Monday, January 12, 2009
What Weiner Said
As a follow-up to my post earlier today about the Liberdopian Randroid Rant Choir's sooper-delusive (or is it... sooper-genius) non-response of a response to the world of bloody bullet-and-debt-ridden shit their market fundamentalist gloating elitist CEO-cult has been shepherding along all these years, I must say I got a kick out of this HuffPost by Ellis Weiner, whose name alone would spotlight him as a malodorous moocher in the "perfectly immoral" (Vidal's perfectly apt phrase, taken from the piece) universe of La Rand's potboiler oeuvre.
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7 comments:
That's funny. I just finished that, and was about to point you at it.
Hey, n8o, nice to see you! Happy new year.
Excellent piece. Thanks for the heads up.
Loved it! I wish something like this piece has been published years ago when I could have used it in a debate with a Randroid. :)
> [I] must say I got a kick out of this HuffPost by Ellis Weiner. . .
>
> > The story concerns railroad heiress Dagny Taggart (beautiful, slim, etc.),
> > and her efforts to keep Taggart Transcontinental in business. . .
But who tragically gets run over by one of her own trains
while taking a quick leak on the tracks.
http://mthollywood.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-have-used-batman-last-week-i-said-my_19.html
> Yet, obviously, people do. Individuals capable of dressing
> themselves apparently love this, one of the most turgid,
> contrived, pompous, and comically over-written books ever
> published in English. Why?
>
> Because they **believe**. For Randroids, "glibertarians,"
> "conservatives" (whatever that means at this point) and
> Republicans in general, politics has become a matter of faith.
( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellis-weiner/
on-atlas-shrugged-as-a-gu_b_157295.html )
I have another explanation for this.
In my experience, folks attracted to Rand's fiction (or
to transhumanism, for that matter) have a touch of (or perhaps
even full-blown) Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
They can **identify** with characters like Dagny Taggart and
John Galt, with a perfectly straight face. This is not
a matter of rational debate -- it's a matter of feeling
**in your bones** that you're one of the superior beings
in this world full of mediocrities, just as the author
of Atlas believed herself to be.
"Grandiosity Deconstructed"
"I believe that I will live forever... It is a cellular
certainty, almost biological, it flows with my blood
and permeates every niche of my being. I can do
anything I choose to do and excel in it. What I
do, what I excel at, what I achieve depends only
on my volition. There is no other determinant."
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal9.html
"A Great Admiration"
"I always wanted to be a genius... Ever since my fifth
year I pretended to be thoroughly acquainted with issues
I had no clue about. This streak of con-artistry reached
a crescendo in my puberty, when I convinced a whole
township (and later, my country, by co-opting the media)
that I was a new Einstein. While unable to solve even the
most basic mathematical equations, I was regarded by many -
including world class physicists - as somewhat of an
epiphanous miracle."
http://samvak.tripod.com/journal14.html
G. K. Chesterton once described the type:
---------------------------
"[My] publisher said of somebody, 'That man will get on; he believes
in himself.' And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my
eye caught an omnibus on which was written 'Hanwell.' I said
to him, 'Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in
themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in
themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know
where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide
you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really
believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.' He said mildly
that there were a good many men after all who believed in
themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. 'Yes, there are,'
I retorted, 'and you of all men ought to know them. That
drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy,
he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from
whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.
If you consulted your business experience instead of your
ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing
in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors
who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't
pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail,
because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not
merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.
Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief
like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has
`Hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."
---------------------------
-- G. K. Chesterton, _Orthodoxy_,
Chapter 2, "The Maniac"
> Ellis Weiner, whose name alone would spotlight him as
> a malodorous moocher. . .
Well, ptooey to you too, Ellsworth!
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