Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is a very special kind of shitty

Adrian Mack's words are simply untrue. I loved the movie. It moved me to tears in several places. I have read all of Ayn Rand's works and found this picture to be faithful to Atlas Shrugged. Many of Rand's closest friends loved the movie also. Mack is all froth and no evidence.

The scariest bit is the "Part 1". I'm sure all the naive high schoolers and 1st year university students, along with dumb-ass marketeers, will ensure that Part 2 comes along to make us puke even more. One of the most mediocre and irrational novels ever written. Why do people still bother with it?

According to a 1991 survey done for the Library of Congress Atlas Shrugged was second only to The Bible as the book that made the most difference in the lives of readers.

http://www.englishcompanion.com/Readings/booklists/loclist.html

I read the book and watched the movie and found that it was no more or less true to the book than any other movie adaptation of a novel. The book was better. The movie was fun because the book was wonderful.

Those two points and Adrian Mack's use of questionable language and innuendo in place of rational argument places that movie review in the realm of, "a very special kind of shitty".

Just watch the movie and you will see what al the buzz is about

The standard, self-satisfied, cure-all for the smugly dismissive: only fanatics would like the movie, so...(you guessed it) anyone who says they liked it can be dismissed as...that's right, fanatics. And since no one has to (or, really, even should) take fanatics seriously, anyone who has anything positive to say about the film can (must be?) dismissed out of hand. Nothing like cutting off your detractors at the pass. Perhaps, in the future, a review that actually said something about the film, free of ad hominem pleading and ideologically biased whining might be nice. Or is that too much to expect from the Georgia (excuse the euphemism) Straight?

...Birdy, you asked what changed (you were the libertarian on the pot thread, weren'tcha? The one who was soundin' kinda all Murray Rothbard about victimless crimes?).

Roughly speaking, what changed was:

1. Having gotten into Rand in high school, I attended a few Ayn Rand society meetings at SFU and discovered that it was all business students, conservatives, and banker's sons who would subscribe to any philosophy that said they shouldn't have to pay taxes. Suffice to say that I did not feel at home, whereas my standing as a Randian didn't put me in very good stead in my philosophy classes...

2. I realized that the neocons who DO support Ayn Rand are generally quite two-faced, praising the market on one hand while taking advantage wherever possible of what Chomsky has called the corporate welfare state; and that in many cases (transit) it is in fact FAR preferable to have public institutions than privatization than to surrender all to the free market - as I think Randians are more or less obliged, by the terms of the ideological blinkers she crafts, to believe.

3. I started seeing (even in those pre-Rush Limbaugh, pre-Fox news years) a lot of hysterical intellectual dishonesty on the right that I wanted nothing to do with. I remember receiving an Objectivist newsletter in my early 20's that was selling a book - I don't remember the title - that claimed that the environmentalist movement was just another big-government ploy to meddle in the world of business, that environmental safeguards shouldn't be a matter of law, and that it will be CAPITALISM and human inventiveness that solve the environmental problems of the world, not regulations or big government or such. All of which seemed then and seems to me now to be the intellectual and moral equivalent of Slim Pickens' whoops of joy as he rides the A-bomb down to glory in Dr. Strangelove : more than any other single event, it was my Big Yuck moment, where I decided I had been seduced by intellectually dishonest horseshit; the only people who would be at all attracted to such a point of view would be businessmen and industrialists who were knowingly disregarding environmental standards, or didn't want to be hemmed in further; their "philosophy" was just an extension of their business interests, nothing more. Maybe if I were from Alberta, I'd feel differently, but...

5. (and around that time, my own state of mind changed, as well - I explored Nietzsche, hallucinogens, Robert Anton Wilson, even went through a period where I was associating with a charismatic, self-proclaimed Lakota "redneck" and spiritual advisor, and I rediscovered left-leaning punk politics. I can hear the Randians on the thread collecting ammo from this paragraph, but screw'em - sometime in my early 20's, I took off the Randian blinkers, put on my Hoffman lenses, and I haven't looked back. Really - why would I?).

Apologies for my mangled prose in the above post. I had exceeded the wordcount and hastily had to trim what I wrote. 1,2,3...5. Indeed.

And yes, Bern, I realize that.

Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, heaped praise on serial killer William Edward Hickman who, in 1927, dismembered 12 year old Marion Parker. She considered him a "superman". Here's what she admired about him in her own words:

“Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

I've always felt that the ideas of Ayn Rand had a sociopathic quality. Frankly, I think you have to be, as an adult, enormously fucked up to take her ideas seriously.

The truth comes out of the darkness when they are exposed
So much for the commie/progressive/looters with Jello brains and selfish me first kids and adults who wait for their parents to die in a urine smelling nursing home they hardly ever visit. Damn these socialist pigs who never served their country or understood hard work and personal responsibility...God bless John Galt