I never realized how unrealistic Atlas Shrugged is. Since when do conservatives want to build trains? (via)
It’s a brilliantly composed scene, too, from the haggard union guy to the hint of exposed midriff on Dagney.
by DougJ| 132 Comments
This post is in: Going Galt
I never realized how unrealistic Atlas Shrugged is. Since when do conservatives want to build trains? (via)
It’s a brilliantly composed scene, too, from the haggard union guy to the hint of exposed midriff on Dagney.
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me
Not since the early 20th century, at least.
Vibrant Pantload, fka Studly Pantload
Wow, Schilling’s character sure put that Union Thug™ in his place! But then, she could go Alpha Dog on me any time she wanted, should I be so lucky.
sidhra
Ms. Rand was not forward thinking.
MikeJ
@Vibrant Pantload, fka Studly Pantload:
Rand characters only like rapists.
Cat Lady
The scene needs Lee Garner Jr. to show up and make the union guy wear a Santa suit and then grope Dagney.
It just makes me appreciate Mad Men.
Comrade DougJ
@Cat Lady:
Ha ha!
Omnes Omnibus
How many times will McMegan see this in the theater?
beltane
I’ve already watched one trailer for this POS movie and I refuse to watch another one.
Speaking of trains, I just read Vermont is getting HSR, connecting the western part of the state with NYC and Montreal. We are eagerly awaiting this attack on our freedoms so that we can more easily partake in the atheistic pleasures of the great caliphate to our south along with those of our gay French northern neighbors.
Comrade DougJ
@Omnes Omnibus:
That brings Paul Ruebens to mind.
Halteclere
If I recall correctly, Hank Rearden paid his employees well so that he would retain the best. Too bad that in real life when Henry Ford did it he was branded a commie (even before there was such a thing!) because he thought that people earning a good wage was good for business.
Some reason those who wank off to Ayn Rand forget that part.
Vibrant Pantload, fka Studly Pantload
@Omnes Omnibus:
Theater?
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
OT: As if trying to brand Abortion as Black Genocide wasn’t enough, the anti-choice folks are going even further, putting billboards in Chicago with Obama’s face saying ‘Every 21 Minutes, Our Next Possible Leader is Aborted’.
I wish I could say that I can’t believe that the whole ‘Abortion = Black Genocide’ thing actually has purchase, but then again, I’ve learned to understand that it’s nearly impossible to overestimate how stupid America can truly be.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: Instead of millions of people watching this movie once, there will be a couple of thousand Jane Galts watching it hundreds of times. The trailer was too boring for me to sit through once but I’m not a glibertarian so what do I know.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade DougJ: Yes. Sorry. Somethings cannot be unpictured.
Butler
Amazing. The movie makes the book seem levelheaded and sane.
“You can’t force men to go out and get killed just for profit” says The Bad Guy.
Fucking amazing.
malraux
I, for one, cannot wait for the Rifftrax to this mess.
Omnes Omnibus
@Butler: I could never get more than 20 pages into the book. I think I will skip the movie as well.
beltane
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik: The whole black genocide argument conveniently forgets the existence of the black women committing this so-called genocide. Americans as a whole may be stupid, but telling black women that they are like Hitler for having an abortion may not be the best way to win over their target audience. But it will make white, suburban, not-at-all-racist, megachurch goers feel all smug, warm and righteous inside which is all that matters.
J. Michael Neal
@Halteclere:
Of course he was a commie. The man was a flat out fascist, and Jonah Goldberg assured me that those are the same thing.
Alex
Damn that union for wanting some measure of safety!
And demanding it from the good-hearted company that gives them jobs out of the kindness of their heart!
Luckily for good-hearted company, they’ll ask for volunteers. As we all know, no one would ever volunteer for a risky job that could kill them just to feed their family.
Walker
Remember, this is a book that requires a perpetual motion machine to make its ultimate premise (a self-sufficient Galt’s Gulch cut off from society) work out.
Tim, Interrupted
Surely this horrible piece of shit won’t actually be shown in real theatres?
It has the look of a above average budget afternoon soap.
