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Re: Atlas Shrugged: Motor City

Keith Taylor — Fri, 06 May 2016 10:27:54 -0000

It's difficult to see why Dagny and Hank were astounded that the motor should be left on the factory's junk heap and forgotten. And the experimental notes too. I'd have thought they would suppose the motor was abandoned and the project to produce it forgotten, BECAUSE IT HADN'T WORKED. That the research department's efforts to create a perpetual motion motor had been unsuccessful, like all similar attempts before it. Dagny knows about those earlier efforts. "They couldn't do it," she says. "They gave up." So why, since the motor is incomplete almost to the point of being unrecognizable, and half the relevant notes are missing, would she jump to the conclusion, "But there it is." And why would Hank believe it too? Beats me. Except that this is happening in Atlas Shrugged and anything the heroes want to be true, is true.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Exeunt Omnes

Keith Taylor — Sat, 07 May 2016 08:10:44 -0000

It's a good question, all right. I'm afraid I did take it seriously when I was a teenager -- a misfit teenager who didn't like people much, which no doubt explains it. Once I'd done a little growing up I did see that the final line could easily be varied to ... "he traced in space the sign of the bat" or "the sign of the Z for Zorro" or for that matter "the hammer and sickle" or "the sign of the cross" depending on what your unrealistic panacea for all the ills of this imperfect world happens to be.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Exeunt Omnes

Keith Taylor — Sat, 07 May 2016 10:51:39 -0000

ATLAS SHRUGGED took Ayn Rand years to write and she regarded it as her magnum opus. As a fan, long ago, I read everything of hers I could find, and I remember it all well enough to see a progression of the sociopathic ruthlessness in her novels (and one play). WE THE LIVING was set in the Russian Revolution. Rand lived through that, and the Russian Civil War that followed, so I can well understand that she loathed Communism and saw the U.S.A., to which she emigrated, as having saved her from the hellhole that Russia became under Stalin. But her heroes in WE THE LIVING foreshadowed, unpleasantly, those of Atlas Shrugged. Leo, the communist warrior, is introduced in these words: "His mouth was such as could order a man's execution, and his eyes were such as could watch it." Kira, the heroine, loathes Communism, like Ayn Rand herself, but she admits to Leo that while she hates his ideology she admires his methods, because the mass of people are just mud to be cleared out of the way before anything at all can be achieved.
Then there was the play NIGHT OF JANUARY 16TH. (Rand preferred her original title, PENTHOUSE LEGEND.) The main character, Karen Andre, is accused of murdering her long-time lover, Bjorn Faulkner, a fictional counterpart of the "Match King" Ivar Kreuger, whose financial empire proved to be built on fraud. Karen denies the murder, as she worshipped Faulkner and would have done anything for him (he raped her the first day he met her) but admits she would unhesitatingly have committed murder FOR him. If someone had been about to expose him and send him to jail, for instance.
Howard Roark in THE FOUNTAINHEAD also commits rape, and the victim comes to adore him. He dynamites a building that was altered from his designs, and even involves the woman, Dominique, in his act, sending her to lure the watchman away. You could say that's very humane, but there might have been someone else in the newly completed building, a drunk sleeping it off or a pair of teenaged lovers, and Roark doesn't appear to investigate that possibility. Besides, Dominique gets hysterical when the building is blown down, and she almost bleeds to death when cut by flying glass. With lovers like these, who needs enemies?
In the same novel, sculptor Steven Mallory tries to murder Toohey, the socialist plotter. He's never met Toohey, only read some of his columns, but this is enough to convince him that Toohey knows everything about the beast of evil and has to go. Yellow journalism titan Gail Wynand employs Toohey, and has used his wealth and power to break various men of integrity and force them to reverse their dearest convictions in print, basically because he's sold out his own integrity and knows it. One becomes an alcoholic and one commits suicide, but nobody tries to shoot Wynand. He;s one of Rand's superhuman titans, after all, even though a titan gone wrong, so he's above the judgements of lesser beings.
The development and lead-up to the monstrosities of ATLAS SHRUGGED couldn't be much clearer. It appears that in AS, finally, Rand's scalding contempt for the vast majority of the human species emerged final and complete. In FOUNTAINHEAD, the glaceed, neurotic Dominique says at one point, "Don't ask men to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul. They won't say that, of course. They will say that you hate them."
There's a lot of evidence in Rand's writing that she did, indeed.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Welcome to Atlantis

