So wait....Ayn Rand's "masterpiece" has a part where she kills off every type of person she hates?

[Tommy_Carcetti]

I never bothered to read Atlas Shrugged, nor do I have any desire to do so now. But a DU post yesterday satirizing the plot of the novel made note of a part in the book where Rand puts on a train various types of people she despises for what she sees as being anti-objectivist or anti-capitalist and kills them all in a bloody train crash.

I thought to myself, that couldn't be real. Could it?

So I did some research, and I found out, yes, it was real. 100% real.

I'll spare you the long winded recitation of how she describes the doomed passengers, but a full text for your enjoyment can be found here:

http://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2007/10/that-winston-tunnel-scene-in-full.html

The victims include teachers, professors, lawyers, anti-monopolists, humanitarians, family members of government officials, journalists, government loan recipients and other people that Rand apparently thought were of no use to her objectivist vision for society.

This is the second time that I've read something about Ayn Rand that I had trouble believing was actually true. The first was when she expressed her open admiration of William Hickman, a child murderer:

http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/romancing-the-stone-cold.html

So seriously, was Ayn Rand a psycopath? How sick was that woman? And how is she considered a beloved figure despite all these sick and twisted thoughts in her head?

[RagAss]

1. Yes. It's all there. And they call us crazy and marginalize our concern when we...

point out that we are dealing with sociopaths who grew up wishing us dead !!! And now they have the opportunity to do just that.

[rDigital]

12. Just keep in mind that the person in your avatar was an ACTUAL murderer. nt

[Kingofalldems]

31. Who did he murder?

And I would assume by your focus on an avatar and not the question at hand that you're OK with Rand.

[NightWatcher]

2. forget her fiction, read her essays "The Virtue of Selfishness"

"Objectivism" at least sounds nice, like "fair trade" and "clean coal", but to ultimately wallow in the goodness of being a selfish prick is the height of hubris and is why these people cannot be elected.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

5. It's rough reading, in more ways than one.

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_objectivist_ethics

The first sign that this woman is not of her own right mind was the fact she started off her essay by quoting her own fictional character.

What type of person does that?

[white_wolf]

13. You know I read some weird stuff in my life.

I've read some pretty confusing pointless stuff in my life, but nothing I've read comes close to just how utterly hateful, selfish, and pointless Ayn Rand's works are. You know I've read Nietzsche and it confused the hell out of me, hell I read Crowley's Book of the Law and it made no sense to me whatsoever, but Ayn Rand's works have got to be the most hateful and useless things I've ever read. Everything else I've read was at least somewhat interesting to me, but she is boring. I can forgive an author having awful political views, I can't forgive an author being boring.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

3. I will provide a couple of short examples, just to show how nasty a writer this woman was:

"The woman in Roomette 10, Car No.3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, and that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing."

"The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, 'I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.'

The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels."

It's as though you can almost see her typing away on her typewriter, with her teeth seething as she writes these words as her blood pressure rises with hate.

[white_wolf]

14. The 3rd one is telling.

She condemns a man to die simply because he writes plays she disagrees with. So she is only pro-liberty if you agree with her, if not you can go die a train wreck or just read her books they'll kill you by boredom.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

18. The mother and children dying because her husband was a government official....

...reminds me of Timothy McVeigh's "collateral damage" attitude towards not only the government workers in the Murrah Building, but the children in the day care center within the building as well.

Truly psychopathic.

[HooptieWagon]

15. If she were alive today...

I envision her pounding out hateful rants on her keyboard (with nicotine-stained fingers) from her parents basement and posting them on FR...
I see no intellectualism in her writing or "philosophy", just outbursts of pent-up hate with a high degree of narcsisism.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

16. The fact that Atlas Shrugged is over 1,200 pages long and by most accounts very boring....

...shows me that the woman by principle did not believe in editing and revision, and that any attempt to cull down her "masterpiece" into a shorter, more managable form was somehow viewed as an affront to her individualism. And as a result, her work suffers. But she's too stupid or blind to realize that.