And what’s with Dagny’s sloppy, crooked tee shirt? That actress has no gravitas.
other than that, looked great.
hhex65
A quick search tells me the name “dagney” has not been in the Top 1000 baby names in the past 50 years.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alex: Having never read the book, I have a question. Why don’t they just test the material and see if it is safe? Wouldn’t that work for everyone or am I missing some important Objectivist, glibertarian point?
beltane
I don’t really understand the Randians. If altruism and morality are nothing but sentimental nonsense, why wouldn’t it be OK for the non-productive slobs out there to hunt the Galtian geniuses like animals, just for fun, because they can?
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: Because that is H. G. Wells.
hitchhiker
Quite appropriately, it looks and feels like a standard soap opera. So hard to forgive even my 16-year-old self for admiring this tripe.
Roger Moore
Clash reference FTW.
malraux
Via wikipedia, trade secrets. The guy who designed the metal doesn’t want anyone to figure out how it works.
BR
Wait, was this a spoof video or the real thing? That’s a serious question – I’m not sure if I’m missing something or this was a real clip from the movie.
Omnes Omnibus
@malraux: I am not arguing with you, but that makes no sense.
Southern Beale
That’s what I’ve been saying all along! They stayed true to the book but the book isn’t true to our current conditions. Trains are all social1st1cky and big government-y. And steel? All of our steel comes from China now. It’s the classic conservative conundrum: trying to squeeze our modern world into a mold that’s 60-70 years old.
That’s why they say if you want to go back, put the car in R…
James E Powell
I think I do. It’s a myth they can believe in so that they don’t feel bad about people who have nothing or very little.
malraux
@Omnes Omnibus: To be fair, in a world in which someone figures out how to create a perpetual motion machine, they still drill for oil. Because apparently John Galt is the only guy who can figure out how to make his machine work, but he decided to go live in a ditch rather than suffer under the yoke of 39% marginal tax rates.
Rather than the real world in which everybody would immediately copy such a device if there weren’t the government to enforce patent laws.
Seriously, looking for logic in randroids is madness. Nothing makes sense.
Omnes Omnibus
@malraux: I guess I’ll go read something with orcs instead.
John - A Motley Moose
I’ll have to rethink the possibility of a benevolent god. When I clicked on the message I got an error message that said, “An error occurred. Please try again later.”
Vibrant Pantload, fka Studly Pantload
@MikeJ:
“Rand characters only like rapists.”
I take it nuance ain’t their thing, either.
J. Michael Neal
@Omnes Omnibus: The “trade secret so we can’t do anything rational with it” seems to be a glibertarian trope. Robert Heinlein used it multiple times, generally explaining that someone avoided getting a patent since those are only for a limited number of years, and whatever invention the character in question had was SO MONUMENTAL A WORK OF GENIUS that no one would ever figure out how it worked or be able to design anything like it.
lovable liberal
Couldn’t the filmmakers update it to supersonic space planes and piss off environmentalists too?
No, it’s scripture. You can’t change a word of it.
Butler
@Omnes Omnibus:
Honestly I don’t remember what the reason was (or if there was a reason at all), but I do remember that there seemed to be some sort of grave urgency to complete this project. Like if it wasn’t completed and run by a specific day the whole world was gonna fall apart or something, which left no time at all for testing. The first train had to be full of cargo or passengers or McGuffins or whatever it was hauling.
Dagny Galt
Christ, just when the family thought that this couldn’t possibly get any more embarrassing. Nobody wants to interfere with free speech, especially free speech by a crackpot from a parallel universe to ours, but there are times when I wish our principles were a little more elastic.
And for the record? That dreadful woman in the trailer is nothing like my mother.
Kiril
They got Big Love from House to be in it because Big Love was a Mormon character and now he is in Atlas Shrugged so in the primaries people will subconsciously not be freaked out by Mitt Romney THE ILLUMINATI ARE VERY SNEAKY!
