Atlas Sucked

via Hey Jenny Slater:

So I've been reading at several different blogs how a small but vocal cadre of libertarian right-wing-authoritarian-masquerading-as-libertarian bloggers are threatening to respond to Barack Obama's cruel, Marxist attempts to make us all communist put the highest marginal income-tax rate back where it was in the late 1990s by "going John Galt" -- i.e. quitting work in protest and ceasing to make contributions to a society that supposedly only wants to suck off of them like leeches -- and I was prepared to write a long, withering rant about how stupid that is, but a) DougJ at Balloon Juice has already done a better and more succinct job than I would've done (and is named Doug to boot) and b) there's no empirical proof that anyone's actually done it yet.

So in lieu of that rant, I will simply say this: If you're basing your lifestyle, your belief system, or even the name of one of your pets on Atlas Shrugged or anything else written by Ayn Rand, you are a tool.

This isn't even the cranky asshole left-wing liberal in me telling you this, this is the cranky asshole English-lit minor: Atlas Shrugged sucks. It sucks as both a political allegory and a work of fiction. It sucks hard. Atlas Shrugged is not a novel, it is a pissy, monotonous political treatise disguised as a novel....read more.

driftglass takes on " The Authoritarian Mind"

"They [Native Americans] didn’t have any rights to the land,
and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights
which they had not conceived and were not using . . . .
What was it that they were fighting for,
when they opposed white men on this continent?
For their wish to continue a primitive existence,
their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched,
unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out
so that you will live practically like an animal,
or a few caves above it.
Any white person who brings the element of civilization
has the right to take over this continent."














-- Wingnut Oligarch Bitch Goddess Ayn Rand,
during the Q&A after her address to West Point, 1974



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