My Serious Kitten nominations

I opened Three Star Wars trailers: movie, television, and video game by writing that it was the first to two Sunday entertainment entries and concluded the entry by telling my readers to "Stay tuned for a follow-up to 2015 Hugo nominees for movies and television."  I left some business unfinished in that post.

That brings me to the controversy.  Neither snubbed movie was on the slate put forth by Sad Puppies, which is loosely affiliated with GamerGate, but three of the five nominees were.  In fact, a lot of the nominees for other categories were on that slate, which led to a lot of gnashing of teeth among fans.  I might return to this later, but I have to cut this entry short to go to work.  Until then, read A.V. Club's This year's Hugo Award nominees are a messy political controversy for an explanation.

Follow over the jump for the response to the ballot stuffing scandal from We Hunted the Mammoth, which was to start their own awards, along with my nominations for the awards.

Razzies and Robocop

I promised that I'd write about the Oscars tomorrow at the end of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' tops weekend box office, whips up controversy and I still plan to.  However, the Academy Awards aren't the only film awards this weekend.  Tonight are the Golden Raspberry Awards AKA the Razzies.  For my readers who didn't see last year's Science fiction and fantasy at the Razzies, CNN answers the first question they might have in What's a Razzie?

Find out what films were nominated as the worst of the worst for this years Golden Raspberry Awards. CNN's Lisa France breaks down The Razzies.

Of all the films mentioned, I've written about only one, "Annie," which had a song nominated for a Golden Globe but not for an Oscar.  Also, only one of them was a science fiction or fantasy movie, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."  Both of them are up for Worst Remake, Sequel, or Rip-off, along with The Legend of Hercules, Atlas Shrugged 3: Who is John Galt?, and Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, all of which are fantasy or science fiction movies.  Three of the four sci-fi/fantasy nominees in this category also receive honorable mentions for my having written about either the movie itself, a prequel in the series, or a nominated performer in the film.  Follow over the jump for what I have to say about them along with a bonus feature about the Robocop musical.  Yes, there is such a thing.

From 'Snowpiercer' to 'Atlas Shrugged': Sublime to ridiculous

I concluded 'Snowpiercer', by quoting the following transition and commenting on it.

There is one thing that's puzzled me, though.  Some reviews, including several raves, have claimed to see the influence of a writer who is about as far from Occupy Wall Street as it's possible to get.  Despite the political allegory, the very clear parallels to modern life, and the criticism of elitist greed that permeates the entire film, a handful of people are convinced that Snowpiercer was at least partially inspired by the least liberal, least likely of writers:  Ayn Rand.

Yes.  Really.

That sets up part two, in which Ellid descended from the sublime to the ridiculous.  Stay tuned.

Follow over the jump for Ellid's take on Ayn Rand and "Atlas Shrugged."

The Archdruid on Objectivism as civil antireligion

I promised to say something about John Michael Greer, the Archdruid, in July 2011.  I finally found something of his worth quoting.  Better late than never!

Third, civil religions share with theist religions a curious and insufficiently studied phenomenon that may as well be called the antireligion. An antireligion is a movement within a religious community that claims to oppose that community’s faith, in a distinctive way:  it embraces essentially all of its parent religion’s beliefs, but inverts the values, embracing as good what the parent religion defines as evil, and rejecting as evil what the parent religion defines as good.

The classic example of the type is Satanism, the antireligion of Christianity. In its traditional forms—the conservative Christians among my readers may be interested to know that Satanism also suffers from modernist heresies—Satanism accepts essentially all of the presuppositions of Christianity, but says with Milton’s Satan, “Evil, be thou my good.” Thus you’ll have to look long and hard among even the most devout Catholics to find anyone more convinced of the spiritual power of the Catholic Mass than an old-fashioned Satanist; it’s from that conviction that the Black Mass, the parody of the Catholic rite that provides traditional Satanism with its central ceremony, gains whatever power it has.

Antireligions are at least as common among civil religions as they are among theist faiths... Communism has its antireligion, which was founded by the Russian expatriate Ayn Rand and has become the central faith of much of America’s current pseudoconservative movement. There is of course nothing actually conservative about Rand’s Objectivism; it’s simply what you get when you accept the presuppositions of Marxism—atheism, materialism, class warfare, and the rest of it—but say “Evil, be thou my good” to all its value judgments. If you’ve ever wondered why so many American pseudoconservatives sound as though they’re trying to imitate the cackling capitalist villains of traditional Communist demonology, now you know.