Omnes Omnibus
@J. Michael Neal:
@Butler:
So basically it is is because SHUT UP, that’s why?
micah616
IMDB lists this as Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. Is this going to be a trilogy? It looks like it was made for TV.
gnomedad
Get ready for the whining when librul media reviewers pan it.
hitchhiker
@lovable liberal:
Precisely. Just like the 20-times-re-written bible. Sacred text is what defines a certain class of obsessives.
trizzlor
@Butler: Yeah, loved it when the awful union agitator tells beautiful, sharp-faced Dagney that she can’t force men to die for profit and she says, incredulously, “Put that in writing” – as if it were some kind of revolutionary entitlement that would be laughed out of any court of law.
Seriously though, (in my best comic book guy voice) who in their right mind would run/work a train across an unstable bridge made of some never-before-seen material that the company claims can’t be safety tested because of “trade secrets”. Oh and the owner of the train company just happens to be in a bizzare sexual relationship with the owner of the material. Who would volunteer for this? Are we supposed to respect Dagney for so obviously taking advantage of her employees?
trollhattan
Wow. I am teh riveted. Does the John Galt Very Limited(tm) make it over that union-built kraptastik bridge? Kan I haz giant speech? It’s teh felz gud flik of teh summer, and it’s not even summer.
Roger Moore
@Southern Beale:
Which just goes to show that most people who claim to be conservatives are actually reactionaries. They aren’t trying to keep things the way they are; they’re trying to return them to the way they used to be. Or at least the way they imagine they used to be. In reality, most reactionaries are at least as radical and utopian as the progressives they like to criticize. It’s just the ideal world they want to create is an idealized version of the badly remembered past.
Butler
@Omnes Omnibus:
Pretty much. They build a whole rail line, bridge, and train out of this Amazing Miracle Steel which of course only the small group of heroic characters actually believe will work. And in true Randian Superhero fashion, the Amazing Bridge is designed not by a team of careful, skilled civil engineers, but is quickly sketched out by the main character in a flash of genius. A true “Laffer’s Napkin” moment.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@micah616: That’s what I’ve heard, though I suspect the makers are counting on the profits from part one to finance the second two parts. And they’ll probably make it, since there are just enough true believers who’ll shell out whatever it costs to go to a movie to make a profit. Hell, it might even be the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre of the summer.
But it’s still going to suck donkey balls all to hell.
Butler
I cannot fucking wait. Of course, either way its a win for them.
Good reviews + good box office: all hail Queen Ayn!
Bad reviews + good box office: take that, idiot liberal critics, the market has spoken!
Bad reviews + bad box office: Liberal conspiracy to make the movie fail
Good reviews + bad box office: Only the chosen few appreciate the genius of Queen Ayn!
Earl Butz
The Objectivists won’t buy it; the Dagney character is too good-looking.
Ayn Rand had a face that looked like someone lit it on fire and then tried to put it out with a screwdriver. That’s more their speed.
Bubblegum Tate
@trizzlor:
Well, what she did was rephrase the evil man’s desire for some sort of safety testing as a desire to prevent people from working and ever getting paid. In other words, the kind of completely ludicrous bullshit that would be immediately followed by the sound of wingnut fapping.
Calouste
@Halteclere:
Ford did his major salary raise in 1914. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. They probably called him something differently (bolshevik came in vogue only a few years later), but the intention would have been the same.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
I wonder how many internet glibertarians will torrent the hell out of this movie and claim they’re doing it out of enlightened self-interest?
priscianus jr
micah616
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): I don’t know. When there’s some sort of shitty Christian film, like the Left Behind series, they at least have a captive audience that will buy it. I can’t see how they sell a film trilogy with no explosions and a rape scene to a mass market.
nostromo
@Butler:
My other favorite part was the flash of insight that came to Rearden to his “Laffer Curve” moment.
According to the book, the idea was a “truss combined with an arch.”
PanAmerican
It ain’t easy being cheesy
Mark B
Honestly, do they even have fucking engineers in Galt land? I guarantee that if you build a fucking bridge with train tracks on it, you are going to be able to know whether it can hold the dynamic weight of a train, not just before the first train goes across it, but also before the first piling is put in, the first piece of steel (or Galt metal) is laid, etc. These days, you can simulate the entire structure virtually and not have any question that it’s engineered well enough to do the job.
