Tell me, what do you think of me?

I absolutely love this

http://www.veoh.com/m/watch.php?v=v17990884DXWTS8At?h1=Al+Franken+Plays+Himself

I thought it appropriate

Al Franken nails it!

he was the inspiration for Stephen Colbert. Maybe, someday, Stephen will follow Al to the Senate.

And have never forgotten it. One of the funniest things ever

Thanks for posting!

How about when we all but genocided First Nations?

How about the mind boggling sums of time, money and energy we've been more than willing to use for wars?

The idea that Ayn Rand, awful as her ideology is, turned this nation into a greedy one ignores a lot.

She just disguised it as a philosophy, legitimising it in the minds of people who might otherwise have been troubled by conscience.

conscience espouse Rand's philosophy anyway. You have to be pretty bloodless/soul-less to buy into it. JMO

Plenty of anecdata in there about people who were turned into assholes by reading Rand. No hard evidence, though, so I'm not sure I altogether buy it.

that is much older, though just as evil and inhumane.

I don't think reading a book turns a compassionate giving person into a greedy, heartless one. Maybe I am underestimating.

and negative tendencies into a virtuous philosophy.

This isn't hard to predict at all and it has done a lot of damage.

"nor did we all but genocide the First Nations"

In 1860, the US was a nation of 31,400,000 people. Here's what I read about slaves "Of the total southern white population of 8,099,760 in 1860, only 384,000 owned slaves."

Figuring even 7 people per family, the slave owning families were 2.69 million people or 33% of the population of the south and only 8.6% of the total US population.

If 8.6% of a group is doing something is it accurate or fair to say that WE are doing it?

One thing that struck me in reading this history was that slavery - was started by rich people.

"Slaves were expensive - a healthy adult male was priced at about L23 at midcentury - and required at least a modicum of lifelong care. Ordinary planters could seldom afford them and could not easily include them within the family structure of their farms. But increasingly slaves appear in the records of the more affluent, and by 1675, as the result of hundreds of private, unrecorded decisions, they became common on the region's plantations." (The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn p. 525)

Those same rich people were quite willing to also exploit white people too. "To the relatively secure, ambitious small and middle-level planters seeking to expand their holdings, as well as to the rising gentry, the freedmen, land poor and desperate, became competitors and constituted a threat that the planters sought to contain. Through their representatives in the House of Burgesses, the planters passed laws that extended, by all sorts of devices, the length of the servants' bondage; imposed penalties for idleness and bastardy; and granted loans that tied the freedmen in webs of debt....In 1642 more than half of Maryland's freedmen were tenants, and they were often indebted." (op cit p. 522)

As for the near genocide. Well, my best source is Russell Thornton's "American Indian: Holocaust and Survival, a population history since 1492"

A graph on page xvii of the preface sums things up. It shows an American Indian population of about 5 million in 1492, that falls down to about 200,000 by 1890. However, the biggest losses are the drop below 3 million - before the year 1600. That's over 2 million lost - before Jamestown was even founded in 1607. By 1700, when the US white population was about 250,000 and restricted mostly to the east coast, American Indian population is below 2 million. Over 60% of the population loss happened before there was significant European presence.

As a final note, just in time for Christmas, I would remember the most famous reindeer (importer) of all.

"But it was in this same epoch (1884) that an American Presbyterian missionary, Dr. Sheldon Jackson, set up shop in Alaska as Superintendent of Education. He found that whisky, prostitution, and disease, liberated from the more rigid controls of Russian times, had drastically reduced the Eskimo population. The thousands of Eskimos that in the 1820s had inhabited the Alaskan north and northwest coasts were only hundreds in the 1880s....

Dr. Jackson set about to replace the vanished caribou with tame reindeer, change the Eskimos from hunters to herdsmen, and bring them some education, some medical care, and some legal protection.
Hercules never faced a task more beset with discouragements and opposition - passive from the Eskimos, violent from frontier whites who could not see any earthly reason for helping the dirty and wretched natives to survive. But in 1892 the United States government brought in the first sizeable herd of reindeer, and hired Lapps from Norway to teach their care and breeding; and to everyone's amazement except Dr. Jackson's the experiment began to work." (Indians by William Brandon pp 286-287)

Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the red-nosed reindeer importer, you'll be forgotten by his-tor-ree.

"One thing that struck me in reading this history was that slavery - was started by rich people."

"For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism."

Many of the people who follow and believe Rand also profess to be Christians. There is nothing Christian about Rand or her grand selfish plan. You can't be both it just doesn't work. Christ didn't ask us to help the poor, he demanded we help the poor.

At the end of her useless, selfish life Rand was on SS and Medicare. So her final act was to agree with and accept socialism.

Her ideas are not worth the paper they are written on. I have serious reservations about anyone who respects and agrees with Any Rand. She is not what America is all about. We may not be perfect but we are not Any Rand.

It was hilarious. I asked if they were talking about the same Ayn Rand - the one who was an athiest, pro-choice, had a 15 year affair with a married man, and wrote Atlas Shrugged?

You should have seen the look on his face. Priceless.

That was an interesting point about cult leaders being deliberately inconsistent in order to weed out clear thinkers who might challenge their authority. I had never thought about it like that before.

Neither has anything to do with socialism. Both were invented, not in the U.S., but in Germany in the 1880s by the very anti-socialist 'Iron Chancellor' Bismarck.

an adult who likes Rand has no brain or heart

when the first settlers murdered their first indigenous human being because they were in the way of "manifest destiny." Then there was the war that killed a half million Americans, fought so slavery could remain the law of the land.