Keith Taylor — Sat, 07 May 2016 22:40:39 -0000

It's noticeable, in fact it stands out like a gold coin on black velvet, that Ayn Rand used a lot of pulp-magazine clichés in ATLAS SHRUGGED. The secret organization fighting for justice with a secret sign of recognition, etcetera. And John Galt is suspiciously like a scaled-down Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. He looks metallic, with skin like "an aluminium-copper alloy", and his eyes are like sunlight glinting on metal. Doc has bronze hair, Galt's is chestnut brown, which is pretty close. Each man is a super-scientific genius with a team of incredibly talented aides to support him, and Galt, by Rand's warped standards, is a fighter for justice. Doc Savage Magazine flourished in the 1930s, I believe, and since she was a fan of both Mike Hammer and James Bond, I'd suppose Rand was surely acquainted with Doc and the Shadow. It wasn't just plagiarism, she knew the appeal of the pulps and how to make a novel, even a colossally long one, readable. Rand actually had a talent for writing that was of no mean order, but what she did with that talent ... was appalling.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: The Gini Coefficient

Keith Taylor — Mon, 09 May 2016 10:49:08 -0000

Something in Rand's rigid (and warped) reversal of common ideas of morality reminds of a conversation with a friend a long time ago. She thought that Rearden's steel mills in AS owed something to Undershaft's arms factory in Shaw's "Major Barbara". Both characters were millionaire super-industrialists perceived as completely immoral by the general public, but (by the story's internal standards) more moral than the people who condemned them. One difference, a big one, is that Undershaft perceived the "lucrative trade in death and destruction" as his only chance to rise out of the poverty to which his low birth and illegitimacy condemned him in an unjust society, and he took it. When virtuous poor man Peter Shirley says to him. "What's keeping you rich? Keeping me poor. I wouldn't have your conscience, not for all your income," Undershaft replies sardonically, "I wouldn't have your income, Mr. Shirley, not for all your conscience."
The differences, two of them at least, are that Undershaft recognizes capitalist society as unjust in many ways, and now that he IS safe and prosperous at last ("I was a dangerous man until I had my way") he approves of the good the Salvation Army does. His favourite child Barbara is a member, and remains his favourite child. He's also generous to the poor now that he can afford to be.
Another play of Shaw's, "The Devil's Disciple", has two aspects that seem to me to have been borrowed by Rand. One is its ironic reversal of conventional ideas of morality. (Rand, of course, was humourlessly serious in that.) Another is its use of every pulp fiction cliché the writer can borrow. Shaw commented with high amusement in his preface to "TDD" that the critics raved about how original his play was, when it contained every staple of Victorian melodrama that would fit in it. The black sheep of a respectable Christian family, the disgrace to a good mother, the "good" brother and the "bad" one, the mistreated orphan who finds a protector, the man who nobly takes another man's place on the gallows, the last minute reprieve -- it's all there. Just as all the pulp conventions are there in ATLAS SHRUGGED. The wastrel playboy who is a secret fighter for justice, the dashing handsome pirate with a cause, the scientific super-genius who creates incredible devices ...
If she did borrow Shaw's technique and use it, I don't suppose Rand would ever have acknowledged it. Shaw, after all, was at least two of the things she most loathed ... a socialist, and an anti-romantic.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Exeunt Omnes

Keith Taylor — Wed, 11 May 2016 10:21:42 -0000

Well, I could have it wrong, but I read in a couple of online biographies that Rand was born in Russia in 1905 and was twelve when the October Revolution happened. Her father's pharmacy was confiscated by the Bolsheviks and she and her immediate family went to the Crimea, which I think was still held by the Tsarists at the time. She attended university in St Petersburg, but she and other "bourgeois" students got the boot. Pretty damned brassy of the Bolsheviks considering that Lenin came from a bourgeois family himself, and a wealthy one! Rand did graduate at last, in October 1924, and finally got a visa to visit relatives in the U.S.A. in 1925. She had no intention of ever going back to Russia, and she didn't. I'm not a hundred per cent sure of this either, but I have read that her American relatives sold jewellery to pay for her voyage to America. If that's correct ... so much for her proud claim that "nobody helped me, nor did I think at any time that it was anybody's duty to help me."