Of course, the first trains on the bridge are going to be test trains loaded with sensors to collect data on how well the structure is performing. Not full of people.
I guess the obervation is that not only is the view of human behavior completely unrealistic, but also the view of how you actually build things and conduct business is completely fantastical. Believe, if the uncertainty was that high, the bridge would have never even been beyond the drawing board, much less been ready for a train to cross it.
Dan.
Someone watched a lot of West Wing and tried do something afterwards. I don’t know. All I could hear throughout that painful scene was:
“Well I do owe you for giving me this unholy [Shatner]Acting. Talent[/Shatner].”
hitchhiker
@nostromo:
A truss combined with an arch!
That should have been the title of Part One. Dagny is the arch, Rearden is the truss.
Soap. Opera.
J. Michael Neal
@hitchhiker: Dagny is arch all right.
TBogg
Wait. Wait.
She’s going to ask for volunteers?
Isn’t volunteering for something breaking Rand Rule #1?
Ayn Rand just shit herself (again) in Hell.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Dan.: Shatner? I remember that as Calculon.
Mark B
@Earl Butz “Ayn Rand had a face that looked like someone lit it on fire and then tried to put it out with a screwdriver.”
Yes, but her face was more attractive than her personality.
JGabriel
DougJ:
Or equally to the point: Since when does TV cover union protests?
.
schtum
Wait, wait, I’ve never read the book, does it really treat a corporation’s refusal to do basic safety testing as heroism? And is that a message that’s supposed to resonate in the wake of an oil rig explosion and a near nuclear meltdown in Japan?
Mark B
It’s completely ridiculous. You can’t build a large structure like a bridge without adequate engineering studies. Not only would Dagny have to contend with the union, but the damn government would be on her ass. It’s almost like Ayn Rand would have to be a complete idiot to be able to write something so completely unrealistic.
malraux
FWIW, Greenspan though the book was great and inspiring.
Craig J
Hard to believe the production budget was only $5,000,000, lol
Roger Moore
@malraux:
And people still trusted him with our economy. Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about just how fucked we are?
Mark S.
@Mark B:
Are you questioning the realism of an Ayn Rand novel?
@malraux:
Even in soshalist Obamaland, creating a perpetual motion machine would make you a trillionaire. Isn’t that enough to enable you to do whatever the fuck you wanted for the rest of your life? What in God’s name is this philosophy about? I think it’s solely about getting revenge on the people who teased you in high school, who didn’t appreciate what a genius you were.
Citizen_X
@Mark B: Not only that, but if that is their “design” process, who the hell is going to invest in the thing? Oh, sure, tell the banks and venture capitalists, “We can’t test the metal and we can’t test the bridge before running a full train over it. Trade secrets. Liabilities? What are you talking about?” They’ll love that.
Kristine
@beltane:
HSR and single-payer?
I’m so retiring there.
J Edgar
What I remember is that after the good guy / gal industrialists announce their plan for the Rearden metal railroad, the bad guy establishment of government, press, college professors, creepy brothers, and socialists, was so offended and frightened by the idea of the untested, unknown metal, that the good guys were just unable to reason with them. No fact-based activity was possible because the industrialists were so oppressed by the force of bad people.
That makes some sense in a sci-fi novel aimed at 14 year old boys.
hamletta
Did no one on the set notice that Haggard Union Guy left his briefcase in Dagny’s office?
Or is that a plot point?
cthulhu
@Butler: I wouldn’t give it much chance of being a hit in the traditional sense. It is a low budget ($15 mil according to imdb) independent and with a minor distributor (Had they at least gotten someone like Lionsgate or one of the majors’ boutique distributors, I might be a bit more impressed). Initial release according to their website is only 50 theaters and, given where many of those theaters are, I don’t expect it will end up wide (one normally starts in the big cities and moves out to the boondocks, not the other way around). The only way I see this running to profit is via wingnut welfare bulk video purchases. Which I suppose will happen…
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Dagny Galt: OMFG. You have just won all the internets.
