Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 (Movie)

[DucatiMonster696]

It isn't that people on the left oppose the concept of individual rights, it's just that many think that what she advocates would result in an effective and de-facto decrease of people's individual rights.

If people on the left believe this then they are delusional or highly miss informed. True capitalism cannot properly function as intended without a strong basis and adherence to individual rights. Ayn Rand's personal experience with communism and socialism gave her enough experience to understand what happens under a forced (either direct or indirect) collective of a "workers paradise" instituted on a populace.

 

[William Gaatjes]

If people on the left believe this then they are delusional or highly miss informed. True capitalism cannot properly function as intended without a strong basis and adherence to individual rights. Ayn Rand's personal experience with communism and socialism gave her enough experience to understand what happens under a forced (either direct or indirect) collective of a "workers paradise" instituted on a populace.

Everybody can understand that communism does not work. But capitalism does not equal selfishness either. IHMO : A gentlemen's agreement is something that she would not honor (if she would still be alive)if she would make more money scamming somebody. Capitalism is something that actually works better under the basis of basically being altruistic and knowing when to be selfish when one needs to protect his or herself from corruption or scams.

 

[Steeplerot]

Ayn Rand's personal experience with communism and socialism gave her enough experience to understand what happens under a forced (either direct or indirect) collective of a "workers paradise" instituted on a populace.

Ayn Rand was living in desperate times in Russia. Bolshevism had all of dick to do with the "left" in Russia. She came from a family who supported the Kerensky government who disposed the Czar in the first place.

Ayn Rand's hate of the left is the biggest case of sour grapes of the 20th century as her support of kerensky was just the type of "useful idiots" which Lenin needed to concentrate "all power to the soviets" during those fateful days in wintery Petragrad during WW1.

I am glad she escaped the CCCP when she did, things got worse with uncle joe. But she took the anti part to the extreme to win fame with her new host countries elites. Her endless pandering to the rich gets really transparent in her awful books.

Another fun fact about early Ayn life in Russia, her family ran into the arms of the white armies in the Crimea.

I wonder how many jews she watched being rounded up and slaughtered in the height of the pogroms?

Did her family help or just watch and do nothing?

Good company she kept! She is a fascist traitor from the start. The rest of her shit is more of the same bad knucklehead logic as she descended into sociopathy and started rationalizing her insanity.

If you would like a far more unbiased view of the horrors of early bolshevism and the inner dramas of the soviets coming to power I would get the real libertrian point of view from a woman who was exiled from the USA to Russia at that period of time.


-A woman far more bold then Ayn Rand who confronted Lenin face to face and called him out for turning Petragrad and Russia into a slave camp. (and barely escaped the CCCP to tell the story)


My Disillusionment in Russia

 

[DucatiMonster696]

Everybody can understand that communism does not work. But capitalism does not equal selfishness either. IHMO : A gentlemen's agreement is something that she would not honor if she would make more money scamming somebody. Capitalism is something that actually works better under the basis of basically being altruistic and knowing when to be selfish when one needs to protect his or herself.

Your premise is only valid had she gone out and specifically said that attaining wealth by violating the rights of another person. Ayn Rand never supported criminal behavior which in itself leads to violations of individual rights.

 

[DucatiMonster696]

Ayn Rand was living in desperate times in Russia. Bolshevism had all of dick to do with the "left" in Russia. She herself supported the actual left as she was all for Kerensky government who disposed the Czar in the first place.

Russian Bolshevism was a leftist faction of the Marxist's party in Russia. You can pretend that they were not leftist all you want but in the end this just makes you look silly and delusional.

Ayn Rand's hate of the left is the biggest case of sour grapes of the 20th century as her support of kerensky was just the type of "useful idiots" which Lenin needed to concentrate "all power to the soviets" during those fateful days in wintery Petragrad during WW1.

Ayn Rand's father and family were the ones who sympathized with Kerensky. Ayn Rand was 12 years old during the Russian revolution.

I am glad she escaped the CCCP when she did, things got worse with uncle joe. But she took the anti part to the extreme to win fame with her new host countries elites. Her endless pandering to the rich gets really transparent in her awful books.

Ayn Rand fame came from her understanding and championing of individual rights which trump the will of the majority and that left wing ideologies will not matter how well intention lead to the eroding of the rights of the individual, e.g. Venezuela and Chavez as a modern day example or Fidel and Cuba, etc..

 

[Steeplerot]

Russian Bolshevism was a leftist faction of the Marxist's party in Russia.

You need to read up a bit, Bolsheviks were the FAR RIGHT of revolutionary Russia. Lenin was known as the "right-wing hardliner" who "got stuff done".