I couldn't resist the juxtaposition of Satanism with Objectivism.  I'm not the first to make that connection, which goes all the way back to Anton LaVey himself, as noted by Joe Carter at First Things.

Perhaps most are unaware of the connection, though LaVey wasn’t shy about admitting his debt to his inspiration. “I give people Ayn Rand with trappings,” he once told the Washington Post. On another occasion he acknowledged that his brand of Satanism was “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.” Indeed, the influence is so apparent that LaVey has been accused of plagiarizing part of his “Nine Satanic Statements” from the John Galt speech in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Devotees of Rand may object to my outlining the association between the two. They will say I am proposing “guilt by association,” a form of the ad hominem fallacy. But I am not attacking Rand for the overlap of her views with LaVey’s; I am saying that, at their core, they are the same philosophy. LaVey was able to recognize what many conservatives fail to see: Rand’s doctrines are satanic.

I also can't resist pointing out that the Pournelle Chart shows both Communism and Objectivism enthrone Reason, which makes both anti-conservative according to Pournelle's definition.  Where they differ is their attitude to the State.  Communism worships it, at least as the personification of the will of the collective, while Objectivism thinks of it as the ultimate necessary evil, allowing only the military, police, and courts as its legitimate functions.  That makes Objectivism the funhouse mirror reflection of Communism, exactly the point Greer is making.


For more of my musings about the Pournelle Chart, read Food Fight! Thoughts on liberalism and conservatism inspired by the Preface to Food, Inc. and James Howard Kunstler swims against the stream on marriage equality.  Pournelle doesn't have it completely right, but he has produced a useful tool.

Hostess Cakes has gone Galt

WOOD-TV has the story.

Locals stock up on Twinkies, Ho Ho's

  Hostess is going out of business.
I doubt this will be the end of Twinkies. As I said in January:

As for Twinkies and the rest of the baked goods put out by Hostess Cakes going away, advocates of healthy eating could only wish.

The products are too valuable and someone will make them. Until then, enjoy this.

Talking like Ragnar the Pirate

When I searched for pirate while writing yesterday's entry about Talk Like a Pirate Day, I found the following paragraph in a drinking game about Atlas Shrugged.

7.Every time someone mentions the Pirate, drink. Seriously, there's a pirate. His name is Ragnar and he’s a Viking god with golden hair and a face so handsome it can never be scared. Is he a hero or villain? You get one guess.

Yes, there is an Objectivist pirate who is a hero to Rand, but read the following passage about his motivation and see if it fits that of a conventional hero.

Ragnar Danneskjold: "But I’ve chosen a special mission of my own. I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in."

Hank Rearden: "What man?"

Ragnar: "Robin Hood. ...He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich – or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich."
...
"What I actually am, Mr. Rearden, is a policeman. It is a policeman's duty to protect men from criminals – criminals being those who seize wealth by force. ... But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law...then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman."

Another source supplies more of Ragnar's animosity to Robin of Locksley.

[Robin Hood] is not remembered as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became a symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures – the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich – whom men have come to regard as the moral idea." ". . . Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive."

As Smoop's page on him concludes, the other strike leaders don't completely approve of Ragnar's methods. As for me, I don't approve of Ragnar at all. That's one pirate I'd rather not hear people speaking like, even if he has an argh sound in his name.

Tom Tomorrow on Ryan and Rand plus bonus anagram

I know I promised "a post reviewing WXYZ's reporting about how the Dream Cruise fuels tourism," but I that will take some time to watch video I don't have right now. Instead, I have some more about Paul Ryan and his relationship to Ayn Rand.

First, Tom Tomorrow at Daily Kos posted this last night.


Full-sized version here.
That prompted a couple of commenters to post some macros to point out how the members of the ticket accidentally highlight the relationship between Ryan and Rand.


That's a much more impressive version than the one I first saw on Facebook courtesty of Nebris, who got it from Failbook.


In case you doubt the veracity of this anagram, another commenter from Daily Kos prepared this demonstration.


Sweet.

Finally, a diary at Daily Kos describes how Ryan has had to run away from Rand.