[dies, laughing]
cthulhu
Oh, and I have noted before, the writer/director/producer has basically no movie biz experience.
hippobippo
@malraux: of course, it went a bit further than casual fandom–greenspan was annihilating fat rails of homegrown, uncut ‘O’ back before Rand Paul could chew. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ayn_Rand_Collective
“checkmate” he says.
from a critical point of view, the movie looks goddamn stupid.
cthulhu
Ahhh, look what else the distributor, Rocky Mountain Pictures, has brought us: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091617/
I have issues with Baltimore
@Dan.: Props for the Calculon reference. That is my indisputable number one favorite line from the entire Futurama series.
Also, relative to this sampler clip, I’ve seen more inspired acting from the roaches in my building’s laundry room when I flick on the lights.
daveNYC
@Walker:
Entropy, the ultimate parasite
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
if the actors wore blue make up and had tails, this movie could be a blockbuster.
either that or cast one of the olsen twins as dagney, add a couple of shower scenes(with non-eco friendly shower heads restricting the amount of water put out) and exploit the freak show element to its fullest potential.
Petorado
“I’ll ask for volunteers so then it will be my problem, not yours Mr. Brady.”
… said Don Blankenship of Massey Energy at the Big Branch coal mine.
chines
I had to look up Paul Johanssen, director of AS/John Galt because I don’t watch the WB. He mostly appears in movies or tv shows I’m unfamiliar with and/or never watched. That’s not a slam against him, just an expression of the fact that my TV is usually engaged by tots.
Until I got to Soapdish (1991). Love that movie! and he played Bolt. BOLT! He did SUCH a wonderful job playing a bad actor in a cheesy soap.
But, perhaps it wasn’t an act. He is a crazy Randian, after all.
Socraticsilence
Does liability exist as a concept in Galtopia- because if it does it just seems moronic- using an untested metal on a major scale- what happens if its I don’t know a carcinogen or something.
andy
Maybe it doesn’t have to be good or profitable to make the sequels. Surely the Koch boys will understand what’s at stake and dump a few hunnnert mill on the project!
Socraticsilence
Also- I can’t wait to see if they keep the part were the Galtanista’s essentially gas a trainload of people (including token black guy in the seem up there) in a tunnel because that was seriously some Turner Diaries level domestic terror shit.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@malraux: Material? Metal? Forgive me, but are they talking about rail? It’s not like this has been proven and improved in practice since, oh, about 1823 when the B&O made it to Ellicott City.
Claptrap.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@trizzlor: So they got some structural engineer (who has to be a PE) to seal the drawings for a bridge that he can’t verify is safe? BS. No PE is going to risk his career on an untested technology.
Well, unless Dagny’s going to pay him a shitload of money, I guess.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Butler: That’s why they’re doing trains. No public infrastructure, no pesky PEs. Although I don’t know why their insurance and bonding company isn’t insisting on it. Or are these Galtians self-insured?
As Pogo said “It is to laugh.”
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
I see my fellow engineers already found all the holes in this cheesy (or is that Swiss cheesy) plot. Thanks guys, I’m out. Got a long day of engineering ahead of me tomorrow.
BTW, do you know the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?
Mechanical engineers build weapons.
Civil engineers build targets.
Thanks, I’ll be here all week, tip your waitress!
Batocchio
Holy crap, that’s bad. That’s a horrendous script based on a worse novel, and a one-sided scene poorly directed. Ayn Rand’s writing is really just godawful fanfic by a plutocratic, neofeudual, sociopath who considered agitprop the highest of art forms, but couldn’t even do it with as much style as the Soviets (whom she despised) did.
demz taters
@Socraticsilence:
BP can tell you all about liability as a concept.
Alex
How dare we deny people the right to choose to get killed for profit. Things like Black Lung and asbestosis used to be every American’s birthright.
HeartlandLiberal
Atlas Shrugged was written during a period when trains were in the last phase of productive use for passenger as well as freight travel. They would be killed off starting in the fifties with the introduction of the passenger jet. This was aided and abetted by the construction of the interstate highway system and the emphasis on and support of the personal car as the primary goal of ownership and personal transportation, and the movement of population to suburban residential developments during the same period.
The de Havilland Comet was introduced in 1949, but the introduction of the Boeing 707 into commercial passenger usage was not until 1958. But from that point on, the age of passenger rail was near-death in the USofA.
