Can someone explain Ayn Rand to me?!

oh no! douchebags who either engineered or enabled our current economic shitpile and fancy themselves modern-day John Galts are going on a "brain strike"!! OH NO!!!

She looks like Greenspan with a wig.

Well, she DOES have a sense of humor (not really exhibited in her books unfortunately) -- and lol @ how she loves "charlie's angels" and how much she sounds like Alan Alda or David Van Driessen re how "real men" should not suppress their feelings.

Who cares if Atlas shrugs now? He's already dropped the planet.

Can you say "conservative cunts" boys and girls? I knew you could!

Ayn Rand's zombie presence makes perfect sense. Indeed, her lit cred, thoroughly middlebrow and thus utterly American, lends her capitalist fantasies some theoretical weight. Rand fancied herself as high-minded, an intellectual counterbalance to Karl Marx. In truth, Rand was closer to Walt Disney, minus the Mouse King's showbiz flair. Each used cartoons to convey their message. Both were dedicated anti-communists, hostile to organized labor, friendly to the post-war Red Scare. Only Rand felt that the U.S. government wasn't going deep enough in uprooting commies, primarily those in Hollywood, hypnotizing Middle America with phony smiles and pretty songs while undermining free enterprise and its besieged supporters....

Heller also note(s) that Rand considered the dollar sign "a better symbol than the cross, because it didn't require the sacrifice of anybody." I trust that Heller doesn't share this ahistorical view. Not only have the cross and dollar enjoyed a lucrative, long-running alliance, the dollar requires massive sacrifice across the planet. Poverty, starvation, environmental damage and genocidal violence are some of the dollar's greatest hits. Use any calculator you like to tally the body count under state socialism, and it'll explode when computing the ongoing ravages of global capitalism.

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2009/11/atlas-insolvent.html

Indeed, her lit cred

what??????????????????? she has no lit cred.

w/ people who buy books, and biographers, apparently

shooting fish in a barrel

thoroughly middlebrow and thus utterly American,

stfu

xp It would be a better world if that fact was as obvious to everyone as it is to us.

I enjoyed the piece in slate from a couple days ago: http://www.facebook.com/fluxion23?ref=profile

um

Oh. Sorry.

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966

ah

She looks like Greenspan with a wig.

― Goth As A Moth (Bimble)

Perfect.

comparing ayn rand to walt disney is an obscene insult to disney.

I like the comparison in the Slate story much better -- to L. Ron Hubbard.

Slate's latest batch of philosophy essays have been...highly variable, like this ludicrous Hannah Arendt piece

alfred that link just goes to a big list of ron rosenbaum articles for me

Whoops: http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/

Glad I'm not the only one. :)

The banality of Ron Rosenbaum

You're right, that article is horrible.

"Internalizing" lol

The banality of Latinates.

atlas shrugged was boring

also kindof offensive

"lit cred" = high schoolers read Anthem and so think Ayn Rand is Serious Literature.

the arendt piece is one of the worst things i've ever read on slate. incredibly ignorant and hysterical. has rosenbaum always been an idiot?

The tone most offends me -- the smug assurance with which he thinks we'll agree that the banality of evil is a hackneyed phrase.

especially because his own idea of what evil actually is (bad people apparently ALWAYS know what they're doing, and revel in the fact of their evilness) is so laughable.

i get the sense that most of the people who criticize arendt's calling eichmann "banal" haven't even read that book. she hardly lets him off the hook.

And she endorses the death penalty for him!

In fact, the imaginary judgment she wrote for the prosecutor is the best case for a one-shot application of the death penalty I've ever read.

My understanding of "the banality of evil" is that it refers more to the collusion of millions of otherwise apparently mundane civilians than it does to the actions of ideologues and high-ranking Party officials.

ron rosenbaum is a maroon

My understanding of "the banality of evil" is that it refers more to the collusion of millions of otherwise apparently mundane civilians than it does to the actions of ideologues and high-ranking Party officials.

Yes, true, and also: Eichmann the family man didn't act like Conrad Veidt.

I'm all for intelligent criticism of The Origin of Totalitarianism, whose first third splinters into discrete chunks that don't really advance her theses yet if treated as such make for fascinating reading. Rosenbaum doesn't have time for it.

as far as i can tell this is his argument

1) i, ron rosenbaum, hate the phrase "the banality of evil"
2) luckily, no one will use the phrase "the banality of evil" any longer because people have recently pointed out that hannah arendt uses anti-semitic sources in her work
3) therefore, hannah arendt is a self-hating jew
4) hannah arendt is a self-hating jew because she was in love with martin heidegger
5) martin heidegger was a nazi through and through and there is absolutely nothing of value in his philosophy
6) i know there is nothing of value in his philosophy because a) i didn't understand and b) internet commenters at the chronicle for higher education website didnt explain it

7) How on earth could Arendt have fallen in love with an unrepentant Nazi?

I feel like this bit is the crucial sub-text:

It's a concept that has great relevance right now because there are still those who don't understand how theocratic police states can be called "fascist." Duh! It's because they're totalitarian. Whatever religion they profess, what they share with past fascist regimes is greater—in terms of denial of human rights—than what separates them. Just as political regimes adopt religious-type totalist worship of the state or the leader to enforce their oppression, religious or theocratic regimes adopt political oppression to enforce their orthodoxies.

The whole piece isn't really about Arendt or Nazi Germany but about Iran and whoever else is in this year's Axis of Evil, and Rosenbaum is arguing for a hawkish US stance because you can't negotiate with Fascists.

h8 this ho

"Just as political regimes adopt religious-type totalist worship of the state or the leader to enforce their oppression, religious or theocratic regimes adopt political oppression to enforce their orthodoxies." Wtf does the "just as" mean here?

and ALL regimes are "political."

that essay...

saw a documentary once bout arendt and heidegger's relationship, was pretty okay, like there was some cool "brief encounter" lookin re-enactments and a shitload of speculation like "arendt was prolly conflicted"

Come on, people
Oooh, so daring!
Duh!

http://timothyzhu.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/bill_cosby1.jpg
Come on people!

wake up, sheeple!

THE NAME IS HARVEY. HARVEY WEE-WAX.