Flutterby™! : Atlas shrugged, and so did Dan

It is because of Ayn Rand that I survived my '20s. In an era where I had a tremendously skewed risk/reward view, a belief in right and wrong and non-violence bolstered by her philosophies helped me stay alive, out of jail, and from all sorts of other horrible bad ends.

And I could compare her epistemology with _Karl Marx_'s, and despite the strong similarities (they're both staunch materialists), at the point where they diverged her reasons for diverging made a hell of a lot more sense than his.

Eventually that faded. The first cracks came with reading her letters on patents and the space program, and at some point I realized that externalities and a world with finite resources meant that if we could conceive of real estate ownership then having children was an act of violence. Enough of my peers had children, and between that and just looking at history and the human condition, eventually I was worn down to the point where I accepted that, in fact, humans couldn't be rational, and violence was a normal part of the human condition.

So I started voting Democrat. [rimshot]

As Charlene started exposing me to the stuff from Barry Kaufman and the Option Institute, I was also able to see that some of my discontent stemmed from the feeling that that many Objectivists, and Libertarians in general, used their philosophies as excuses, rather than as an empowerment.

But I still have enough of a soft-spot for Rand and that when I heard there was an Atlas Shrugged movie coming out I was kind of excited. However, I have now seen the new Atlas Shrugged trailer.

Uh. Yeah. Trains 90210. Apparently it's like a Paul Verhoeven movie, only without the special effects. Be nice if they could have included some acting.

Sigh.