I still find it hilarious that the anti-socialist forces of our reich wing brethren are pushing a story so profoundly rooted in a transportation that just SCREAMS socialism and social cooperation to maximize passenger density and coverage while minimizing costs and impacts on the ecosystem. Which is, of course, what trains do.
They do it very successfully right now with freight, the companies even advertise currently based on the low cost per weight per mile that movement by rail offers.
But high speed urban and inter-urban rail represent the dangerous threat of European style socialism. Thus the frantic resistance to rail projects by the current Republican tea-bagging governors just elected.
By the way, if you love trains, one neat experience is sitting in a restaurant in I-15 in California where it climbs up through the pass in the mountains to the east of Los Angeles to get to the Mojave desert. There is constant passage up and down the rail lines which parallel the highway up through the pass, freight trains that look like they might be a mile long, all either toiling slowly up the long grade, or carefully creeping down with the grade. A lot of goods from that were offloaded from container ships on the coast are on those trains, making their way to their destinations all over the nation.
Xenos
This union rep is upset because risking the deaths of workers is against human rights? Why would anyone cite something as undefined as ‘human rights’ when there are all sorts of federal and state rights he could be citing? And since there is a union here, there is no controlling contractual language?
In many cases these unions have a lot of money invested with the major investment banks… you would never see a Rand plot where Dagny is told by her bankers to stfu and follow the law.
Moonbatman
Stupid Wingnuts
Don’t they know that trains are a function of the Federal Government just like the Post office.
Trains are too important to let them be owned and ran by private enterprise.
The union guy should have brought 50 large and loud friends to beat and rape the stupid bitch(like the Rand Paul supporters did to the poor Moveon.org woman who destroyed their worldview with a Repubicorp sign) for talking back to the working man.
Peace Out The Power is Yours.
Alex
Apparently stupid wingnuts are ignorant of the fact that things like transcontinental railroads would have been impossible without the massive government intervention required to obtain rights-of-ways necessary to make the construction of such rail lines feasible, and to limit the liability for damage caused by rail construction to other landowners, and finally liability for injuries to rail workers and third parties caused by negligence.
Lee
They misspelled Dagny.
DKF
@lovable liberal:
I had the exact same thought. Rand is infallible, and what may appear to be a problem with her holy text necessarily arises from faulty exigesis, not from the text itself.
Nicole
Speaking of Henry Ford- he was against unions, believing it was the responsibility of the business owner to hire managers so capable there would be no need for unions. He also admitted that it was just about impossible to find enough managers who were capable. So he was against unions in the real world because in his fantasy world, full of mythical capable managers, unions aren’t necessary.
Ayn Rand’s writing is very similar. In her fictional world these geniuses of industry all have an innate sense of fairness and never, ever look to game the system. In Atlas Shrugged, one of the big villains is Dagny’s brother, who is skilled only at back room deals and securing special breaks from the government. In the novel he comes to a bad end. In the real world he’d be on the GOP ticket in a heartbeat.
But hey, Rand hated Reagan, so I give her a single point for that.
cmorenc
The movie version of books often make alterations that substantially depart from the author’s original story, much more often in the direction of dumbing it down and introducing spurious artifacts in the pursuit of dramatic visual impact that don’t hold up under logical or factual inspection nearly as well as in the author’s original.
NEVERTHELESS, do I understand correctly (if anyone here has actually tortured themselves to struggle through reading “Atlas Shrugged”) that the ORIGINAL plot really centers in substantial part on the railroad CEO’s insistence on running a train full of passengers over a railroad bridge of untested design and metallic materials, confronting a union representative who objects to staffing the train on safety concerns with the claim that such concerns are unwarranted because if the bridge wasn’t safe, the railroad would quickly be out of business, and meanwhile the union rep is stealing worker’s right to choose to be employed by the railroad?
And if so, Alan Greenspan thought this was a splendid book full of splendid ideas?
Oh, Geez it becomes more and more apparent by the day why wingers produce such a clusterfuck every time they gain the levers of power.
bjacques
This trailer needs to be followed with Gomez Addams blowing up the trains in his train set. It would make about as much sense.
