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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (69935)	1/19/2009 5:52:11 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 71178

Rambi: Post of the year-lol! But her one tell sign is that she has no sense of humor. Absolutely spot on. NONE at all! And the other thing that struck me in Atlas, which I hated, was her treatment of parenting as a kind of secondary, not terribly important, activity, and certainly not really relevant to her grand philosophy. I think the only mention it got was toward the end in her utopian mountain retreat where the kids were in a sort of nursery taken care of by women whom Rand obviously disdained as inferior minds. Her main characters couldn't be bothered with having children and remain happily infertile despite their active sex lives. Goes with Mme's point on how completely non-maternal Rand was- in real life as well as in her writing. She couched her own behavior in pseudo-heroic terms to justify actions I think were hurtful and selfish. I hated her characters, and found Dagny Taggart horrid. And it WAS kinky-- and she seemed to put up with physical violence against herself on the part of the men. I remember being horrified when Hank Reardon smacked her... not that I didn't want to smack her a lot myself in the course of that endless book.. While discipline may be necessary at times, using humor is far better as a distraction. We always found it provided some kind of space to step back from bad situations. ANd everyone here knows I survived CW's teen years only by making fun of myself and our conflicts.

To: Rambi who wrote (69935)	1/19/2009 5:55:55 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 71178

youtube.com Here you go Any Rand in person. She is creepy-lol!

To: Rambi who wrote (69935)	1/19/2009 6:03:06 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

"not that I didn't want to smack her a lot myself" I am ROFL over that one I wanted to smack Ayn AND her characters. But in the end I just feel really sorry for her (for being such a freak) and for the people who seem to feel the freak's works are some how relevant to human beings who have "normal" human feelings. The woman was deeply damaged- I'd love to see a psych profile of her. And while the damaged deserve are pity, I'm not really interested in emulating them. I think of the line in the Ref wrt human feelings where the woman character says "Didn't your alien leaders teach you that before they sent you here?" And no, Ayn's alien leaders didn't teach her much...

To: Rambi who wrote (69935)	1/21/2009 12:08:08 AM
From: JF Quinnelly	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71178

The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult by Murray N. Rothbard Written in 1972, this was the first piece of Rand revisionism from the libertarian standpoint. ...If the glaring inner contradictions of the Leninist cults make them intriguing objects of study, still more so is the Ayn Rand cult, which, while in some sense is still faintly alive, flourished for just ten years in the 1960s; more specifically, from the founding of the Nathaniel Branden lecture series in early 1958 to the Rand-Branden split ten years later. For not only was the Rand cult explicitly atheist, anti-religious, and an extoller of Reason; it also promoted slavish dependence on the guru in the name of independence; adoration and obedience to the leader in the name of every person’s individuality; and blind emotion and faith in the guru in the name of Reason. Virtually every one of its members entered the cult through reading Rand’s lengthy novel Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in late 1957, a few months before the organized cult came into being. Entering the movement through a novel meant that despite repeated obeisances to Reason, febrile emotion was the driving force behind the acolyte’s conversion... lewrockwell.com