Ayn Rand Was a Terrible Person: A Short Essay

Shared cultural experiences are one of the strongest ties people can have. A Star Wars fan is going to be fundamentally the same regardless of location or age, because you and he saw the same movies. Kuurion and I, living at either ends of a large-ish continent, have a few such shared cultural experiences. For instance, we both thought Atlas Shrugged was a terrible book. The key difference is that I called bullshit after 82 pages and he read the whole thing.

Atlas Shrugged was written by a very angry woman named Ayn Rand. Rand hated the idea that anyone in this world should have any more or any less than exactly what they worked for. Atlas Shrugged was her dense, heavy-handed, wrathful sermon on how most people in society are parasites sucking off of the creative power of a very few.

But that's not the worst of it. Rand's idea of the cultural hangers-on wasn't simply that they mooched off those who were better than they. She viewed them as anti-progress, and depicted them as such in a way that was the single most offensive thing in the part of the book I made myself read.

One of the major characters is an industrialist named Henry Rearden, a man who has created a metal alloy that does the work of steel, but better. Protagonist Dagney Taggart, sister to a buffoon who controls a railroad, wants to use it to make rails. Nobody else in the industry will touch the stuff, and her brother fights her on it. The gist of the argument against "Rearden metal" is that the railroad people dare not touch anything new.

That's really it. I know that's really it because that single point is harped upon in a way that goes beyond beneath subtlety. Industry leaders fear change.

That would be a really potent message if it were even remotely true. In practice, industry people cannot wait to get new ideas out the door. Look at thalidomide, for God's sake. The people who made that stuff pressured for its availability in the United States in the and didn't apologize for the things it did to people until three weeks ago. Thalidomide came out the same year as Atlas Shrugged, just for comparison.

Rand's book is populated by straw men who are shown to be retardant to progress. Her arrogant opinions, when transposed onto the real world (where they are indeed embraced by certain people), are the most unapologetic kinds of dangerous. Her ideal of growth and independence is the tumor.

I'm Gonna Be an Olympian

I've been holding off on blog posting because what I want to do is write another review of "Homestuck," which Kuurion reviewed back in June. I had originally hoped to have a review ready a month after his, but Homestuck is loooooooong, and it's slow going. But anyway: I'm going to be in the Olympics in 2016. You just wait. They had a thing on the Weather Channel today where one of the WC guys was shown how to throw discus by Olympic people (a trainer and athlete), and that looked doable, but there's the whole "aerodynamics" thing, which I know I'm bad at with frisbees already. So: shot put. Just throwin' a heavy ball around. I'm going to get my own and start practicing.

Always on the Eve of Destruction

According to Wikipedia, the Iraq War lasted from March 20, 2003 until December 18, 2011. On March 20, 2003, I was a student in middle school. On December 18, 2011, I was a college graduate employed in my field and engaged to be married.

I have not known an America without war since my childhood. Even if America is done in Iraq, there is always the question of Afghanistan, a conflict that continues to rumble in the background. But that's for me, as an American; things are far more wretched from the other end of the telescope. Afghanistan has been at war since 1978, against the Soviet Union (1979-1989), the US (2001 - present), and itself throughout. You can read the details here, but basically what we think of as the War in Afghanistan is actually the third act in a very long and bloody play. It somehow gets worse when you find out that the average life expectancy there is about 44 years and you suddenly realize that there aren't going to be that many people who can clearly remember a time before there was war.

If that previous sentence didn't bum you out, you're welcome to look at Wikipedia's list of modern conflicts in the Middle East, which runs from 1918 to the present. War is more common than the lack of war.

And so, at last, we arrive at the present and find that the United States and Israel are engaged in an increasingly tense standoff with Iran over the latter's nuclear ambitions. If you ask the Iranians what they're doing in underground laboratories with uranium, they'll tell you that they're working on a nuclear reactor for the generation of electricity. The other two openly suspect that the Iranians might be building an atom bomb. The politics of it all get so much more complicated after that that nobody really knows what will happen next. And that's bad.

I hope this doesn't sound too detached, but how much more war can this part of the world take? And how much more can the United States take? The 1990s were tremendously dull for me when they happened, but now I can't help but think how nice it would be to live in a country that's not at war somewhere. We have too many problems here at home to afford another war, and yet there is a point beyond which not fighting is worse than fighting. The problem with that is that no two people can ever agree on where that point is - and, in this case, the stakes are exceptionally high.

EDIT: I've just learned that Anonymous is reporting (but not taking credit for) the disabling of the CIA's website, which explains why I couldn't use it to check Afghanistan's life expectancy rate a few minutes ago (I ended up using Wikipedia). In the spirit of looking at what a fantastic and frightening place the world is, take a few minutes to read this article about the rise of the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol of rebellion. It may be coming soon to a street near you.

Gimmie a G!

I work at a newspaper, and one of the perks is that I get a free copy to take home each week. Since I'm a copy editor and proofread almost everything in it before publication, I often only take the free copy for the syndicated crossword puzzle. The following, preserved for posterity, is a conversation I just had with my girlfriend:

Me: Okay, the theme is "2011 in Review" and 19 across is "deposed despot." It's going to be Ghaddafi. How the hell do you spell that?

Her: Well, the first letter is a G or a Q.

Me: Unless it's a K.

Her: ...Right. Well, the second letter is definitely an A.

Me: Unless it's an H.

Her: Shoot, right. I thought I had that one. The last letter is definitely an I.

Me: ...Yeah, I think they all end in I.

Her: How do you think he spelled it?

Me: In Arabic.

[They spelled it "Gaddafi."]
[Later!]

Me: 25 down is "site of nuclear disaster." I don't think they can fit "Fukushima Daiichi" in there, so let's see what they did.

[Glances at word slot, which already has first two letters filled in.]

Me: It's "Japan." MOTHER FUCKER.

In summary, I know that my generation has a reputation for bad memory and worse decorum, but I want the future to recognize that this started generations earlier with the crossword people.

Also, Moammar Ghaddafi should be played at some point by Mickey Rourke. You can't spell "Moammar Ghaddafi" without "Mickey Rourke" if you try hard enough.