There were many parties back then vying for power in the chaos of the Kerensky government. You know very little.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Your premise is only valid had she gone out and specifically said that attaining wealth by violating the rights of another person. Ayn Rand never supported criminal behavior which in itself leads to violations of individual rights.

If you read one of her books(which i think is atlas shrugs), that is exactly what had happened and is what one of the residents of atlantis is about. Scamming others. Yet he is praised like all the others. Did she herself not break the individual rights of her own husband ? And being selfish does not equal being criminal either. Another question i have : What could happen is that a parent is too selfish towards children. It would not violate the rights of the children either, would it ? But it would not be beneficial either. According to Ayn Rand ones own individual rights and progress is the most important.

For example :
The problem is that if person A is totally selfish and buys all the food, there is nothing left for person B. Person B could die of hunger. But person A must never help person B because when helping person B, the life expectancy based upon the amount of food person A has acquired will be lower and thus violating his or her personal rights.

 

[Steeplerot]

Ayn Rand fame came from her understanding and championing of individual rights which trump the will of the majority

This is metaphysics of a deranged mind on a fear motivated paranoia self rationalization trip, a mental type of PTSD. This is a abstraction, a philosophical idea that she does not own. Even though she may claim so. Yes, she's nuts. Ever read one of her books? Obviously not.

Every "ISM" claims to be the "champion of individual rights" you numbskull.

Show me the FACTS. Ayn Rand ideology has been a total fail in real life, not even close to a coherent enough ideology to get past its most basic contradictions.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

There are two different and completely separate issues being discussed. One is her life experience and how it shaped her thinking. The second and, more important, is her abominably bad writing which too many seem to believe are a blueprint for social change.

 

[DucatiMonster696]

You need to read up a bit, Bolsheviks were the FAR RIGHT of revolutionary Russia. Lenin was known as the "right-wing hardliner" who "got stuff done".

This is completely laughable as to not even warrant a response but even a cursory reading from any reputable sources would completely prove you wrong.

There were many parties back then vying for power in the chaos of the Kerensky government. You know very little.

Your absurd revisionist distortions of well known facts is the only major issue here.

 

[Steeplerot]

You as usual by your posting show you have very little knowledge of a subject. No revisionism necessary. Feel free to dispute my WW1 era Russian history stuff.


I listed the parties of the Kerensky era above. You wasted a one line response already.

 

[William Gaatjes]

There are two different and completely separate issues being discussed. One is her life experience and how it shaped her thinking. The second and, more important, is her abominably bad writing which too many seem to believe are a blueprint for social change.

This indeed.
More a blueprint to social failure. Capitalism based upon altruism and honest work works best. Everything else is utopia. You work for yourself and you voluntarily give up a percentage to help those in need and pay for expenses such as infrastructure and the administration and housekeeping of government items such as tax and personal id's. And of course for the defense of the system.
If all do this properly there really are no issues except budget issues.

 

[Steeplerot]

but even a cursory reading from any reputable sources would completely prove you wrong.

The day hell freezes over is the day a Rand cultist cracks a history book. Much less a Rand book. :biggrin:

 

[DucatiMonster696]

If you read one of her books(which i think is atlas shrugs), that is exactly what had happened and is what one of the residents of atlantis is about. Scamming others. Yet he is praised like all the others. Did she herself not break the individual rights of her own husband ? And being selfish does not equal being criminal either. Another question i have : What could happen is that a parent is too selfish towards children. It would not violate the rights of the children either, would it ? But it would not be beneficial either. According to Ayn Rand ones own individual rights and progress is the most important.

For example :
The problem is that if person A is totally selfish and buys all the food, there is nothing left for person B. Person B could die of hunger. But person A must never help person B because when helping person B, the life expectancy based upon the amount of food person A has acquired will be lower and thus violating his or her personal rights.

That is not even remotely close to the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged#Plot_summary

 

[CallMeJoe]

Russian Bolshevism was a leftist faction of the Marxist's party in Russia...

You need to read up a bit, Bolsheviks were the FAR RIGHT of revolutionary Russia...

Bolshevism was neither. It was the Authoritarian faction of Russian Marxism.

 

[Steeplerot]

Bolshevism was neither. It was the Authoritarian faction of Russian Marxism.

The majority of the left Russian intellectuals did not consider Leninism at all derived from Marx but a extreme for of nationalism and authoritarianism. (Lenin-Stalinism and Maoism = "Socialism in ONE country)

Trotsky was the leader of the democratic lefties. Some say Stalin threatened his life to switch sides to bolshevik and support Lenin in the crucial moments. Who really knows? Trotsky did finally man up to Stalin and told his authoritarianism off -and got a icepick in his skull for the trouble.

