Category: Media Citings

The Atlasphere featured in today's New York Times

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

A story in the style section of today’s New York Times begins:

STEPHANIE BETIT first read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and Ayn Rand’s essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness in 2004. The books changed her life, she said, turning her from a devout Christian into an atheist and a follower of objectivism, Rand’s philosophy of independence and rational self-interest.
“From then on, I was looking for a partner who shared my outlook on life,” said Ms. Betit, a 28-year-old teacher working with autistic children in Walpole, N.H.
Finding him proved a challenge. Last fall, she met someone while volunteering for the Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, but the affair was as ill-fated as the campaign itself.
By winter she had all but given up on love. Then a friend told her about TheAtlasSphere.com, an online dating site for Rand fans. Ms. Betit posted a profile, which caught the attention of James Hancock, 30, the chief executive of a business software company in Orillia, Ontario. He sent her an e-mail message, and within a few days they graduated to talking on the phone. Three months later, they were engaged.
Mr. Hancock had tried mainstream dating sites in the past, but “no one even marginally piqued my interest,” he said. “Women who don’t know or follow Rand tend to just accept what they’ve been told. I can’t be with someone like that in the long-term.”

See the full story for more, including a photo of Stephanie and James.

Profiting from Rand

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Bloomberg writer Matthew Keenan reports on a controversial, but growing trend: businessmen are openly supporting academic institutions that teach Ayn Rand. Apparently, not only is resistance to Ayn Rand and fear of disclosing any association with her or her philosophy fading, but more and more people in academia, the media, and elsewhere are discovering that it now pays to be associated with her:

“After BB&T mandated that some schools teach Atlas Shrugged, grant seekers became aware of Allison’s interest and now tailor their applications by stating up front their interest in Rand.”

When being in some way associated with Rand is no longer a kiss of death, but on the contrary becomes profitable, the culture is approaching an important tipping point.
The full article is here.

Bloomberg News: "John Galt Plan Might Save U.S. Financial System"

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Thanks to Johann Gevers for forwarding this fantastic citing of Ayn Rand in the media:

John Galt Plan Might Save U.S. Financial System
Commentary by Caroline Baum
March 10 (Bloomberg) — Let’s face it: The Federal Reserve must be scared to death as it watches the financial system unravel.
Unravel would appear to be the operative word as leverage proves to be as toxic on the way down as it was intoxicating on the way up.

And later:

Galt’s Solution
The following day, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke encouraged mortgage servicers to write down a portion of the principal on home loans, which would give owners some equity and discourage foreclosure. He advocated a bigger role for the Federal Housing Administration, a Depression-era agency that insures mortgages. Congress envisions an even larger role for the federal government.
Any day, I expect some government official to unveil the John Galt plan to save the economy.
Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged,” stops the world by going on strike. He and the “men of the mind” literally withdraw from the world after watching their wealth confiscated by the looters (the government).
Toward the end of Rand’s 1,000-plus page novel (or polemic), the economy is in shambles. Desperate, the looters kidnap Galt and prod him to “tell us what to do.”
Galt refuses, or rather tells them “to get out of the way.”
Road Is Cleared
You probably can sense where I’m going. Today’s economic and financial crisis would resolve itself more quickly and efficiently if the government got out of the way. Yes, there would be pain. Some banks would fail. Others would clamp down on credit to atone for the years of lax lending standards. Homeowners-in-name-only would become renters. Housing prices would fall until speculators found value.
That’s not going to happen. The bigger the mess, the more urgent the calls for a government solution, the more willing government is to oblige.
We want laissez-faire capitalism in good times and a government backstop against losses in bad times. It’s a tough way to run an economy.

See Baum’s full commentary for more.

Buying a Spot on the Syllabus … for Atlas Shrugged

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Inside Higher Ed Editor Scott Jaschik kindly sent a link to his new story “Buying a Spot on the Syllabus,” which is indeed very interesting. He begins:

Some professors at Marshall University believe that the institution has crossed an ethical line by accepting a gift that requires that a specific book â?? Ayn Randâ??s Atlas Shrugged â?? be taught in a course.
While the criticisms have come from professors who are not fans of Randâ??s philosophy, they stress that their objection has nothing to do with this particular book, and that they would have no problem with a professor making the choice to include it on a syllabus. Their concern, they said, is a university accepting a gift that requires any book to be taught â?? when book selection should be a faculty prerogative.
â??Atlas Shrugged can be taught. Itâ??s the required part that is problematic,â? said Jamie Warner, director of undergraduate studies in political science. Under this precedent, she said, â??you could see neo-Nazis giving money and saying that you have to teach Mein Kampf.â??

Boy, she didn’t waste any time raising the specter of Hitler, did she? Cause, you know, it would never occur to universities themselves to distinguish between gifts from neo-Nazis and gifts from advocates of the free society. That would be a difficult decision for them, no?
Wonder if she even knows it was public — rather than privately-funded — education that constituted a major cornerstone of Hitler’s strategy for brainwashing young minds. (…And I’m just getting started with the liberal fascism analogies. Imagine if we really studied the dynamics at work, here.)
In any case, see the full article for more about this controversy, which we’ve actually seen here before.
In any case, Kudos to Jaschik for including this perspective in his article:

