Ayn Rand wrote her books with characters divided between the supermen, the hard-working but untalented servant laborer class, and the parasites who opposed the supermen only because they hate themselves and the world and wish to see it burn.

No wonder then it's like a religion. It's how Rand was able to build a cult where she banned art as 'unobjectivist' based on her whims, convinced her followers she had the right to demand their money without earning it, and to sex with their husbands, as she was inherently better.

I did not know about the husband-fucking.

To be fair, it was just one husband, and it was more of an open-relationship thing where everyone involved was hypothetically okay with it.

That said, open relationships involving Ayn Rand work out about as well as you'd expect them to. The husband in question ended up being removed from her will, taken out of every acknowledgments section of her book, and she never spoke to him again.

In "The Passion of Ayn Rand", Barbara Branden (the wife) describes the affair. Rand didn't get her consent, so much as tell her "The fact that you don't want me sleeping with your husband shows you are a weak parasite trying to suck away the happiness of stronger people. So either consent, or be excommunicated." There might be legal consent, but its classic cult behavior.

Branden was a devoted acolyte of Rand's and close to her throughout her life. And yet, "The orthodox Randists, led by Leonard Peikoff, have put it about that anyone who utters a word in praise of the book is to be shunned, boycotted, and cut off root and branch."

Oh fuck. I didn't know about any of that.

You win this time, IrishWhiskey.

So wait, what? There's an ultra-Randroid sect for whom AS is "too commercial" or some shit? Leonard who? This is some good stuff over here.

Leonard Peikoff became her intellectual heir after she disowned husband guy we were talking about earlier. You can find a pretty sweet video clip of Bill O'Reilly trying to talk sense into him if you just Google his name. I would have submitted it some time ago, but I'm not about the low-hanging fruit.

"the parasites who opposed the supermen only because they hate themselves and the world and wish to see it burn."

Ironically, that description applies more to John Galt and Atlas Shrugged fans.

Fled? We couldn't get rid of her fast enough.

Oooooh fuck, that's gold! *****

Awesome.

Pretty much.

There are actually a lot of really interesting and worthwhile concepts in Rand's writing.

That said, I don't really disagree with any of the other comments here criticizing the giant problems with her philosophy.

And her ardent followers are just worthless.

I think the most charitable thing you can say about Rand's writing, *which I haven't been subjected to but am responding only to the commentary I've seen*, is that the story might describe a set of circumstances under which the seeming asshole is the more valuable character. Randroids go along with the idea that the circumstances involved make for a good stand-in for the general circumstances of the world, and so they infer that the seeming asshole is the hero in general. If you think, for one of the infinitely many possible reasons, that those circumstances are merely contingent, and so that the Ultimate Ethical Theory requires more than what has been given in a /novel/, then you may think that even full agreement with the story's heroes and their actions does not suffice to show that the story could establish the basic moral code of humanity. At most, it shows how things ought to work under a particular set of circumstances. Randroids think that particular set is pretty much the set that always obtains. That's my theory.

Rand had serious issues, but she would never have commented on something she hadn't actually read, so she's less of a tool than exy is.

Ba-boosh. Only commenting on my impressions, gained from encounters with a few fanatics in my day. Good job ferreting out the lack of credentials in my post.

They do.

She just couldn't use her productive ability to find the spill supression button in After Effects.

conversely, if you light the set and talent properly they work just fine

these people are amateur hacks who do not deserve to live

I say we sabotage the infrastructure, then a handful of us hide in a cave and wait for billions of people to die, so that way the amateurs and idiots are gone and we can take over unopposed using our skills as company executives and songwriters.

No wait, that's idiotic.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

spoken loosely...No man is an island.

Like how republicans are gay?

Man. Fuck those guys.

Rand's admiration of a real-life child killer:

http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm

@Bort: Your link has changed. It's now:

http://michaelprescott.net/romancing-the-stone-cold.html

And while I'm glad someone is adding to the "Rand was a nutcase" files for those who still worship her lunacy, I would point out that in several of his other essays, Michael Prescott actually thinks "medium" John Edwards is a REAL psychic and that the dead can talk to the living.

^Binro reply