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Exeunt Omnes

Keith Taylor — Thu, 12 May 2016 00:14:14 -0000

I like that point and think it's telling, Esmeralda. In fact you and Spectrowski are both on target here. Eddie could not have stopped a blast furnace breakout by throwing gobs of clay at it; he just didn't have the steel workers' skills. But Rand says in the text that it was a steel worker's skill that was long out of date, made obsolete by the hydraulic gun, and in the days when it was needed it was "a dangerous job that had taken many lives". Rearden had it because as a young man he worked in steel mills that were going down the drain, losing money, about to fail, and reverted to the methods of the past in desperation. But it's doubtful whether Rearden, or Dagny either, could have succeeded in Eddie's last forlorn mission to California. As Adam pointed out, Eddie actually succeeded in it! He managed to get three violent warring factions to agree on immunity for the Taggart Terminal, an impossible task for anybody without considerable negotiating and diplomatic skills. Qualities despised by Galt, Dagny and Rand's other ubermenschen. Maybe that's why they made no effort to rescue him.
Getting back to that furnace breakout, the text blames a useless young man with a college degree for letting it happen. He rushes up afterwards whining (of course) "I couldn't help it, Mr. Rearden!" But we've been told in the text that Rearden runs "the best steel mills in the country". We could be excused for wondering why, in that case, there wasn't a standard piece of safety equipment like a hydraulic gun there and working and ready for use. Even the second best steel mills in the country should've had that.
And, okay, Rearden had learned how to throw clay billets into a ruptured furnace, because he'd come up the hard way, and he survived the learning process because he was super-competent at everything. BUT. Francisco was born to extreme wealth and privilege. Just when and how did he learn that excessively dangerous skill that belonged to the past? Why did his father, who valued him highly (we're told that too) ever let him do it when his treasured heir could've been killed at it? The closest Francisco comes to explaining, when Rearden asks him, is to say, "I was brought up around smelters of every kind."
It's essentially just a contrived reason to interrupt Francisco as he's about to tell Rearden what's really going on, and to show a couple of superhuman bosses doing what their steel workers who spend all their time at the furnaces, cannot do. "Without us you're helpless and wouldn't survive." The rationale for Galt's strike in the first place. To teach the lower orders where they belong. No more revolutions and no more safety regulations, ever again.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: L’Etat, C’Est Moi

Keith Taylor — Thu, 12 May 2016 21:46:22 -0000

Since this post and the discussion involves a lot of assessment of Objectivist theory, it reminds me of a recurring phrase in the novel. It serves as an instant identification of the villains, the looters and the moochers, almost as reliably as their being physically ugly and sloppy. Any time a hero or heroine (well, there's just one heroine) states a principle or points out how irrational the villain is being, he snaps, "OH, THAT'S JUST THEORY!" Somewhere in his immense speech, John Galt says that the looters "struggle to evade, as 'theory'" -- any kind of opposition to their procedures. Rearden gets it from a whole group of the looters, Galt gets it from Mr. Thompson, and there are other instances. Rand treated it as a sure sign of a deliberately irrational villain. I suspect she frequently heard, in her own life, the objection that her ideas might seem great in theory but would never work in the real world, and that it made her furious. As far as she was concerned, if a theory was consistent and intellectually rigorous, which she thought hers was, then it would automatically work in practice and only a wilfully irrational person would disagree.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Exeunt Omnes

Keith Taylor — Fri, 13 May 2016 06:19:55 -0000

Uh, excuse me. I overlooked something when writing the above, concerning Francisco's ability to fix the furnace breakout with Rearden. I foolishly objected to his having the skill as unlikely, for a couple of reasons that seemed sensible and evident to me. I forgot that Francisco is very nearly the ultimate Mary Sue, as Adam wrote long ago. He can do anything, the first time he tries it, do it superbly, and do it without effort. He independently discovered calculus at age twelve and drove a motor boat instantly as a teenager, drove it like a master. Plugging a ruptured furnace in the most dangerous fashion there is? Duck soup. That shouldn't have slipped my mind.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Exeunt Omnes

Keith Taylor — Fri, 13 May 2016 06:27:12 -0000

True. Her chances probably wouldn't have been good in Tsarist Russia, especially as she was Jewish. Not that prejudice against Jews vanished under the hammer and sickle.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Exeunt Omnes

