ideology - W21st NYC on Diigo

01 Nov 09

“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand and issuing warnings of incipient socialism,
Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review
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- Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.
- Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching.
- The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.
- Rand labored for more than two years on Galt’s radio address near the end of “Atlas Shrugged” — a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” sound like the Sermon on the Mount.
- Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as “collectivism,” from Soviet Communism to the New Deal.
- In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.
- but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nietzsche
- Rand’s potent message could lead to intoxication and even to madness, as the second half of her life showed. In 1949, Rand was living with her husband, a mild-mannered former actor named Frank O’Connor, in Southern California, in a Richard Neutra house. Then she got a fan letter from a 19-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal and invited him to visit. Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.
- The decades of psychodrama that followed read, in Heller’s excellent account, like “Phèdre” rewritten by Edward Albee.
- ironically, but not ironically enough, for they began to display the frightening group-think of a true cult. One journalist Heller refers to wondered how Rand “charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as ‘clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ”

Dede Scozzafava, Republican, Quits House Race in Upstate New York - NYTimes.com

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conservative strategy upstate ideology

Effective immediately, the R.N.C. will endorse and support the Conservative candidate in the race, Doug Hoffman,” the party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, said. “Doug’s campaign will receive the financial backing of the R.N.C. and get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bill Owens on Tuesday.”
Ms. Scozzafava, a state assemblywoman and former small-town mayor, was nominated this summer by Republican county leaders who quickly found their choice second-guessed by the party’s conservative wing. Many officials in the district, a vast expanse from the Vermont border through the Adirondacks to Lake Ontario, were deeply resentful of the outside involvement.
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- They’re trying to bang 435 elections across the United States into the same mold,” said James Ellis, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party. “It’s a detriment to democracy.”
- The swell of opposition to Ms. Scozzafava was reflected on conservative radio talk shows and in a heavy diet of television advertising supporting Mr. Hoffman that was financed by conservative groups.
- Ms. Scozzafava did not say whom, if anyone, she would endorse. Polls in the district showed that Mr. Owens and Mr. Hoffman were each drawing about 35 percent of the vote;
- The decision by Ms. Scozzafava to suspend her campaign is a clear victory for conservatives in the party at a time when there has been a pitched battle among party leaders over whether Republicans needed to change their ideological appeal as part of an effort to recover from the losses of 2006 and 2008.
- A primary is unfolding in Florida, where Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for the Senate, is facing a challenge from a conservative, Marco Rubio, the former Florida House speaker. Mr. Crist has come under fire from conservatives for, among other things, supporting Mr. Obama on his economic stimulus package.

20 Oct 09

Vatican Plan to Oversee Conversion of Anglicans - NYTimes.com

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religion anglicans conservative strategy Vatican ideology

18 Oct 09

Digital Domain - Broadband Access, Yes, but Some Don’t Subscribe - NYTimes.com

"It also blithely overlooks the fact that the infrastructure is already in place to provide speeds of 3 to 10 Mbps to 94 percent of American households."

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