hahahahahaha Atlas Shrugged is being made into a movie! with Angelina Jolie! [EDIT: actually not anymore! oh well!]

The Atlasphere: Ayn Rand Dating & Networking

OTM. I've a few objectivist friends and in each of their cases they were already predisposed to a high degree of self-centeredness and isolation. Sara has done this frightening self-indoctrination thing where she's read Atlas & Fountainhead twice a year for the last 8 years.

Her political philosophy is "as long as the government let's me close the door to my house and leaves me the fuck alone, I don't care what else it does (to you or anyone else)."

My fave philosophy prof who pointed out that trying to focus on selfishness and asshole self-centeredness as a means to actually develop a self tends to result in hilarious failure. "Selfishness is not selfish enough" or some such.

I see this as fairly otm. I'm in the buckle of the Bible Belt, and I just don't see that many politically engaged, under 25, right wing Christians these days. Perhaps it will come with age?

True: all we do see is decline in participation at the polls.

It's a remarkably libertarian sentiment, I think.

oh dear Lord. Would this be less toxic or even more toxic than those "Conservative T-shirts!@!!1" pop-ups?

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Villians design a sound-wave machine that can make things explode, which is tested on a goat in a public ceremony.
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I remember the novel having some entertaining set pieces, and the Epic cinema prose which praises American landscapes and industrial machinary is effectively visceral in doses. The most ineresting thing about it though is the fact that the villians are all defined as passive-aggressive types who used their emotions to manipulate people. This aspect, if adapted correctly may resonate massively with the emo backlash in the culture.

i love "sewer, gas, and electric." it starts out with a parody of the first scene of atlas shrugged. but everything's better when you add a mutant flying shark.

Then I moved on to James Joyce and the Pogues or something, I forget.

I never went through a "Rand phase" because I read Anthem at age 14 and thought it was a poorly written, melodramatic pile of BS. (But I won 30 bucks from the Ayn Rand Institute for the essay I wrote about it.)

(x-post)

Yeah, I can't imagine any 15 year old reading anything from Marx except the Communist Maniphesto.

Now that's how Rand makes in-roads in education. Every English class from seventh grade on had a poster for their essay contest. I never could bring myself to enter.

(I never had a Rand phase - I had an Orwell/Hemingway/pine-for-the-glorious-Spanish Republic phase. I call that phase "my teenage years.")

And Nietzsche had plenty of problem, mainly involving women. Either in his take on them("Everything Nietzsche ever knew about women was second-hand and third-rate" -Walter Kaufman) or his nutzoid sister who shacked up with a proto-nazi husband and put out a random blather of N's notes and called it "Will to Power."

I don't remember Marxist boy's opinion on Kant, but I know he's read him and a ton of other philosophers. (He and another friend of mine are in a Facebook group called "Let the General Will Be Sovereign" where argue about Rousseau.)

-- Eppy (epp...) (webmail), Today 5:47 PM. (Eppy) (link)

EH?

I've only read half of Twilight of the Idols and am in the process of reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra but I wouldn't call him a political philosopher. He seems like more of a moral philosopher determined to tear down rationalist and Christian tradition