A Love Rejected: The Strange and Tragic Story of Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand

Too bad for Ryan that the Atlas Society has preserved Ryan's remarks about how important Rand was to him and reposted them. With friends like that, Eddie Munster hardly needs enemies.

Time for a Paul Ryan label

In The future of the Olympics, I made the following prediction.

As for more speculation about the future, I think it's time I gave Paul Ryan his own label and a post introducing it.

Time to follow through.

To mark Willard Mitt Romney selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate, I'm sharing all the posts I've written about Ryan so far.


'Atlas Shrugged' gets the reviews and box office it deserves (Part I of a series)

Weekly roundup and sustainability news from national commercial sources for the week ending June 11, 2011

Weekly roundup and sustainability news from national commercial sources for the week ending June 11, 2011

Now S&P thinks it's a Satan Sandwich

A Day in Exquisite Insults of Objectivists

More Krugman on Paul Ryan

I was one of "about a dozen" yesterday

I'm sure I'll have more Paul (Krugman) vs. Paul (Ryan) posts. Until then, here's a macro of Paul Krugman calling Ryan's budget plan a fraud.

I was one of "about a dozen" yesterday

Paul Ryan came to town yesterday to be the main attraction for a fundraiser for Pete Hoekstra, who is running for Senate.  Since I've had my share of things to say about Paul Ryan, it was an easy sell to get me to be one of the people demonstrating his visit. A bunch of us carried signs about protecting Social Security and Medicare. The protest even made the Detroit Free Press.

Candidate Pete Hoekstra rallies support

About a dozen protesters, including some senior citizens, picketed the event at the Westin Hotel in Southfield and were more than happy to talk about their fear of spiraling health care costs.

“All I have is Social Security and my husband’s pension and now I feel like I’m being squeezed out,” said Deanna Tachna, 73, of Birmingham. “I always thought that I was part of the middle class, but with this, there’s not going to be a middle class anymore.”

The reporter came at the end of the demonstration as people were starting to leave. If she had counted five minutes earlier and included the people demonstrating by the entrance to the parking garage less than 100 feet away, she would have recorded twice as many. That's not the only error in the report.  She identified Paul Ryan as an "Illinois Republican."  He's not.  Paul Ryan is a representative from Wisconsin, not Illinois. He represented my wife when she lived in Kenosha County, not when she lived in the Chicago suburbs.

On the subject of followers of Ayn Rand, there is a diary about their ill effects on U.S. politics and society over at Daily Kos: Book Review: Ayn Rand Nation, by Gary Weiss. I recommend you read it.

And now, the macro I keep on hand just for mentions of Ayn Rand.

Blast from the past: Pathology on the Right, a commentary on Krugman's "Two speeches and an editorial"

Time to pull out a blast from the past, in this case an essay I posted to Daily Kos back in January of this year, two months before I created this blog. It looks like a good day to re-post it.

Pathology on the Right: A commentary on Krugman's "Two speeches and an editorial"

In Two Speeches and an Editorial, Paul Krugman juxtaposed two quotations from President Obama about the importance he placed on empathy with the following sentence from the National Review Online on the same subject.

Empathy is simply a codeword for an inclination toward liberal activism.

Follow me over the fold for the observations of the commenters on one particular implication of Paul Krugman's point, including my own comment.

A Day in Exquisite Insults of Objectivists

On February 11th of last year, Paul Krugman quoted Jonathon Chait, on the revelation that Paul Ryan is an Ayn Randite:

Ryan clearly has a passion for ideas and isn’t just interested in short-term positioning. It would be nice if the party had people like that who didn’t also happen to be loons.

The rest of Chait's post read as follows:

Last week, I called Republican budget sorta-kinda point man Paul Ryan "crazy but honest." Today, some of the intellectual influences behind the first half of that description are coming out. TPM reports that Ryan is a big fan of Ayn Rand and "Atlas Shrugged." The Daily Beast, interviewing Ryan, reports that he was influenced by Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism."

What do those works have in common? They're written by people who don't understand liberalism and the left at all, and are thus unable to present liberal ideas in terms remotely recognizable to liberals themselves. The specific lack of understanding lies in an inability to grasp the enormous differences between American liberalism and socialism or communism, seeing them as variants on the same basic theme. The historical reality is that the architects of American liberalism saw it as a bulwark against communism, and communists and socialists in turn viewed the liberals as in implacable enemy. (Yes, you can cherry pick a few data points of commonality, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.) The result is a tendency to see even modest efforts to sand off the roughest edges of capitalism in order to make free markets work for all Americans as the opening salvo of a vast and endless assault upon the market system.

