lol Slavoy Zizek a self-label "communist" who do nothing that speaking random complete non sense under the effect of drugs
This is what passes for "intellectualism" on the left today, well well don't be amazed if the young are reading ayn rand and joining the freedom movement en masse
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"There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian."(Murray N.Rothbard)
"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."(Ayn Rand)
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"(Margaret Thatcher)
This is what passes for "intellectualism" among Randriods today.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
I'm somewhat impressed that he spelled "en masse" correctly.
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"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
The three young girls -- under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them -- explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.
Then my brother asked how much each item cost.
"Oh, no," they replied in unison, "they're all free!"
I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: "But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I'm really thirsty!"
His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."
That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.
"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."
I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.
"You must charge something for the lemonade," I explained. "That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs -- how much the lemonade costs, and the cups -- and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money."
I was confident I had explained it clearly. Until my brother, breaking the tension, ordered a raspberry lemonade. As they handed it to him, he again asked: "So how much is it?"
And the girls once again replied: "It's free!" And the nanny looked on contentedly.
She then whined about how Americans expect lots of freebies from their government.
Among Ed Brayton's commenters, Dr. X noted about her that
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Terry Savage is a longtime Chicago financial reporter popular with local Libertarians. She was also the first female trader at the CBOE. Though I'm not shocked that she would hold such a view, I am surprised she would behave as she did and write about it. This is a typical Chicago trader attitude, but Savage's manners are usually better than the typical (think Rick Santelli) trader.
lynxreign noted
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I certainly hope she paid her brother for that free car ride. Gas, maintenance, time of the driver. Damn commie, sitting in the back seat being chauffered around town to yell at children.
Sounds like a real life episode of Tom the Dancing Bug's Lucky Duck.
She returned a few days later with Giving is great, but lemonade stand should teach entrepreneurship :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Terry Savage, where she whined about all the nasty things that people said about her. She claimed that she admired charitable giving, which seems extremely unconvincing. It's like a thief claiming "I have the greatest respect for property rights". After whining that charity must be done with money that one had earned, she then returned to her theme that it's necessary to promote entrepreneurship.
But someone made a remarkable discovery. Checking at Netcraft, her site is hosted by a server running Linux and Apache. Perhaps her next column will be on the evils of open-source software, on how it is a Communist plot to destroy the commercial-software business with predatory pricing. She could point out that Linus Torvalds had developed Linux right next to the former Soviet Union, meaning that he could easily have been recruited by the KGB.
Normally, I am skeptical of people who say they've read that speech in the same way I'm skeptical of those who say they've read the begats in Genesis, but it looks like that guy really is! He's reading the whole Galt speech!
I hope he is having his vital functions monitored appropriately.
Normally, I am skeptical of people who say they've read that speech in the same way I'm skeptical of those who say they've read the begats in Genesis, but it looks like that guy really is! He's reading the whole Galt speech!
I hope he is having his vital functions monitored appropriately.
As a big "fuck you" to Ayn Rand, I purposefully skipped John Galt's big speech, because I was fucking sick of the Objectivist philosophy by that time and just wanted to get back to the tawdry plot so I could finish the damn book.
If Ayn Rand wanted me to read any part of that book, it would have been that speech, and reading that book made me want to make her posthumously disappointed. It made me happier knowing that if she were alive, she'd be unhappy with my choice to skip it.
I've been following Adam Lee's blog for that, and I commend him, because I hated that book.
“Ladies and gentlemen… Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. His time is up. I have taken it over. You were to hear a report on the world crisis. That is what you are going to hear.”
… “For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing — you who dread knowledge — I am the man who will now tell you.”
It ends:
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“Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.
“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle — and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:
I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Adam Lee:
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There’s nothing between those two paragraphs that we haven’t already heard by this point in the book: capitalism good, government bad, reason dictates that you agree with my every word or else you are a parasite, I’ve taken away all the producers and now the rest of you are going to starve, and so on and so forth. What’s more notable is how long it takes him to say it.
That speech has 34,000 words, about the length of a midsize novella.
At 120 words per minute, an ordinary speaking pace, it would take 4h 45m to deliver it. One would have to get up to 190 wpm to deliver that speech in 3 hours.
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And all that’s assuming you don’t need to stop midway through to rest your vocal cords, take a drink of water, or use the bathroom.
Adam Lee notes that there are no mentions of audience reactions anywhere in the speech.
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As with Francisco interrupting a wedding to deliver a twenty-minute lecture on the gold standard, or Hank Rearden offering a philosophical monologue in place of a plea at his own trial, Rand’s characters seem to have the superpower of being able to deliver arbitrarily-large infodumps without taxing anyone’s patience and without being interrupted or shouted down.
He concludes that it's Ayn Rand's fantasy of being able to express her views without any challenges to them or any refusals to hear them.
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Whenever she met with any kind of challenge or resistance, she immediately became furious and sought to expel that person from her life. For such a staunch capitalist, she was a fierce enemy of the marketplace of ideas!
I did read the entire Galt speech because I was 90 miles away from my home on a school trip and Atlas Shrugged was the only book I brought. I thought a three-day trip would be a perfect time to polish off a 1,200-page book. And I can't even claim I didn't know what I might be in for, because Anthem and The Fountainhead were assigned to me in my 10th and 11th grade English classes (the Ayn Rand Institute's practice of bribing its way into the school curriculum with a cheap-assed scholarship prize worked at my school, alas).
It was... so bad. Worse than my most pessimistic fears. The thing that killed the book for me was, surprisingly, just an offhand conversation between Dagny Taggart and Francisco D'Anconia where she was explaining the advantages of a light rail system for hauling the ore he was mining around Galt's Gulch to be processed. I thought, "And if Dagny has packed a whole rolling mill into the back of that little private plane of hers, she can get right on with providing that rail system for him." The willing suspension of disbelief had long since evaporated, but at that moment the unwilling, just-let-me-get-through-the-damned-thing suspension of disbelief shattered as well.
On the way home, I convinced my parents to let me stop at a Borders so that I could find and buy something decent to read. And thereafter I never went anywhere, even for an hour, without at least two books on me.
Whenever she met with any kind of challenge or resistance, she immediately became furious and sought to expel that person from her life. For such a staunch capitalist, she was a fierce enemy of the marketplace of ideas!
This is typical of a malignant narcissist. Surprise.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
Ayn Rand Christmas Cards
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