Monday, March 16, 2009

Atlas shrugs

The [pinko] message is always the same: "Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good."
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12 comments:

Mr roT said...

Jesus = pinko. Another day at the office on Planet Tecs.

3/16/2009 10:16 AM
Tecumseh said...

No, Jesus was not a pinko. He did rightly warn about the camel and the needle, that's true. But he didn't say Caesar should confiscate the fruits of a man's labor and give them to another man, for political purposes (which is one of the pillars of the pinko philosophy).

3/16/2009 10:38 AM
Mr roT said...

I agree. On both sides the ethic is caricatured though.

Jesus rightly says that greed is bad and we should help each other out. Nothing wrong with that. He also says to render unto Caesar that which is his. OK, up to a point.

Pinkos like Obama think this generosity should be forced and Rand thinks it's an evil.

Both are wrong, but while pinkos are wrong by degree, Rand is wrong in principle. Her point of view needs to be nuanced (read cancelled) with some tripe about long term self-interest includes interest in the group...stuff that the real WSJ types shut their ears to like the boring stuff at Mass every Sunday.

Agreed?

3/16/2009 10:47 AM
Tecumseh said...

And, by the way, Mr Rot, here is what two of your favorite commentators had to say about Ayn Rand: On the left, Noam Chomsky considers Rand "one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history." On the right, William F. Buckley declared: "Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was in fact stillborn." What says you?

3/16/2009 10:47 AM
Tecumseh said...

Wires got crossed, I see now your point. Tell you the truth, I never paid careful attention to what she says, though I saw many references to her work. Like anything else, one can selectively pick and choose from someone's saying, and manipulate them to justify almost anything. It's all a matter of degree, and of intellectual honesty in how one proceeds.

That said, yes, of course it feels better to be altruistic than selfish, and do good deeds than to screw people, a la Madoff. And I don't buy the "greed is good" philosophy (at least not when pushed to the extreme), or spend my life chasing the Golden Calf (to the contrary). That said, that's not what my beef with the pinkos is. Too long to explain, I'm sure you understand. Do I need to draw a commuting diagram?

3/16/2009 10:54 AM
Mr roT said...

How about some inequality?

3/16/2009 11:02 AM
Mr roT said...

I think Buckley's quote is religious in character. And I agree with it.

I don't care what Chomsky says.

3/16/2009 11:03 AM
Tecumseh said...

A tidbit: In the wake of the negative economic situation which began in September of 2008, sales of Atlas Shrugged sharply increased, according to The Economist magazine and The New York Times. The Economist reported that the fifty-two-year-old novel ranked #33 among Amazon.com's top-selling books on 13 January, 2009 and that its thirty day Sales Average showed the novel selling three times faster than during the same period of the previous year, outselling even the newly elected Barack Obama's latest title. With an attached sales chart, The Economist reported that sales "spikes" of the book seemed to coincide with the release of economic data. The reason given by Republican Congressman John Campbell was: "People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in [the novel]... We're living in Atlas Shrugged," echoing Stephen Moore in an article published in The Wall Street Journal on 9 January, 2009, titled "Atlas Shrugged From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years." Subsequently, on 15 March, 2009, Atlas Shrugged ranked #27 at Amazon, and they ranked the novel their #1 seller in "Fiction and Literature."

3/16/2009 11:04 AM
Mr roT said...

Ron Paul

3/16/2009 3:05 PM
Tecumseh said...

What about Ron Paul? OK, he's a crank. But I got the impression during the campaign that he knew more about finance and economics than Mac (which is simply saying \epsilon>0).

3/16/2009 3:25 PM
Mr roT said...

I mean that the current situ calls the crazies out. They think, "Hey, if that zero Obama can get in, then I can."

And I cannot blame them a bit.

This trickles down to the rest of the deep thinkers till you get Amazon overflowing with Ayn Rand buyers.

I guess it's better than a flood of Mao buyers.

3/16/2009 5:33 PM
Tecumseh said...

Or L. Ron Hubbard. We're witnessing the Decline of the West. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

3/16/2009 6:17 PM

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