Calvin A. Kent is a vice president for business and economic research and distinguished professor of business at Marshall, and he will be teaching the course with Atlas Shrugged in the fall. Kent argued that the gift provides a great opportunity for the university, and that there are no academic freedom issues. Kent noted that there is no requirement that Marshall students take the course, and that he will include material beyond Rand.
â??The expectation is that this book will be used. I donâ??t think that is an unreasonable expectation,â? he said.
Kent said that he is a fan, having first read Atlas Shrugged in college, where he found it â??pretty profound,â? and said that he still views the book that way.
The threat to academic freedom, Kent suggested, isnâ??t from accepting a gift but from discouraging it. â??I would not go around telling the history department or the English department that they have no business using a particular novel or a particular historian,â? he said. â??For someone to tell us that we should or should not include something smacks of censorship.â? Asked about the argument that some professors would reject a gift requiring any book to be taught, Kent said heâ??s skeptical.
â??I think thatâ??s the way they are trying to spin it,â? he said. â??There are a lot of people out there who donâ??t agree with her philosophy. I happen to agree with most of it, but not all of it. The thing that has really got people upset is that they donâ??t like the book.â?

The bottom line? Universities are free to reject gifts from neo-Nazis, just as they’re free to reject gifts from wealthy entrepreneurs who want to see more students exposed to the pro-reason, pro-freedom principles in Atlas Shrugged.
By making spurious comparisons between such donors, however, liberal professors are revealing just how much they need to read — or re-read — Atlas Shrugged and understand its lessons about the role of consensual relationships in a free society.
These gifts from BB&T force no professor to teach Atlas Shrugged and force no student to take a course on Atlas Shrugged. The gifts simply provide educational options for each that did not exist before.
The bottom line: Offering someone money to do something is, in no way, fascistic. Taking money from the public treasury to fund politically-correct government school curricula, on the other hand….
Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot.

The Atlasphere Cited in NY Times' "Paper Cuts"

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

NY Times blogger Gregory Cowles just made a kind mention of the Atlasphere in his post “Dating Ayn Rand” this morning:

In response to my Valentineâ??s Day post about books and romance, a reader named Sharon wrote that she was â??drawn to the passion and devotionâ? of the twisted love between Dominique and Howard in â??The Fountainhead.â?
So I had to smile when a colleague sent me a link to the Atlasphere: a dating site for Ayn Rand fans.
This oneâ??s for you, Sharon.

Welcome, Paper Cuts readers.

In Favor of Polite and Respectful Dissent

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Soon we’ll be publishing Debi Ghate’s new tribute to the (selfish) meaning of Thanksgiving. With that in mind, a new column by David Hawpe in the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled “Atlas shrugged, but thousands of volunteers boost Every1Reads,” caught my attention.
Hawpe writes partly in response to Ghate’s op-ed, which — like all of ARI’s op-eds — was distributed to media outlets throughout the country.
Ayn Rand has many dissenters, and I’ve developed an interest in the way that people disagree with her. Some dismiss her outright. Some are rude.
Others, though, respectfully acknowledge her position — while respectfully disagreeing. Hawpe’s column is an example of the latter, and I tip my hat to him for that.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Maggie Gallagher: Three Cheers for Ayn Rand!

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Writing for Yahoo News, former National Review editor Maggie Gallagher has penned a rousing and insightful defense of Atlas Shrugged.
She rightly chastizes Terry Teachout for his silly assertion in National Review that Rand writes a pretty good potboiler, a plot “complete with sex scenes and a shoot-’em-up finale. No wonder that it has sold like soap for half a century.”
As Gallagher puts it: “Novels, even page-turning potboilers with lots of sex and gunplay, do not typically sell like soap, year-in and year-out, for half a century.” Atlas Shrugged, she points out, is currently the #1 selling book on Amazon in the category of “literature and fiction-classics.”
So why, then, does the novel continue to sell so well? Gallagher presents her own theory — and it’s a good one:

The key to Ayn Rand is that she pictured America largely from early films from Hollywood. As a young girl growing up in the grim world of communist Russia, she saw America as we dreamed ourselves to be, and she longed her whole life with a child’s intensity to make this vision real, to live in it. We respond to her novels because they offer us one deep strand of American self-identity — as individualists, yes, but individualists who together dream big dreams, conquer wild frontiers, invent the future, remake our very selves.
She understood, the way so many pampered Hollywood artists don’t, that much of the romance of America is in business — in our dreams of making it, by making big new things, things no man has ever made before. Rand is virtually alone in seeing businessmen as fellow artists: makers, creators, inventors. In her novels, the greatness of the artist was matched by the greatness of the architect, the scientist, the entrepreneur and the railroad executive. The Homer of our era, she sang the song by which so many Americans live our lives.

Well said. Read her full article for more.

Myanmar: Right out of Atlas Shrugged?

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Don Hauptman points out a passage from an article in Thursday’s New York Times that sounds, well, straight out of Atlas Shrugged:

In Thailand and Myanmar, the military has been deeply involved in politics in recent decades. Thailand has had more than a dozen coups since the 1930s and, after the overthrow last year of a democratically elected government, power remains in the militaryâ??s hands.
The salient difference, says Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, is that Thailandâ??s leaders have allowed businesses to thrive.
During 45 years of misrule, Myanmarâ??s generals have almost entirely dismantled the economy, he said. There are no effective property rights, and contract enforcement is nonexistent.
â??If in other countries ruling regimes behave occasionally as Mafioso in skimming a cut from prosperous business, then Burmaâ??s is more like a looter â?? destroying what it can neither create nor understand,â? Mr. Turnell said.

(Emphasis added)
See the full article, “Across the River: 2 Divergent Paths in Southeast Asia,” for more background.

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