Keith Taylor — Sun, 15 May 2016 05:43:09 -0000

As Adam and others have remarked, it's yet another sign of Galt and the others' arrogance that they believe they CAN just walk into the ruined world they've made and take it over, turning it into a super-capitalists' paradise. No more unrealistic than the idea that they could have ruined it in the first place, by removing just a thousand of the U.S.A.'s industrial prime movers from society. (Okay, just for the sake of argument, let's move the decimal point and make that TEN thousand. The country could still survive and flourish without them. Other people could take over their functions.) But they are going to have to fight the battle-hardened gangs that have taken over the ruins. Even with Galt's super-motor and disintegration machine and deceptive artificial mirage, they aren't going to defeat people like that in combat. Galt couldn't be more wrong than when he claimed in his speech that they'd be helpless against the Gulchers because "hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind."
Only they have. Robert Heinlein has been criticised sharply for his writing, STARSHIP TROOPERS especially, and even called "the Ayn Rand of science fiction". But he still had his feet more firmly planted in reality than she did, especially where technology was concerned. In METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, a member of the long-lived Howard Families makes a similar stupid remark to Galt's. A wiser head "knew it was sophistry and so did any member competent to judge the matter. Knowledge alone did not win fights. The savages of Europe's Middle Ages had defeated an incomparably higher Islamic culture, Archimedes had been murdered by a common soldier, and barbarians had sacked Rome."
And there were the Mongols. Once Genghis Khan forced them to unite (by killing anyone who disputed him) they conquered the Chinese Empire, vastly more civilized and sophisticated than they were. They didn't have civilization, but they had high mobility, superb military tactics and discipline, and unrelenting persistence. Once they reached the Middle East, they were even able to destroy the sect of the Assassins, by annihilating their mountain strongholds one by one. Not even the Templar Order had been able to do that. It's interesting to imagine John Galt coming face to face with a post-Galtocaust version of Subotai or Batu Khan and telling him he's a subhuman anti-living object who cannot prevail against the mind. He might even learn a bit of humility at last and have to gasp with his dying breath, "Oops ... wrong thing to say ..."

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Take Our Word For It

Keith Taylor — Sun, 15 May 2016 05:57:17 -0000

Haven't seen any of the AS movies, apart from excerpts online. But the above isn't surprising. Any live actors would have difficulty playing the lean, comely, energetic heroes, or for that matter the disgusting looters. Why didn't they do it with computer animation? A convincing handsome-metal-man Galt or pirate Ragnar or riveting Francisco might have been possible in that medium, not to mention a sufficiently revolting petulant loose-lipped Mouch and slimy Ferris. But I suppose that would just have underscored the fact that you can't find caricatures like these in the real world.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: The Hippocratic Oath

Keith Taylor — Sun, 15 May 2016 06:21:40 -0000

All the above is absolutely spot on. And I'm delighted by Cobra Commander's response below. Dr. Hendricks disgusts even this arch villain. A minor quibble, but it still applies -- Rand, as she often does, fails to specify just what she means by "medicine being placed under state control." Was it some variant of Medicare, or, in ATLAS SHRUGGED, some "looter" measure a lot more extreme and absurd? The readers aren't told. It wouldn't surprise me if Rand had in mind the doctors, specialist surgeons included, being required to work thirty hours a day, nine days a week, and accept all patients even if they couldn't possibly treat them all and collapsed over the operating table trying.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: The Social Atom

Keith Taylor — Mon, 16 May 2016 09:15:00 -0000

Man oh man are you correct when you say Ayn Rand was given to pontificating on subjects she knew almost nothing about -- especially where non-western cultures were concerned. She took umbrage over the growing attitude in the sixties and seventies that even native African cultures should be accorded some regard. "The cannibals, the literal CANNIBALS, this time," she fumed. I take it her full knowledge of an entire continent's history, kingdoms, empires, tribal migrations, was at that level -- the level of cartoons about cannibals and missionaries. Had she even heard of Songhai, Mali, Dahomey, the Ashanti, ancient Kush? I suppose we have to assume she'd at least heard of Ethiopia and the Zulu, but she certainly ignored them. I don't suppose anybody would have got far with telling her that most African peoples did not practice cannibalism, and that in any case EVERY branch of the human race at a primitive level has done so. The ones that didn't, at least not on a big scale, went in for plenty of other atrocities, like human sacrifice, enthusiastic head-hunting, and obscene terror tactics in war.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: The Non-Altruistic Rescue Squad

