her link to the outside world. So, by the `50s, Rand's only real attempt at living an engaged life was to surround herself weekly with adoring fans of a philosophy that explicitly denied the worth of most of the rest of the world.


    What Rand utterly rejected was, in fact, sanity.

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  10. Spaghetti Lee1:49 AM

    Rand wrote hundreds of pages about the virtues and benefits of collaborating with others to mutual advantage.

    Whoa, slow down there, Mr. Rogers! You're gonna make me tear up with all this lovey-dovey stuff!

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  11. Kantina Drinko: "Not to mention that plenty of conservatives would rather establish a safety net more concentrated, not in individuals’, but in other types of community: church, clubs, extended family."

    Who among us hasn't wished that the distancing experience of receiving food assistance checks from faceless taxpayers would be replaced by daily air drops of Mars Bars and bagged lettuce from the swell boys down at the local Radio Controlled Aircraft Club? And would not going to one's bootstrap conservative brother-in-law every month and begging for money to pay for an inflated private insurance premium be preferable to a filthy public exchange filled with undesirables and gang-bangers? Is not the corner chapel whose collection plate swells with riches the appropriate disburser of unemployment monies?

    Or have we become so depraved as a nation that we would gladly surrender a portion of our collective wages to the government to take care of our fellow man and deprive the needy of the character-building experience of going begging to a myriad of far-flung outfits of various means and competency?

    / wingnut

    Charities and clubs and churches already provide the help that they can for a safety net. It is not even close to being enough. 

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  12. DocAmazing2:35 AM

    And still they haven't all gone Galt. When will they fulfill their--and our--deepest desire?

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  13. Malignant Bouffant3:04 AM

    Dogmatic, if not religious.

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  14. Malignant Bouffant3:08 AM

    Isn't "going Galt" just for the makers & producers, not the losers the makers & producers fund?

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  15. Malignant Bouffant3:14 AM

    Nathaniel Branden, Rand's ideological lieutenant in the 1960s

    And one of the Collective who eventually was run out by Rand because he wasn't interested in continuing their "mutually advantageous" sexual relationship. Skin is crawling as I type.

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  16. montag24:23 AM

    There are interesting contemporary interviews of Branden and his wife about that period of Rand and the Collective in Adam Curtis' first installment in his last documentary series, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." Worth looking for it.

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  17. Rand… recognized that a crucial way we “develop ourselves” and pursue our rational self-interest is by building strong relationships with other people, whether in business, friendship, romance, or any other kind of life-serving relationship.

    Yes, "strong relationships," where the lesser beings are subjugated for the Greater Good of the Galt. Why, it's possibly the most pleasant sales pitch for monarchy/dictatorship/sociopathology/conservatism I've ever heard!

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  18. It looks like Obama only discussed this because he was asked a question about Paul Ryan's mad love for Ayn. (And the rest of his answer is pretty thoughtful, too.)

    On the other hand, the chances he's going to win are about 70%, according to Nate Silver. It's not Obama's typical style, but similar to the Trump Kenya joke, wouldn't it be great if Obama's were just fucking with rightwingers here? The Troll Pulpit is a powerful force.

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  19. Rand wrote hundreds of pages about the virtues and benefits of collaborating with others to mutual advantage.

    Yes, like the train scene in Atlas Shrugged where caricatures of all the people she despised died horribly, because they had it coming. They died; she smiled. Win-Win.

    Rand wrote hundreds of pages about the virtues and benefits of collaborating with others to mutual advantage.

    Yes, because although she claimed to be an atheist, Rand was ideologically in tune with a certain type of far-right Christian who believes that torturing damned souls in Hell is their path to redemption. (Well, maybe not "redemptive" for the damned, but it's satisfying for the torturers.)

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  20. montag25:45 AM

    "... peals of glory."


    The Objectivists must have been spawned by the Alchemists, because that is, fer damned sure, an attempt to turn horseshit into honey.


    More to the point, Doherty is doing his best to mischaracterize the general reaction to Rand as a means of making her and her ideas seem the victims of hate speech. The general reaction, instead, is that she's a fruitcake with a following of fruitcakes whose rigidity and fervor in her defense is near-cultlike and positively adolescent, or that Rand, at best, is a third-rate writer and fourth-rate thinker.