[2pooped2pop]

26. she'd be a fox anchor. n/t

[Tommy_Carcetti]

33. Ayn Rand in a miniskirt?

Eww!

[2pooped2pop]

35. they'd tell their knuckle draggers that she was good looking

and they'd believe it.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

38. I'm telling you though, the woman was a splitting image of Livia Soprano.

Don't believe me?

[2pooped2pop]

39. Wowser! lol n/t

[deutsey]

4. Just look at the body count in places where Randian philosophy was brutally implemented

Chile, Argentina, etc. as Naomi Kleins details in The Shock Doctrine.

[ewagner]

29. Randian, Austrian, Chicago School...

whatever name they decide to use this week....regardless...the philosophy has never been implemented ANYWHERE unless it was at the point of a gun...virtually or figuratively.

[Javaman]

6. I wonder what her opinion was of hitler? nt

[Gin]

27. I was wondering that too,

Does ann coulter worship rand also?

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

7. What does that make the people who take her twisted fictional fantasies seriously

and give books like Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents under the tree?

[Viva_Daddy]

8. The authors of the "Left Behind" series had the same fantasy. RW minds think alike.

[just1voice]

9. Repukes absolutely love torturing people too, in real life

And for anyone who thinks I kidding, I'm not. Look up GITMO, Bagram, Dawood, Abu Ghraib, Poland torture camps, and mobile detention centers.

[DonCoquixote]

10. where Ayn contradicts her followers

"If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man."

[Ikonoklast]

11. Looks like she hates everyone on Wall Street, then.

Rand was nuts, and people that fawn over her drug-addled adolescent revenge fantasies are both socially and politically immature.

[nanabugg]

37. BINGO!!!!! nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

17. As a NOVEL, in the period it was written, it is considered a masterpiece

and part of the SCIENCE FICTION canon. How this became political philosophy, and yes she wrote books on Objectivism, is a good question.

It is one of those that as a science fiction writer should read, especially if they want to push a political ideology.

The problem is that a lot of these yokels on the right have literally confused a work of fiction, where I can make everything work out the way I want... with reality.

And yes, I have read part of it, and scratched my head as to how this is considered a masterpiece. Her short fiction, is much better.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

19. L Ron Hubbard was able to create a pseudo religion out of his science fiction work.

Which was as long winded as the stuff that Rand wrote.

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. And you know what is funny as can be?

That was on a dare. No serious. L. Ron Hubbard created Dianetics on a dare.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

22. Wow.

As Johnny Carson said, "I did not know that."

Learn something new every day.

[hifiguy]

24. You are correct, nadin

I heard the story directly from Gordon R. Dickson, a highly regarded science fiction author.

It seems that Hubbard, Robert Heinlein and IIRC Clark Ashton Smith were sitting at the bar at a science fiction gathering in the 1940s. Hubbard bet Heinlein and Smith that he could invent a religion that would be successful and they took the bet.

Dickson got the story from Heinlein himself; they were friends.

[BarackTheVote]

25. Since L. Ron was brought up

I have to go tangential and post this--it's hilarious!

Cracked>Stuff That Must Have Happened>How Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard Came Up With Their Big Ideas:
[link:http://www.cracked.com/video_18426_ayn-rand-5Bplaceholder5D.html|

[HooptieWagon]

30. Yes, a very good analogy. nt

[hifiguy]

21. Rand was a raging sociopath.

She has been accuately described as the Charlie Manson to her lunatic "family" of followers that do her bidding.

[hifiguy]

23. That is almost certainly the sickest, vilest piece of "prose"

ever typed (I can't call it writing) in the English language.

[RoccoRyg]

28. How ironic

In my book, a liberal response to Atlas Shrugged, I do something quite similar.

[Marr]

32. I definitely think she was some sort of sociopath.

Her admiration for that serial killer really says a lot about her.

[JesterCS]

34. See: Operation Northwood

[nadinbrzezinski]

36. Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged

Were published well before the OCS, let alone the CIA, we're a twinkle in any official eyes.