Keith Taylor — Wed, 18 May 2016 09:30:30 -0000

Umm, well, Dagny and Hank, yes. No known experience in combat for those two. Francisco is unbelievably good at everything the first time he tries it. He did do some decisive two-pistol sharpshooting during the staged riot at Rearden's steel mills, blazing away from a structure above the gate, dodging back and forth from behind a chimney that gave him cover (when he wasn't firing down into the mob below, apparently in two directions at once, and never missing. "Boy, what a marksman!" Rearden's mill manager, or the doctor, I forget which, enthuses.)
Personally I tend to yell, forgetting he doesn't really exist, "Stop shooting pistols like a hero of western legend! If someone down there has an assault rifle or even a carbine, you are going to be blown off that structure the next time you pop out from behind the shelter of your blasted chimney. And don't your pistols ever have to be reloaded?" (Like a hero of western legend, again. The exact words Rand used to describe him in that scene.)

Re: Atlas Shrugged: How to Build a Railroad

Keith Taylor — Wed, 18 May 2016 10:16:06 -0000

True as can be, tricksterson. That is the section that includes the mention of magnificent Nat Taggart offering his beautiful wife as collateral for a loan to a sleazy millionaire -- with her consent, of course, she adores Nat and will even pledge her body for a loan, which Nat repaid on time so that she didn't have to forfeit. It's not stated outright that Nat Taggart committed murder of a legislator, it's just very strongly implied, in an approving tone -- but it IS stated outright that he was prepared to pimp his wife to build his railroad.
In passing, Francisco d'Anconia had a similar ancestor, Sebastian, one of Spain's greatest aristocrats, who left Spain for the New World after a disagreement with the Inquisition and founded the great Chilean company d'Anconia Copper. "My ancestors and yours," he tells Dagny, "would have liked each other." We're not told that Sebastian committed any actions as reprehensible or loathsome as Nat's, but we are told that he personally dug the copper for his first mine, with the help of Indians and escaped convicts. Oh. The girl he left behind waited fifteen years for him.
I doubt very much that he started his copper mining business on free labour. Voluntary. As a sixteenth-century Spanish aristocrat he would have been fine with slavery, particularly of heathen Indios. In the real world, in his own time, and not in a family legend centuries old, he probably began his new fortune as a pirate and slaver, then founded his copper mines on slave labour. Shackles and whips galore.
I suspect that Francisco was right. Nat Taggart and Sebastian d'Anconia WOULD have liked each other. And would also have been ready to slit each other's throats for a profit.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Industrial Accidents

Keith Taylor — Fri, 20 May 2016 09:43:13 -0000

That's exactly what her decision to run the train at 100 mph instead of 65 was, an ego-driven pissing contest. She did it out of defiant spite and even admitted it. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, too, that is, to ascertain if she even knew what she was talking about, check her words to her doubting brother James. "Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them." And she explains that all she saw was "Rearden's formula, and the tests he showed me." She studied engineering, but she has apparently never worked on a real-world engineering project or done a contracting job personally, and she absolutely does not appear to have studied metallurgy at all. Would it matter, in Randworld, if she had? Remember, when Tony (the Wet Nurse, to use the nickname Rearden's macho steel workers give him) asks Rearden for a job, crawling abjectly while he does it, he says, "I've got a college diploma in metallurgy, but that's not worth the paper it's written on." This is by no means the only contemptuous crack in the novel about college degrees and college professors. As for Rearden, who is credited with creating this astounding alloy, he started out as an ore digger at the age of fourteen. He apparently never went to college and never studied either metallurgy or construction engineering. When would he have the time to do it, anyway, while he was rising out of the ore mines to own first iron mines, then coal mines, then venture into steel making and make a brilliant success out of that, coming eventually to run, I quote, "the best steel mills in the country"? Oh, he did finance labs and a group of young -- they are described as young -- technicians and scientists to help him create Rearden Metal, but after years of trying they were pretty much all of the opinion, "Mr. Rearden, it can't be done." It seems that only Rearden's superhuman will and drive kept them working at it until it WAS done.
But if Rearden was that obsessed with doing it, and wanted it so desperately, that would surely be a likely source of error through wishful thinking? The mere fact that he wholly believed Rearden Metal was good, all he wanted it to be, wouldn't necessarily make it so. As for Dagny, the novel's internal evidence indicates that she was completely unqualified to judge. She believed because she was ridiculously arrogant and WANTED to believe. No, Jason Wexler did a great job writing "Dagny Was Wrong After All", and dark as it was, the results in the real world might have been darker yet. By the way, Mr. Wexler, terrific work, I enjoyed it in a grim way.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: The Hippocratic Oath