    And nothing gets their knickers in a tighter twist than the rest of the world being dismissive toward their heroine.

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  21. Mr. Wonderful9:03 AM

    Also recommended: The Passion of Ayn Rand, the movie, w/ the comparable Helen Mirren as you-know-who and a great Eric Stoltz as Branden. When I asked Howard Korder, the screenwriter, how he liked Atlas Shrugged, he said he didn't read it--just Galt's big speech at the end. I don't know what this proves, but it sure proves it.

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  22. XeckyGilchrist9:27 AM

    Rand wrote hundreds of pages about the virtues and benefits of collaborating with others to mutual advantage.


    And that was just one line of dialogue!

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  23. redoubt10:13 AM

    Here is President Hoover, during the Great Depression, begging people to give to the Red Cross.
    How they were supposed to have something to give, in the midst of a worldwide depression, remains unexamined.

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  24. Halloween_Jack10:40 AM

    I generally agree that brevity is the soul of wit, but occasionally I've done my own version of a meme (I'm fond of the Sarcastic Wonka meme at the moment) where I've gone on for a bit.

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  25. Nathaniel Branden, Rand's ideological lieutenant in the 1960s


    doesn't this sort of sum up everything?

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  26. Got it, got it, got it. I plead the lateness of the hour.

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  27. Halloween_Jack4:46 PM

    Coincidentally, there's a long comment thread over on Boing Boing about "disruption", which is sort of shorthand for "using social networks to encourage people to ignore laws when there's a quick buck to be made." Some of the comments are pretty thoughtful in discussing when it's a good thing to disrupt entrenched interests for the sake of progress (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and when the thing being disrupted is actually in place for the common good, but there's also a lot of a) you don't really understand Rand; b) Rand was an asshole but true Objectivism is still perfectly legit, and c) disruption is responsible for all the cool gadgets, so shut the fuck up. I've been a longtime BB reader, but sometimes I despair at the shallowness and flippancy of much of the commentariat there, and I wonder how many of them could or would cop to something like this autobiographical essay if they were honest.

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  28. DocAmazing5:00 PM

    Paulina Borsook's book Cyberselfish is still one of the key texts for understanding the BoingBoing/glibertarian axis.

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  29. Christopher5:58 PM

    So, accusing Ayn Rand of being totally about selfishness and saying she's for angry, dorky college kids is about as shallow and cliche a criticism as you could make (I'm not sure she deserves better, mind you).

    That said, uh, I'm not super-impressed with these brave philosophers whose response to Obama amounts to "Nuh-uh!"

    Here's the quote Roy ommitted:

    Branden noted that Rand's detractors rarely deign "publicly to name the essential ideas of Atlas Shrugged and to attempt to refute them. No one has been willing to declare: 'Ayn Rand holds that man must choose his values and actions exclusively by reason, that man has the right to exist for his own sake, that no one has the right to seek values from others by physical force--and I consider such ideas wrong, evil and socially dangerous."

    Which is ridiculous and silly. To my knowledge, many people and philosophers do in fact believe that it's not possible to come to moral values with the same reason that we use to arrive at facts, and the other two essential ideas are so vague that they don't really mean anything by themselves. For example, if I can't get a job I could starve. Companies can use that threat of physical harm to me to extract the value of my work at a lower price than it's worth. On the other hand, if the government mandates full employment, it's using essentially the same threat against the company as it used against me.



    I guess I just think that if you were defending an actual philosophy, you'd have some kind of argument, rather than just testimonials from satisfied customers.

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  30. wkiernan8:53 PM

    No no no Brian, Ayn Rand's novels are not for teens. Ayn Rand's novels are for teens who can't get laid.

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  31. "Building strong relationships with others" - the Randroids sure have a funny euphemism for rape, don't they? ;)

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  32. "Just because they stim instead of laughing doesn't mean they don't have a sense of humor."



    Do you have any idea how hurtful this is? How hateful it is?

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  33. Yeah, I see this a lot in discussions of Libertarianism or the far right: they are assumed to have Asperger's or autism, and all people with these disorders are assumed to have abhorrent opinions. This is bigoted and wrong.

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