The people who’ll end up seeing this movie (like the ones who saw Expelled and An American Carol) come off like the mooches and second-handers in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged who end their arguments with “it’s self-evident!” Angry people with unsupportable arguments. At least the mooches and second-handers have the excuse that Ayn Rand created them to be stupid.
Cermet
Where is the Captain of the Pirate ship? Not kidding; in this dream land book this guy roams the seas sinking all ships they come across to prove that the evil socialist are taking over the world – yes, somehow this guy runs a battleship freely over the oceans destroying anything and all world governments put together can’t stop him. Of course, he sinks the transport ship carrying the critical element (Cu) for the super metal creating a plot crisis … so believable – not – even for the day the fuckard wrote this steaming pile of $hit that idea was so outdated as to be beyond laughable – I guess they can cut the scripture, after all.. . lets not forget the force field which is so common … and greenspan the a$swipe likes this pile of $hit? Only in another dream world could anyone trust anyone who admires this bad and stupid a book.
jwest
Any movie that exposes union thugs and anti-progress liberals as villains is worth the price of admission.
Popcorn, anyone?
Ken
@Mark S.: What in God’s name is this philosophy about? I think it’s solely about getting revenge on the people who teased you in high school, who didn’t appreciate what a genius you were.
@J Edgar: That makes some sense in a sci-fi novel aimed at 14 year old boys.
I never really appreciated how much Rand’s writing resembled resembled Orson Scott Card until now. Perhaps because she was a crappy writer in addition to being a crappy philosopher.
There is one way in which they are almost polar opposites, though. Card’s works – beat your tormentors to death, then save the rest of the world to demonstrate that you a shining beacon of guiltless goodness — see the world as largely good, or neutral, with a smaller subset of evil tormentors who must be destroyed. Rand’s work sees the world as full of leeches, looters, parasites, welfare queens and young bucks buying ribeye steaks, with only a small subset of them being good, true, Galtian good guys.
And yet they’re both nothing more than elaborate adolescent revenge fantasies writ large.
shortstop
@cmorenc:
Why be so negative? What the union was doing was stifling creativity with its everlasting naysaying. It’s gloomy Guses like that who keep good ideas from being born just because they’re jealous of their intellectual betters.
It can’t be said too often that it is freaking hilarious that they didn’t update the industry from a transcontinental railroad to something more relevant in 2011. It would be funny even if the entire GOP weren’t engaged in a stick-their-fingers-in-their-ears battle against HSR.
And making the union guy over-the-top haggard instead of grossly obese is a subtlety of which Ayn Rand would not have approved.
Legalize
Snap! It just hit me. I went to law school with a gal who’s middle name was Dagney. She was an arch free-market, small-government, freedom loving, rugged individualist who just wanted to keep the government out of our faces – while getting through school on student loans just like everyone else.
redoubt
@schtum: Because to these people “risk” (usually with someone else’s body/money) is always followed by “reward” (multiple zeros in their bank account). They take the “risks” and should reap the “rewards” and skip all that time- and money- wasting “testing” and “verification” part, because they always “win.” (It’s why Randroids are all over Wall Street.) IRL “risk” is sometimes followed by “bankruptcy” or “death by explosion” which is why this is fiction.
shortstop
@Earl Butz: No, Rand’s mug notwithstanding, objectivists are convinced that all their women are as hawt as Dagny, just as they think of themselves as being Rearden-like in their clean-cut nobility of features rather than the saggy couch potatoes most of them are.
The one thing Rand got right in that novel was having 100 libertarian men for 1 libertarian woman, which necessitates a certain amount of passing around.
Nicole
@Legalize: The guy I knew as a teenager who suggested I read Atlas Shrugged went on to A) join the Coast Guard B) go to a state university and C) work in the oil industry. And insist that he’d gotten everything he had in life all by himself, with no help from anyone. In fact, he was pretty derisive about my family having been able to send me to a private university. Ah, the Randites. For all the focus they put on the individual, you think they’d be a little more self-aware.