Keith Taylor — Sat, 21 May 2016 09:03:24 -0000

That'd be about right. I wonder how Ayn Rand would've reacted if some doctor had refused to treat HER, on the grounds that "This woman offered the most rotten, unprincipled insult to the medical profession and its traditions I have ever heard!"

Re: Atlas Shrugged: The Hippocratic Oath

Keith Taylor — Mon, 23 May 2016 11:33:37 -0000

I don't either. And as with John Galt's astounding motor which produces more energy, constantly, than it needs to run it, the author doesn't seem to have given much thought to how Rearden Metal might conceivably work. Its main ingredients. we're told, are steel and copper, yet it's both lighter and cheaper than steel, as well as having amazing tensile strength. Well, copper has a higher atomic weight than iron, so Rearden Metal ought to be HEAVIER than steel, unless it's either partly antigravitic or contains some other metal that's lighter than either copper or iron. Titanium fits the bill, but Rand doesn't mention titanium. Or there's beryllium, roughly five and a half times lighter than iron, which does have remarkable properties, such as being a hardening agent. Of course it also has a drawback you wouldn't really want in heavy duty railroad tracks. It's brittle. But forget any metallurgical considerations, let's. I'm no more a metallurgist than Dagny Taggart. As Adam pointed out, how could Rearden Metal chicken wire fences cost "pennies a mile" when iron and copper, plus whatever else that super-alloy comprised, cost more than that in themselves? The sad fact is that all the wondrous inventions in the novel are about on the level of the many pulp SF stories of the 1940s and 1950s, in which some youthful hero whips up a faster than light space drive or an antigravity device in his backyard lab and proceeds to save the world. Don't get me wrong, I loved those stories as a kid. They still bring back my youth and make me misty-eyed. But they didn't pretend to be serious literature and philosophy, much less that they could save society.
I suspect that Ayn Rand read a lot of those herself. And considering that John Galt is a physics super-genius (electrical engineering thrown in, it would appear) with metallic skin and eyes and a team of devoted, supremely talented aides, I'd bet cash she was acquainted with Doc Savage too.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Make the Trains Run on Time

Keith Taylor — Tue, 24 May 2016 06:57:07 -0000

Yes, Ayn Rand was completely into the "Great Man" or "Man of Destiny" theory of history. I forget which article of hers contained the blast, but she was sounding off about the appalling idea that great men and geniuses should have to observe any sort of regulation or control. Her first response was, "Do you see Hank Rearden submitting to that? Do you see Francisco d'Anconia? Do you see John Galt?" Then, possibly having a faint glimmer of how whacko that sounded, she went on, "But these are only fictional characters, you say? Okay. Do you see Louis Pasteur? Do you see Galileo -- and what happened to HIM when he tried to share his [insights and discoveries] with the Catholic Church?"
Now it happens that I greatly admire Pasteur and Galileo and others like them, and am convinced the human race owes them an immense debt. But by the Eternal they were absolutely nothing like Rand's heroes. In fact Isaac Newton, for one, despite his transcendent scientific and mathematical genius, seems to have been a rather nasty little man in person, given to holding petty grudges for a long time and gloating when a person who had once disagreed with him met misfortune.
I think it's Galt who declaims at one point, probably in his big speech, "Do not say that perfection is impossible to man. By what standard are you judging him when you do say it? Accept that in the area of morality, nothing less than perfection will do."
Upon which most people would answer, "First tell me what you mean by perfection, and I'll tell you whether I agree with it, and if not, why not."
I'm ludicrously reminded of the finale to the James Coburn movie, OUR MAN FLINT. Derek Flint is comedically like one of Rand's heroes, omnicompetent and invincible. He defeats the weather-controlling mad scientists of the organization called GALAXY and destroys their machines, thus saving the world from their (well-intentioned) domination. One of the trio screams, "Ours would have been a perfect world! Why did you stop us?" Coburn as Flint answers coolly, "Because it's your idea of perfection, gentlemen, not mine."

