Maybe libelous in England, but far less so in the U.S.
So, as a real Amurikin, I’ll start the list! (Though yeah, “second” rate is pretty generous with this one.)
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That is hard to “like” without feeling icky.
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Well, get over it, you wimpy liberal!!
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Whew, that’s some poor syntax in that meme; wonder if it was comrade-generated…
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What did she think about Benjamin Franklin?
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html
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- Correct use of “England” rather than “Britain” for our libel laws.
- Appreciation of the difference.
Are you absolutely sure you’re an Amurikin? You seem remarkably well informed on right pondianism.
(Looks around suspiciously)
Are you now or have you ever been a fan of John Oliver?
(You may wish to plead the 5th on legal advice.)
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Right? It does evince the markings of one of Trump’s favorite fan clubs, the “poorly educated.” (I have no idea if he actually said the following to People, though I don’t doubt he’s at least said more or less the same in private.)
Yep, born and raised. England/Britain/the UK in general is one of my steady foreign interests, not sure why. I think Oliver is pretty good, tethered as he is by a corporate contract. I dunno, maybe it all goes back to an early appreciation of the more sophisticated (and even unsophisticated) absurdities of Monty Python.
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At least the FBI doesn’t do that witch-hunt thing any more.
What gauge hook you use with that bait?
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Ah yes, because shooting people is how you get others to respect your opinion. Oh wait, the other thing: Hate you and not care about your opinion at all.
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Just like you don’t want to mix Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism if you want to understand communism, I’d be very wary of confusing the church of Rand (okay, Objectivism) with Libertarianism. They may seem similar at a long distance, but unless you’re simply using Rand as a bogeyman, it behooves us to understand the difference. (Most Libertarians I’ve met simply roll their eyes at her mention.)
At the time that it was popular, a lot of people had their lives influenced by Rand because they read her works when they were fighting battles for their own identity, and Rand justified turning one’s back on social obligations - all social obligations. It was the freedom to be selfish.
And this included freedom to be selfish enough to leave the church of one’s parents and the freedom be selfish enough to follow their own path instead of their parents intended career path for them, or the freedom to be selfish enough to marry who they wanted, among other forms of selfishness.
This did not make them Objectivists or Libertarians (in fact, I think the two people I know who whose lives were most influenced by her writing are pretty far left).
Now, of course, Rand became a poster child for a certain class of right (the other class of right hate her passionately, since she denied the right of the social obligation and religion to dictate personal behaviour), so most people whose lives were influenced by her writing aren’t in a hurry to advertise that fact.
But I’m more comfortable just leaving her as a cultural artifact of the time, rather than building her up as a sort of bogeyman of the left that has left acolytes holding the reins of power. We can leave the conspiracy theories to the right.
(And yes, personally, I still take way to much amusement over reading about the splitting of the church of Rand over the interpretation of quantum mechanics. And the fact that according to the scriptures, you can logically deduce from first principles whether vanilla or chocolate ice cream is better (it was chocolate, if memory serves).)
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Don’t be silly; Coulter doesn’t need to shoot anyone, as plenty of people already hate her, just on GP- and countless more couldn’t begin to care less about her alleged opinions.
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I don’t, and while a lot of small-l libertarians roll their eyes a lot of those pushing large-L Libertarianism (like Gary Johnson) use her ponderous novels and simple-minded tracts as gateway works. Unfortunately, even though the people you knew outgrew its adolescent justifications for living one’s own authentic life, it’s still popular with people like Clarence Thomas, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, etc.: grown men and women who should know better but proudly claim her nonsense as an inspiration, somehow reconcile it with fundie “family values”, and continue to recommend it to potential supporters as a legitimate and coherent philosophy that forms the basis of modern American Libertarianism. They hand out the books, they cite her in speeches, they produce bad straight-to-DVD movies.
So I’m afraid the cult, while as ridiculous as $cientology, still exerts far more influence on modern American movement Libertarianism and conservatism than it should.
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I’ve heard it told to me by libertarians: “You see, the reason we have such a terrible government is because of regulatory capture. That’s why we should get rid of all the regulations, and in fact even those regulatory branches. No EPA = No corruption in the EPA.”
And then when I point out, the only thing preventing rivers catching on fire regularly is the EPA, they act as if the free market’s unfettered action in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t directly lead to the environmental disasters that necessitated the creation of the EPA in the first place.
It’s frankly, astounding the lengths they’ll go to, to blame the government for what private industry does to corrupt the government, then ignore the fact that private industry’s bad actions are what necessitated government action at all.
It’s as if they were never forced to read Upton Sinclair in high school.
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I’ve heard similar “logic” from Libertarians, which only serves to convince me that they read more Rand than Sinclair in high school. As much as more serious and thoughtful libertarians would like to relegate her embarrassing cult to the past based on the fact that they were able to personally, it’s still quite active.
In contrast, I don’t see a similar number of modern American progressives (and certainly none with any mainstream influence) going on about how great Che or Mao were.
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Yes.
See point #7 (3:40) in the video I posted upthread.
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From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.
It isn’t just fun to go with “fuck you, I’ve got mine”; it’s morally essential. (It is not clear to me what her position on people who assist others because doing so pleases them is; I assume she just didn’t worry about such square circles…)
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If you think that capitalism is ultimately doomed by its internal contradictions; sending the most hardcore true believers you can find seems pretty sensible.
Especially when it is clearly possible to run an almost entirely capitalist economy with some of the rough edges welfare-stated off for quite some time; as long as no short-sighted idiots lose track of the fact that buying off the proles is cheaper and more pleasant than having to kill them off.
Rand really is perfect.
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Well, to be fair, I’ve seen a lot more Che t-shirts than Rand t-shirts :-).
With respect to the EPA, I don’t expect the pendulum to swing toward tighter regulation until we’ve had some significant wide-spread environmental disasters (the kind that kill hundreds or thousands in days) that have a nice clear connection to pollution. Voters have moderately short memories, and I don’t really expect the events that inspired the creation of the EPA to have any significance to the current generation.
The disasters they read about about in history books (if they read about them) just can’t happen today… Except, of course, they can if you strip away everything that protected us from their re-occurrence. But I don’t expect the voters to understand that.
And in the end, it’s the voters that determine what happens and not some not-so-secret cabal. If we can can persuade the voters to adopt our core belief and values, then nothing can stop our eventual progress, not even the ghost of Rand.
If we cannot, then we will lose, and there is nothing that will save us.
It’s why I think that concentrating on the evil ghosts (and not ghosts) will net us very little. It causes us to expend mental energy on something that even if we could succeed, would buy us little except possibly delay of the inevitable.
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Also the CIA doesn’t …