These folks who were not put up against the wall went on to continue to shape democratic socialism across Europe we know of today.

The best way to describe the left in this way are to be able to separate lefties who are "Revolutionary" vs. "Democratic".


Speaking of names

Hitler pulled the same fake name stuff with co-opting a beer hall meeting groups name that had socialism in it.

Same tactics righties use now with fair and balanced in your face to throw the debate to strong-arm opinion of a society.

Authoritarianism is not a popular idea really to try to sell to the public, but can be if you can sugarcoat it with some other ISM's name to gain favor.

Mussolini's blend of fascism is a exception though and shows authoritarianism CAN exist with or without using another ideology to hide behind. Hitler's blend is really just a wanna-be with the name socialism tacked on and some anti-semetic teutonic crap.

 

[William Gaatjes]

That is not even remotely close to the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged#Plot_summary

That plot may be so. but i am writing about a certain character.

Francisco is one of the strikers and is slowly destroying the d'Anconia empire to put it out of the raiders' reach. His actions were designed both to "trap" looters into relying upon his worthless ventures in order to disrupt their schemes and to try to show the inevitable consequences of looting. He adopted the persona of a worthless playboy, by which he is known to the world, as an effective cover. However, he is forced to give up Dagny, knowing that she would not be ready to join the strikers. He remains deeply in love with her throughout the book, while also being a good and loyal friend of her other two lovers, Hank Rearden and John Galt.

His full name is Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia.

I guess it is okay to lie and scam others if they are wrong in your view.
It is okay to violate others individual rights if they do not fit yours...
That sounds to my like the message of some fundamentalists...


It is just a bad written dreamworld from Rand.

 

[DucatiMonster696]

That plot may be so. but i am writing about a certain character.



I guess it is okay to lie and scam others if they are wrong in your view.
It is okay to violate others individual rights if they do not fit yours...
That sounds to my like the message of some fundamentalists...


It is just a bad written dreamworld from Rand.

Of course you've taken that quote out of the context and intentionally left out the pretext to this action which caused Francisco to take such drastic measures (i.e. governmental extortion and corruption being justified by using appeals of authority under the guise of "The People".) and left out what the term "Looters" is actually referring to in the novel:

"Looters" confiscate others' earnings by force ("at the point of a gun") and include government officials, whose demands are backed by the implicit threat of force. Some officials are merely executing government policy, such as those who confiscate one state's seed grain to feed the starving citizens of another; others are exploiting those policies, such as the railroad regulator who illegally sells the railroad's supplies for his own profit. Both use force to take property from the people who produced or earned it.

Hence Francisco d'Anconia's actions against his own company are done out of desperation to fight against the government backed corruption and extortion which are threatening to bring down his family's business empire.

 

[BoberFett]

It's a much closer ratio for atheists/agnostics. Women tend to be more religious than men across the board.

Huh, so what you're saying is that women ARE in fact inferior to men?

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Randian, and Objectivist Philosophy, is that by putting yourself above all others, others will benefit. There is no hate, or ill will towards others, simply the knowledge that your success is what is most important.

If you put together a whole society that believes that only their personal success is important, then you have a healthy and vibrant society.

And I suspect that many advocates of a mixed economy such as myself wouldn't disagree with that. The big issue is what exactly is in a person's rational selfish interest and how best can that be attained. In my view, things like environmental regulations, labor regulations, various business regulations, international trade regulations, immigration restrictions, K-12 public education, government funded and maintained infrastructure, and socialized medicine are part of people's "personal success".

I suspect that a great many self-proclaimed "self-made" people, especially the free market dogmatist types, completely take for granted just how much the structure of their society contributed to their "personal success".

One of the big issues is what do we do when people end up having conflicts of interest. Being able to pay people in China 50 cents/hour so that you can earn a higher profit margin might be in a business owner's selfish interest and part of his "personal success", but it might also result in other Americans being driven into poverty by market forces, conflicting with their selfish interest and "personal success".

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Government, Lawyers, and Insurance, all limit or "spread the wealth" of an individual whom is only striving to be his best, and by his nature "Create Wealth."

In your view, there's no place for insurance and lawyers in a free society? (Without lawyers the only way people can really resolve their differences is through physical force.)

 

[WhipperSnapper]

I never stated my position one way or the other - only the logical consequences of your position. You think that working a call center for $1/hour in India is equivalent to slave labor without recognizing the alternative: that the same worker could be out in a rice paddy somewhere making absolutely nothing and doing real backbreaking work. You also fail to realize that $1 an hour in parts of India is actually pretty good. Are engineers there also slaves, since they only pull in $10k a year (equivalent to $5/hour)? That's less than minimum wage here, so it must be equivalent to slavery!!!1!one! Or, the worker has made the best choice he can and taken the best job he can find. The labor/capital disparity has been a huge driving force for capital influx, raising the standards of living very rapidly.