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Make the Trains Run on Time

Keith Taylor — Tue, 24 May 2016 07:13:49 -0000

Seems to show in her portrayal of mothers in both her main novels. When they appear as major characters they are manipulative, conformist clinging vines -- Keating's mother in THE FOUNTAINHEAD, Rearden's in AS. Ivy Starnes in AS never had children, but once she inherited the motor factory she behaved towards all its workers like an archetypal devouring, evil mother. She might have been inspired by the witch in "Hansel and Gretel", or monstrous Rosa Klebb in the Bond novel FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. Come to that, when Rand uses images that in our culture have archetypal associations with the maternal and female, such as water and the moon, she always uses them negatively. When Kellogg and Dagny are hoofing it from the abandoned train to find a phone to call for help, the plain around them is washed in "moonlight, the dead phosphorescence of impotent, borrowed energy". Lillian Rearden's eyes are like "two lifeless puddles of water" and Ivy Starnes' voice has "the even, dripping monotone of rain." It gets pretty noticeable after a while. Even decades ago, as a hooked fan, I found that a bit disturbing. My sisters and I must have been luckier in our mother than Rand was.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Big Soy

Keith Taylor — Fri, 27 May 2016 06:11:35 -0000

You can see a lot of aspects of AS which are obvious aspects of Rand herself. Judge Naragansett tells her after she gatecrashes Galt's Gulch that he has written a treatise which shows that the ultimate horror machine in society, the source of all injustice, "is non-objective law ... yes, it could save the world ... no, it will not be published outside." Nobody sane needs telling that a man who believes he's written a book, ONE BOOK, which could save the world, has realistically left the beam. And if, improbably, he was right about that, and wouldn't give that book to the world because he didn't like the way the world was heading, what does that say about him? He and Dr. Hendricks could form a club. Oh. They already did.

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Big Soy

Keith Taylor — Fri, 27 May 2016 06:43:44 -0000

She probably did believe ATLAS SHRUGGED would change the world -- hoped it would, and for the better. As I've opined elsewhere, Rand had a talent for writing that was of no slight degree. The baptismal train ride on rails of Rearden Metal to Wyatt Junction, Colorado, along with other parts of the novel, is absolutely riveting. And a lot of the pulp fiction clichés she uses in AS were deliberately chosen, I think, for the good reason that Rand knew they ALWAYS WORK. They get the readers in. Not unlike George Bernard Shaw, she entertained her readers in exchange for trying to make them think. I'd swear she consciously borrowed some techniques from Shaw, and even a few situations. If Rearden's steel mills don't owe anything to Undershaft's munitions factory in MAJOR BARBARA, I'll eat a copy of ATLAS SHRUGGED, hardcover. But probably Rand would never have admitted that, as Shaw was at least two things she detested -- a socialist and an anti-romantic.
One of the major places she went wrong was in opposing the idea that "there are no absolutes" with its total opposite, "nothing exists except absolutes." Another, and more serious error, was her complete and utter contempt for ordinary people, and for emotions. The latter even has an air of being based on terror, as when Halley -- a composer, for God's sake! -- spits out, "Emotions be damned!" He continues with the observation that "The operator of a coal mine knows it isn't his feelings that keep those coal carts moving underground, and he knows what does keep them moving. Feel? Oh, yes, we do feel, you, he and I -- we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling -- and we know where our feelings come from."
Rand seems to have believed that completely, and her belief hurt a number of people, herself included.

Re: HB2: An Angry Christian Shows Us What the Real Problem Is Here.

Keith Taylor — Sun, 29 May 2016 10:31:14 -0000

Summing it up in a sentence, if Jesus did come back now and travel around the U.S.A. saying and doing the same things he did and said in ancient Judea, these people would be the first ones yelling, "Crucify him!"

Re: Atlas Shrugged: Signal Passed at Danger

Keith Taylor — Sun, 29 May 2016 19:16:33 -0000

I personally wish it was just an old outdated book. It's not. There are economically powerful people who treat it as a revelation greater than the New Testament and tend to act accordingly. Alan Greenspan was a Rand disciple. The super-rich love ATLAS SHRUGGED because it gives them a philosophical justification for doing what they want, and tells them, as Francisco tells Rearden, "You [are] the purest and most moral man among them."