Oh, dear XChrom, America's been a selfish, greedy nation for a long time. Ayn Rand just wrote about it.

believe to begin with.

yet it is an individual cell. It cannot do its work without cooperation of all the other cells in the organism. When a cell to us "rogue" that is called cancer. So Rands philosophy is basically cancer of society at large. Rugged Individualism is a cancer on the entire Earth.

Balance is needed, balance of self and community. That can't be said enough in this day.

That would make a topic for a very interesting post on its own

... that Satanists come in several denominations with wildly divergent beliefs and LaVey's works are influential in only one of them.

She is one of the very few writers who, in my view, the world would have been far better off had she died prior to ever putting pen to paper. However, since she did, I hope her death was prolonged and agonizing. That woman has been responsible for more deaths than smallpox.

She was evil incarnate.

I doubt her family had the status she claimed. She was a misanthrope and a liar - nothing more.

Ayn Rand books are a "Men's Rights" bible as well. Biatchy women are just walking around *fantasizing* about being thrown down and brutally taken by the Masculine Force. Then afterward she will probably blend into that anonymous mass of mediocrity that's holding back that Masculine Force from personally Building Something Great and Being a the Most Important Person in the World.

I recognized her works as fiction, not to be taken as any kind of blueprint for government or society. In other words, I got over it. I think that Rand aficionados have adolescent brains that failed to mature.

was clearly insane and the characters were all caricatures and not very good ones.

"Atlas Shrugged was one I finished in silly giggles, trying to envision hard-bitten Dagny Taggart with a whiny toddler wanting a lap clinging to her tight skirt and a world that really didn't give a shit when Galt disappeared since his secretaries did all the real work, anyway. In fact, they'd have been much more productive with all the old windbags gone to join him in his Gulch.

And windbags they all were, multipage phillipics substituting badly for conversation. I confess I thumbed through them quickly to get them over with.

Any adult who takes her garbage seriously is a case of arrested development.

The key to understanding Rand is that she simply erects ludicrous straw men, then knocks them down.

No 1984, but OK. She does love her one-dimensional strawmen, though.

I could never get through Atlas Shrugged. Something about the addled mind of a speed freak makes their writing a bit long-winded.

She kept urging me to read it in school. Later, in my mid-20s, I grabbed a copy for free someplace and got about halfway through before I threw it under the bed in disgust, boredom and apathy. Later, I called her and told her I got as far as I did.

She started laughing. She wanted me to read it to see how stupid the premise, plot, character development (a joke and a half right there) and themes were. She waited 15 years for me to read it and bitch about it with her.

They glorify the tendency many teens have towards being arrogant narcissists who think they are hot shit and are being kept down by the grownups.

And other sociopaths are drawn to her.

She crafted an ideology that meshes perfectly well with angsty young men with will-to-power neuroses, grabs them, and never lets go and never lets them become emotionally mature adults.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

Rand's "work" is not writing; it's barely typing.

Greed and selfishness is sadly the foundation of much of the country. When the first settlers found that the land they wanted to claim was already inhabited, they claimed it anyway, killed the Native Americans, and put the survivors on reservations. Then we decided we should make amends for all this by giving them... casinos.

Then the settlers wanted wealth and prosperity, but they decided making their fortunes off the backs of others while sipping sweet tea was preferable over actually having to get their hands dirty and their clothes sweaty themselves. So they kidnapped countless people from Africa and brought them here as property, and they dismissed the Africans as sub humans and savages to justify the slavery. We still haven't decided how to make amends for that, because apparently "Hey, at least you don't have to live in Africa" is good enough.

These days they're bankers, CEOs, and Republican politicians.

The twelve U.S. Presidents who owned slaves could hardly be described as freedom-loving egalitarians.

I've always suspected Rand was at least partly trying to get rich and famous selling books to wealthy capitalists who were comforted by her message of extreme selfishness and who could use her life and work as propaganda in their struggle against communism/collectivism/unselfishness.

Jesus drove the money changers (good capitalists(puke)making a buck/shekel off of God) out of the temple. Told the rich to give all their money away and said most rich people will never get into heaven.

Healed people for no financial gain, gave food to hungry people and didn't castigate them for being lazy bums, saved a woman from being stoned to death for adultery which was perfectly legal thing to do at the time.

And he also...gasp...paid his taxes!

Try to find a Christian church that preaches and believes these thing in America today. Good luck.

Many Christian clergy were at the forefront of the civil rights movement back in the day, The Reverend Martin Luther King to name just one.

Where are they now with the fascist police gunning down innocent kids for being black or macing and busting the heads of people that are tired of the robber barons of walmart and wall street boots on their neck?

All I hear is "give your money to Jesus so i can build another 10 million dollar mega church(and a new mansion, wink)"

SMH....SMH

She possibly turned people who still had a bit of a conscience or weren't full blown sociopaths into people proud of being cold hearted self centered people, by (in their mind) validating the sociopathic way of thinking. She's like Emperor Palpatine / Darth Sidious encouraging Anakin to come to the dark side.

There have always been full blown sociopaths and narcissists in society, but encouraging others who aren't pathologically like that to be like that and helping to tilt them to the dark side is something else.

and greed.

Rand's "work" is to actual philosophy what a medieval astrologer is to Albert Einstein.

I found the writing to be bad in these books and gave up after a couple of chapters

Calvinism is probably much more responsible for America's moral deformity; the idea that if you're rich, it's a sign of god's favour for your righteousness, and if you're poor, you probably deserve to be because of your own feckless and sinful ways? That's a much older idea than Ayn Rand; indeed, the existence of a Calvinist ethos that dates back to the colonial era probably does much to explain exactly why it is that Rand's ideas have found such traction in the USA, and very very little outside of it.

disaster capitalism thing and has done more damage to the economies of Latin America, Europe, the US , Iraq etc. than any other person I can think of.