Hmm. I’ve read several people make the same accusation against 1984. I need to read We eventually and make up my own mind.

I still hold that the worst thing about Objectivism is inspiring the pain-in-the-ass concept albums Rush puts out.

Please stop. I know Andrew Northrup constantly pushes this garbage, but it doesn’t make it any truer than his similar exaggerations that all Led Zeppelin songs are about Hobbits.

There’s one Randroid Rush album. It’s 2112. That’s it. Peart was like 22 or so when he wrote it, which is ordinarily a bit late for flirtation with Objectivism, but then Peart at the time was a rural autodidact and so ought to be cut some slack about picking up passe’ intellectual fads.

Does that not grab you? I haven’t had a sensation like that in 45 years. And I like this accent better than Boston.

Fuck you, Neil Peart.

That’s because it’s plagiarised wholesale from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, which is actually a good dystopian novel. Try reading them back to back sometime (I did) and comparing the publication dates. And you can chalk up another strike against Rand while you’re at it.

The outsider hero, who doesn’t really need to know anything, who learns how to hack into the most complex systems ever devised by man kick major ass by watching an old drunk

Hmmm, sounds sorta familiar.

Brave New World is the only classic dystopian novel I’ve read whose warning is still applicable [now, actually, more than ever

I often see the modern Republicans as very “Lord of the Flies”, what with being put in a situation where there really is no external power check, and their internal moral compasses existing on a fifth-grade level.

I’m just waiting for January, when we can see the shoes on the beach.

I wish was less spifflicated sp I could correct thoroughly, you Jake m’boy.

I wish I was less splifflicated myself so I would have made some better insights, PeeJ, but I’m totally with you about Gibson getting all of those things wrong. I just meant that he foresaw the rough outlines of those respective technologies, even though not in a way that they actually work IRL.

Let’s take it up tomorrow.

Looking forward to it. Since I can only talk about my work in the most general of terms, it’s fun to use the sci-fi frame of reference. I’ve got to head in to the office this weekend anyway and catch up on some triple-s3kret c0d0r1ng tasks for the current sprint.

It’s fortunate for my ability to get other tasks accomplished that the volume on S, N! has decreased in recent months: I think it’s the calm before the storm. I’ve been pretty confident that our guy’s going to win handily for at least the past 2 months. The InTrade thing and the various EV and popular vote predictions have clenched it for me.

On topic, watching the videos on the BarackObamadotcom YouTube channel is always invigorating. The Bill Clinton speech at the college in Florida was in his inimitable style, awesomely intelligent, and it also showed me that Bill Clinton is still the biggest babe magnet of the bunch, judging from the ladies standing behind him during the speech. The 10-minute Barack bio sketch is very powerful as well.

Let’s take it up tomorrow.

Rand was a lightweight. A third rate mind, at best.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

And to think that kids 10 years younger than me will read that and think he must have meant some kind of ultra-blue sky.

Brave New World … [now, actually, more than ever]

My only criticism of that book (and it’s a completely unfair one) is that, as with Gibson and Neuromancer, the author did not anticipate the invention of personal computers, the Internet (hell, even BBS’s), and cellphones, and the communications revolution brought by those technologies.I remember reading a preface to Brave New World written by Huxley 10 or so years later where he lamented that he did not take into account the earth-changing impact of nuclear weapons (and power). But in retrospect, nukes have changed our world far less than the 80′s and 90′s era tech that I mentioned.

Whoa, that name brings back memories.

What broke me was the first novel, her stab at ‘realism’, We The Living. Lachrymose, maudlin… so unbearably corny. But even then I was a glutton for punishment, so I went ahead and read all of Atlas Shrugged. The long diatribe somewhere in the first third of the novel against ecological responsibility — hell, against nature itself — horrified me. Then there was the guy who worked for Dagny (or was it Hank?) who bought the Objectivist line of crap but at the same time openly considered himself a beta male. How much more untruthful to human psychology could the author be, I wondered. No one would espouse the individual-as-Superman philosophy and at the same time admit himself to be second rate. The whole point to Randroidism is, basically, its utility in deluding losers that they are, in fact, winners; its function is the reinforcement of self-esteem to sociopathic levels. And so, certainly no “squire” is going to buy Objectivism and still think himself a squire: he’s gonna think himself a “knight” or not bother at all.

Then there was the Francisco D’Acona character, the Copper King, which took some chutzpah for that bitch Miss Rosenbaum to write considering the history of copper extraction in South America. And finally, there was John Galt’s speech, which took me two days to get through because it kept putting me to sleep.

I still think, though, as art, Anthem isn’t too terrible a dystopian novella. As a warning, or pedagogy, or even propaganda, it’s nothing compared to Animal Farm or 1984, which warn against basically the same thing. (Brave New World is the only classic dystopian novel I’ve read whose warning is still applicable [now, actually, more than ever]. While By The Waters of Babylon, a short story, remains relevant in the same context.)

[I started writing a post the other night while fried related to this stuff, incidentally; maybe I'll finish it sometime.]

Of all wingnuts, I hate libertarians most; of all libertarians, I hate Randroids the most. A tiny amount of libertarians actually want the government to leave everyone alone. Most, however, adopt their philosophy out of more personal needs: sociopathic self-esteem, again. As such their brand of social Darwinism is the most obviously depraved, because these people, deep down, are some of the most insecure and paranoid people on the planet. Thus, it’s not enough that they should be seen to succeed; it’s that they must see other people “fail” — and most importantly, suffer — to convince themselves that they truly are achievers. Most libertarians and all Randroids *want* “inferior” people to perish. But they lack the courage to do it by their own hand, in the fashion of traditional fascists, so they invent something called “nature” (which in practice means lack of government — remember, to a libertarian and Randroid, “there is no such thing as society”) to do it for them.

(Fun fact: Only on a libertarian site — in this case Hit and Run — will you find such anthropologically-retarded comments as “there is no such thing as other cultures, only freedom or collectivism.”)

fuck me pumps

Booty Bumps 4 All, y’all !!!

Can all the Angels fans finally stuff their thundersticks and their fucking rally monkeys up their drugged-up California asses?

I believe so.

K-Rod……Donnie Moore. Fucking just kill yourself. Please.