One of the commenters on Chait's piece posted the following about the comparison between Rand and Goldberg:

Jonah Goldberg is no Ayn Rand. Indeed, they are opposites. Ayn Rand's books are appealing (forget the politics), but her personality was nothing less than looney. Jonah Goldberg's personality is appealing (forget the politics), but his books are nothing less than looney.

Krugman also quoted the late Paul Samuelson on Alan Greenspan:

You can take the boy out of the cult but you can’t take the cult out of the boy.

We've seen this quote before. We've also seen the complete version of it in context.

And this brings us to Alan Greenspan, whom I've known for over 50 years and who I regarded as one of the best young business economists. Townsend-Greenspan was his company. But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy. He actually had instruction, probably pinned on the wall: 'Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good.'

While Krugman was done, his commenters weren't:

Ayn Rand on love and sex

There is one part of Atlas Chugged I find worth revisiting.

15.Rand's descriptions of love making are truly screwed up; vicious acts of near-sadism. Reardon essentially masturbates using Dagny's body as a tissue and she likes it. Even when Dagny experiences the perfect physical bliss of sex with John Galt (and yes, that's in there too), it's pretty creepy.

Every time you throw up a little during a sex scene, drink. Or at least rinse your mouth out.

TV Tropes has noticed this. Under Author Appeal, there is this little gem.

Ayn Rand had a thing for The Red Sonja and "bodice-ripper" style ravishment sex, which her sex scenes usually involved. The rather violent sex scenes she wrote (especially the rather infamous Howard Roark/Dominique Francon sex scene in The Fountainhead) can plausibly be read as Rape Is Love, although this is debated by many (including anarchist-feminist Wendy McElroy).

• Additionally, Rand practiced consensual polyamory during the time she was writing Atlas Shrugged. The heroine of Atlas, Dagny Taggart, has multiple relationships over the course of the novel's plot.
• Rand's belief in Brains and Bondage female sexual submission shows in a passage of Atlas Shrugged that describes the diamond bracelet worn by Dagny as giving her "the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained." This belief was also expressed in an infamous essay condemning the idea that a woman might want to be President, on the grounds that life without a man to look up to would make a woman "unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting."

There's more under the Red Sonja entry.

Ayn Rand is well known for this trope, as it falls in line with her personal fetishes. Rand liked strong, take-charge men and bodice-ripping, ravishment-type sex. Her works are sometimes accused of containing Rape Is Love, though it is a debatable matter.

• Dagny Taggart from Atlas Shrugged is a modernized version of this.
• Dominique from The Fountainhead.
• Parodied in The Illuminatus! Trilogy's Rand parody Telemachus Sneezed.
• Rand also wrote an essay arguing that no rational woman would ever want to be president because "the essence of femininity is hero worship — the desire to look up to man." A woman president, being the supreme authority of the land, would have no superior man to admire.

There's more under Rape Is Love, but in the spirit of a picture being worth 1000 words, I'll post the following instead.

LOL, PETA

PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is known for their very public, sometimes controversial, crusades against all forms of animal cruelty. Now they have trained their sights on a video game, Nintendo's Super Mario 3D Land.

In the game, the popular character Mario is able to wear a "tanooki suit," resembling a Japanese tanuki raccoon dog. PETA claims the suit encourages the wearing of fur products and has created a website in protest. The site features a parody game where players assume the role of a skinned "tanooki" who tries to wrestle his pelt back from an evil Mario lookalike.

People in the gaming press have been quick to point out that Mario is never seen harming a tanuki in the course of the game. One website called PETA's outrage "absurd and unresearched."

More at NMATV's YouTube page.

PETA has made two prior appearances here, the first in a Silly Sustainability Saturday during September and the second in a stand alone post in October. Now, they've made the silly sustainability news three months in a row. So, should we expect a story about them before Christmas?

In other news, my part in the hornet swatting ends today.  It's now up to other people.  I'll have details when it's done.

Atlas Chugged

Yesteday I promised, "Enough seriousness. Time for some fun tomorrow." Time to follow through.