I don't think it's slavery, but depending on the standard of living that affords them we might call it "slave wages". If American wages fell to that level most people would refer to it as "slave wages".

I'll also note that the market doesn't dictate the percentage of revenue kept by a business owner: he pays his employees what the market (or government) dictates and keeps the rest. He keeps as much as he can just like the worker negotiates the best wage he can. The owner also keeps costs as low as possible to maximize his take-home pay. If he does his job well, he stands to do well for himself, but he also assumes all of the risk and will lose his shirt if things go badly, whereas the employee stands only to cease gaining rather than actually losing.

Did you mean to say that "the market dictates the percentage of revenue kept by a business owner"? (I'm guessing that the "doesn't" part was a typo.)

Uh, yeah...duh...we get that. The issue isn't about how markets work, but the conditions of the playing field such as the supply of labor and what that means in terms of wages and standard of living.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

If i may cut in :
I do not think what you are claiming here is entirely fair and smells of hypocrisy. You can attack cyclowizard all you like, but when will you yourself take a proper stand against slave labor and refuse as a customer to buy any electronic product with foxconn components in them ? The strength in a democracy and of a proper free market is that you can as a customer make a statement not to buy a certain product because of some principle you believe in. If you really cared about foxconn employees, you should trash your apple products, your pc and your monitor for starters. Or at least remove all foxconn components from these items.

That is a good point. First off, in many instances there aren't any alternatives to Chinese-made electronic items. Secondly, it doesn't make any sense for me to forgo those products in the same way that it doesn't make sense for someone not to despoil the commons if everyone else is doing it.

If purchasing an American product at greater expense were a benefit to me then I would do that. However, if everyone else is purchasing foreign goods and services I'll just be hurting myself by spending more than I need to without benefiting from that extra expense in some sort of a way (higher wages, lower unemployment, etc.).

The global labor arbitrage situation is very much akin to a tragedy of the commons. Everyone benefits more if the commons is regulated and not despoiled, but without any regulation then it makes sense for people to try to squeeze as much out of it as they can for themselves. Likewise, Americans would benefit more without being exposed to global labor arbitrage.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

If people on the left believe this then they are delusional or highly miss informed. True capitalism cannot properly function as intended without a strong basis and adherence to individual rights. Ayn Rand's personal experience with communism and socialism gave her enough experience to understand what happens under a forced (either direct or indirect) collective of a "workers paradise" instituted on a populace.

Are you certain that real capitalism would result in actual de facto freedom? Just saying that an economic system is about individual rights and freedom does not make it so in practice. People might have their individual rights but they could end up lacking de facto freedom.

Freedom means more than just individual rights. If you're starving to death or cannot legally leave your property (because you are encircled by private property) then you're really not free. If the only jobs available pay slave wages then you're really not free to be able to own a home or to farm your own land (since the wealthy might own it all). Of course you would have your individual rights and "freedom" on paper, but you wouldn't actually be free. Real freedom implies the ability to have some sort of economic mobility and a certain standard of living. What good is your freedom if you need a kidney transplant but you don't have the money to pay for it and insurance companies wanted to charge you $40,000/month?

Is there some sort of a metaphysical reason why employers, in mass, couldn't start requiring people to adhere to a certain religion or types of sexual practices or diets, or to have the right skin color, etc.? Some businesses already forbid people to smoke in the privacy of their own homes. Most forbid private marijuana use even if it has zero impact on an employee's ability to do the job. I don't see any reason at all why the type of DNA discrimination depicted in the movie GATTACA could not occur, etc.

I think the free market religionists have a cuckoo cloud fairy tale fantasy vision of what real capitalism would be like. The problem is that in reality, resources (land, etc.) only exist in limited finite quantities and rational people can have legitimate conflicts of interest with one another.

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(I'm going to be traveling over the next couple of days, so I won't be able to participate in this discussion any further for a few days, at least not unless I have time to use the WiFi in a motel room.)
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[WhipperSnapper]

So, the movie hits select theaters tomorrow. Is anyone going to go see it? Personally, I can't stand to spend $8-10 for a movie ticket, so I'd have to wait for it to hit the cheap seats though I no longer have access to a second run theater. I'm guessing I'll see it when it comes to the $1 Redbox or airs on Showtime. (I've been waiting for a an Atlas Shrugged movie since I read it back in 1990. I can wait some more.)