For your Saturday amusement, I give you Atlas Chugged: The Ayn Rand Drinking Game, which was originally posted (not by me) on Daily Kos.

There are certain habits in Rand’s writing; repeated phrases, archetypical characters and recurring situations. Habits which beg to be immortalized in their very own drinking game.

A game I call Atlas Chugged.

Collapse is all there in the Objectivist manual

I concluded yesterday's post with the following.

Objectivism is a philosophy that is contributing to our problems. Worse yet, it is becoming a response to our problems, making them even worse.

What, you say, Objectivism causes collapse? Yes. It's all there in the manual. But that's the subject of Part II.

Stay tuned.

More quotes tomorrow.

Time to follow through.

Brad Hicks on LiveJournal had the following to say about "Atlas Shrugged."

Atlas Shrugged, for those of you who never read it, can be summarized entirely fairly as follows. Unknown to our viewpoint characters at first, an inventor named John Galt has invented a "free energy" machine, a motor that runs on ambient static electricity and the Earth's own inertia and puts out enough electricity in a fairly small unit to power almost anything, including vehicles, force field generators, energy weapons, even an invisibility cloak if you use a big enough unit. He invented this while working at a company where his contract gave them rights to stuff he invented on the clock, like most professional engineers and inventors, but he assumed that as the inventor, he was entitled to all of the profits from this fabulous new invention. The company's management and other employees, though, saw just how much resentment would happen if one company owned the monopoly on an invention this valuable, and started making plans for how to invest some of the profits into charitable ventures, so they wouldn't get the whole thing taken away from them via eminent domain. John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert "strike of the mind," as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did -- because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don't consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

I told you. Deliberately engineered collapse in the service of Objectivist goals is all there in the manual. Furthermore, John Galt, the mastermind behind this plan, is someone that Objectivists think is a hero. Lovely.

Furthermore, George Monbiot noted that efforts to prevent collapse, especially environmental collapse, absolutely enrage Objectivists.

A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

Furthermore, they have elite help as Stranded Wind stated on Daily Kos.

How did we get here? You’ll find the Friedmanite free market ideology, lacking in merit for many of the situations to which it has been applied, yet its followers continuing howling that we ought to let the market decide, marketwide credit constipation be damned. The handmaiden of this foolishness, Rand’s objectivism, provides the ideological zombie virus that created many of the Freidmanite ideology’s true believers.

I'm in the middle of reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," in which Milton Friedman's free market ideology plays a starring, albeit villainous, role, so I found the juxtaposition of Friedman and Rand particularly striking. When I finish the book, I promise to blog about it. I just hope it doesn't take seven months.

Of course, what comes around goes around. One of the quotes collected on Mike Huben's site comes from Bob Black, "Smokestack Lightning" and is most apt.

As it happens there is light to be shed on the libertarian position on breathing. Ayn Rand is always inspirational and often oracular for libertarians. A strident atheist and vehement rationalist -- she felt in fact that she and three or four of her disciples were the only really rational people there were -- Rand remarked that she worshipped smokestacks. For her, as for Lyndon LaRouche, they not only stood for, they were the epitome of human accomplishment. She must have meant it since she was something of a human smokestack herself; she was a chain smoker, as were the other rationals in her entourage. In the end she abolished her own breathing: she died of lung cancer.

Enough seriousness. Time for some fun tomorrow.

Quotes about Objectivism from the snarky to the serious

Yesterday, I remarked about my tardiness in following up.

Back in April, I started a series about Atlas Shrugged and how Objectivism is contributing to collapse.  It's been seven months, so I'm way behind.  In fact, I'm so behind and so many new people have started reading this blog that I'm going to review what I rewrote back then.  That it helps explain the nature of the hornet I'm swatting is a bonus.

Time for the next section of relevant quotes from that entry.

Objectivism and Scientology: a sublime to the ridiculous comparison

Back in April, I started a series about Atlas Shrugged and how Objectivism is contributing to collapse.  It's been seven months, so I'm way behind.  In fact, I'm so behind and so many new people have started reading this blog that I'm going to review what I rewrote back then.  That it helps explain the nature of the hornet I'm swatting is a bonus.  That written, here is the first of the relevant sections of last April's post.

Atlas Shrugged: A movie this demented ought to be against the law

Charlie Jane Anders — Every cult needs its own wacky trainwreck of a movie. Scientology got Battlefield Earth, and now the cult of Ayn Rand gets Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. But how does Atlas stand up to Battlefield Earth?

I have an entire canned list of quotes on the similarities between Objectivism and Scientology, but this isn't the post for me to regurgitate all of them. I'll just post this one.

Wasn't Ayn Rand a pseudonym of L. Ron Hubbard?~Mike Huben

I think this is the post for me to regurgitate my canned quotes about he similarities between Scientology and Objectivism. Here goes.

The hornet swatting begins today

In last Saturday's entry, I mentioned that my wife and I were off to swat a hornet. Here are my observations about the contrast between flies and hornets.

My years of living in the country and dealing with insects taught me the following.

A biting fly hurts when it bites, but it doesn't have any worse weapons, so it will fly away from the least sign of a swat. Unlike the fly, a hornet will sit there when someone approaches it with a flyswatter, because it will sting instead of fleeing. Consequently, a well-aimed swat will always catch the hornet, while a fly might still escape.

This lesson can be applied to people as well. If you encounter an opponent that's like a fly, you'll have to be quiet, swift, and lucky to hit them, as they're primed to evade. On the other hand, if you run into an opponent who is like a hornet, you all it takes is a solid swat, preferably with a large foreign object, such as a book, to find its target, as the hornet won't budge.

The hornet swatting begins today. It should be done by the end of the week. I'll tell you about it then.

Until then, if you want a hint about the nature of the hornet, look at the kitty.

Nablopomo for August: Fiction

Seems like only yesterday.

By the way, next month's theme for Nablopomo is Fiction. I'm participating. Here's the badge.



More on this theme beginning tomorrow, which will be in a few minutes. See you then!

Time to share the following from my email.

August's theme for daily blogging: FICTION. Certainly, blogging is about truth-telling; recording our lives. But how often does fiction seep into our reconstruction of our day? Is it important to always be honest, or can we skew the facts to present a better story?Beyond that, how can you not enjoy delving into a work of fiction? Finding a new world, new characters, new inventions that didn't exist until the writer placed them on the page. This month, we have to spend some time sharing our favourite books, authors, and characters.

I've been waiting for a theme like this to come along for months, as I have a whole bunch of book-related posts that I've been promising to do, going all the way back to April, when I wrote three entries in which I said I'd revisit the topic.

'Atlas Shrugged' gets the reviews and box office it deserves (Part I of a series)

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."~Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Allow me this moment of schadenfreude, which I'll eventually demonstrate to be related to the main topic of this blog.


 
Box Office Mojo: 'Atlas Shrugged' Derails?

Atlas Shrugged: Part I was the top-grossing limited release of the weekend, generating an estimated $1.7 million at 300 single-screen locations.

For a pure independent release, Atlas Shrugged: Part I's opening was fine. But for the first-ever adaptation of Ayn Rand's influential mega-selling 1957 novel that had far more media hype than any other independent movie could dream of, it was disappointing.

There aren't many direct comparisons, because it's rare that an adaptation of such a famous book gets such a modest release. Atlas Shrugged: Part I opened higher than recent limited Christian movies The Grace Card and To Save a Life, and it was distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures' third highest-grossing launch, behind End of the Spear and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. But none of those movies are significant in the grand scheme of things. They're all still blips, even if Atlas was a slightly bigger blip than many.

What's more, Atlas Shrugged: Part I's box office dropped six percent from Friday to Saturday, further indicating niche appeal. The movie would require exceptional holds moving forward to right its course.
...
Boosters of Atlas Shrugged: Part I might point to the movie's per theater average to spin it as a success (ex. "it did almost as much per theater as Scream 4!"), but spin is all it is. It's a common ploy to cling to per-theater average to rationalize a soft run. Obviously, it's generally easier for a small release to have a higher per-theater average than one at over 3,000 theaters (at any rate, Scream 4 was a disappointment itself).

That's really crappy box office, which makes me happy. Of course, the movie was only produced for $10,000,000, so it might actually turn a profit, enough to get parts 2 and 3 into theaters. That would make io9's reviewers happy.

Atlas Shrugged: A movie this demented ought to be against the law

Charlie Jane Anders — Every cult needs its own wacky trainwreck of a movie. Scientology got Battlefield Earth, and now the cult of Ayn Rand gets Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. But how does Atlas stand up to Battlefield Earth?

I have an entire canned list of quotes on the similarities between Objectivism and Scientology, but this isn't the post for me to regurgitate all of them. I'll just post this one.

Wasn't Ayn Rand a pseudonym of L. Ron Hubbard?~Mike Huben

Also, if io9, a science fiction site, didn't see the resemblance, I'd be disappointed.

Back to the review.

Quite well, actually. Atlas Shrugged Part 1, which just opened in theaters today, is a grand addition to the roster of movies that are both kooky and clunky. A movie this hideously wonderful really ought to be against the law.
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Actually, scratch that. The federal government shouldn't outlaw dreadful movies like Atlas Shrugged – rather, the feds should just regulate them. For example, we could have a federal mandate that all such movies must star Nicolas Cage or a comparable actor – someone who knows how to bring the right level of gravitas to dialogue like, "Which do I sacrifice: an excellent piece of smelting, or this Institute?"

Call it the Nicolas Cage Full Employment Act. Or better yet, since Nic Cage is a precious national resource that's currently being distributed unevenly, the Nic Cage National Equalization Act. It should be up to the federal government to make sure that as many ludicrously insane movies as possible have access to the vital panacea that is Nic Cage.

Lots more lulzy remarks at io9. At least that reviewer enjoyed the movie, even as a train wreck (and trust me, there are lots of train wrecks in Atlas Shrugged). The same can't be said of most of the rest of the reviewers.

The Nation: Rand Appalling: New 'Atlas Shrugged' Movie Booed Off Planet

It takes a lot to get a 0% at the mass market critics' consensus site Rotten Tomatoes. Pick an awful movie you can think of and it probably managed a 5% or maybe even a 25%. Somehow, Atlas Shrugged, Part I (yes! more to look forward to!), which opens Friday, has at this writing achieved the rare feat.

In other words, not a single critic to date, from major and minor outlet, high or lowest of low of lowbrow, likes it one bit. I like the headline over the Chicago Tribune review: "Taxing Indeed." Still waiting for "Don't Go (Galt) There." Or "Born Under a Bad Ayn."

ETA: The movie's rating has now risen to 8%, which still makes it the lowest rated movie out of the top 50 currently in theaters.

My favorite was from Roger Ebert.

"The most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms."

The pithiest came from Bill Goodykoontz of the Arizona Republic.

"It has taken decades to bring Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" to the big screen.They should have waited longer."

Time to add those to my collection of anti-Objectivist quotes. Speaking of which, here are some of my favorites about the movie.

"There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood ...in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."~Raj Patel in The Value of Nothing.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
~Dorothy Parker on Atlas Shrugged

"Who is John Galt?" A two dimensional character in a third rate novel written by Alan Greenspan's dominatrix.~Inventor on Daily Kos.

Ah, yes, Alan Greenspan. This is where the post turns a little more serious. The late Paul Samuelson had the following to say about him:

And this brings us to Alan Greenspan, whom I've known for over 50 years and who I regarded as one of the best young business economists. Townsend-Greenspan was his company. But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy. He actually had instruction, probably pinned on the wall: 'Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good.'

Yet again the similarity between Objectivism and Scientology appears, and not in a funny way, either.

Greenspan also makes a cameo in Maureen Dowd's comment on Atlas Shrugged, along with Paul Ryan.

Congressman Ryan has said the reason he got involved in public service was “by and large” because of Rand, and he has encouraged his staffers to read “Atlas Shrugged.”

You’d think that our fiscal meltdown would have shown the flaw in Rand’s philosophy. She thought we could derive morals from the markets. But we derived immorality from the markets.
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What Rand and acolytes like Alan Greenspan failed to realize is that if everyone acts in self-interest and no one takes into account the weakness to the entire system that occurs when everybody indulges in the same kind of risky behavior, the innocent and the guilty are engulfed.

Ms. Dowd brings me to the serious point of this post (gloating is not a serious point), Objectivism is a philosophy that is contributing to our problems. Worse yet, it is becoming a response to our problems, making them even worse.

What, you say, Objectivism causes collapse? Yes. It's all there in the manual. But that's the subject of Part II.

Stay tuned.