West of the Cascades
@redoubt: often “risk” is followed by “taxpayer-financed bailout” – so, in real life, our Galtian Overlords are usually facing a win-win outcome. Rand seems to have missed that nuance.
Bubblegum Tate
@Nicole:
Wait, what? How did that work?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“Honestly, do they even have fucking engineers in Galt land?”
Only engineers that have HEROIC INDIVIDUAL INSIGHTS!
The idea that back in the early part of the century you had teams of engineers, backed by dozens of women cranking the mechanical, is obviously sochialistic propaganda.
It’s an irony, though, that of the three professions – law, medicine, engineering – engineering, the one that requires the most teamwork and is the least an effort of a HEROIC INDIVIDUALS attracts the folks that are the most introverted and who’d rather work on their own. But it shows how fucking little Rand understood about the way science & engineering actually got done then or now.
shortstop
@Bubblegum Tate: Because he didn’t have the advantages of a family fortune that could pay for a private university. He was a totally self-made man who went to government schools to make himself. That about it, Nicole?
Robert Green
so everywhere every dickchisel in state gov’t with an R after their name is killing train travel JUST WHEN FINALLY someone makes what will prove to be the most execrable piece of shit my little town has outputted in some time–O THE FUCKING IRONY IS SO DELICIOUS IT’S LIKE THOMAS KELLER MADE IT
Sloegin
The movie will be a rousing success with empty theaters, mostly from conservative “think tanks”, foundations, other conservative sources buying up massive blocks of tickets.
These groups will fund the movie big and buy loads of dvds, because frankly, their wanking to all those straussian, oakeshottian, and burkesian books they buy just isn’t fun anymore.
The Other Chuck
@cmorenc:
There was no bridge in the book: it was just the rails built out of the miracle metal — a metal that is apparently an alloy of steel and copper. Yes, copper. But despite these questionable properties, where oxidization was already giving it its described greenish tinge, it was already said to perform miraculously, nothing so dramatic as testing a bridge necessary.
Yunno, what’s also in the book is a part where Taggart expresses sympathy for a union’s right to strike, not just ones comprised of Galtian Overlords. So despite her otherwise complete lack of humanity (like where she cold-bloodedly executes a guard for the sin of panic) the right to unionize wasn’t even questioned by the likes of Rand back then.
danimal
@Roger Moore: Now I’ve got a job, but it don’t pay…
Obviously a Randian interpretation of the Clash is needed.
west coast
She’s a cold blonde businesswoman in a very cute suit with a black servant….ladies and gentlemen, the Libertarian wet dream.
shortstop
@The Other Chuck: No, there was a bridge — it was a total rebuild of an old steel bridge, and the union did question whether it would hold, since it was made of the totally untested Rearden Metal.
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
This movie will be a big hit in the same way that Ann Coulter is a best-selling author.
I mean, with a budget of $15 million, any one of our nation’s plutocrats could make it profitable just using the change in their couches.
Expect to see DVDs of this flick given as “free gifts” for subscribing to the National Review very soon.
Jose Padilla
She also seems to imply that if a train goes over it once and it doesn’t collapse, then all is good. I guess she hasn’t heard of metal fatigue.
Cermet
Where is the Captain of the Pirate ship? Not kidding; in this dream land book this guy roams the seas sinking all ships they come across to prove that the evil ray-gun empire (due to no s word, this has been in moderation for over two hours so I replaced the word with this) is taking over the world – yes, somehow this guy runs a battleship freely over the oceans destroying anything and all world governments put together can’t stop him. Of course, he sinks the transport ship carrying the critical element (Cu) for the super metal creating a plot crisis … so believable – not – even for the day the f’er wrote this steaming pile of shine’ola that idea was so outdated as to be beyond laughable – I guess they can cut the scripture, after all.. . lets not forget the force field which is so common … and greenspan the a$$wipe likes this pile of shuff? Only in another dream world could anyone trust anyone who admires this bad and stupid a book
Nicole
@shortstop:
Yeah, and what was a shame about the complete lack of awareness about his taxpayer-funded job with the Coast Guard and taxpayer subsidized degree at a public university is that, last I knew, he was fairly solidly middle-class, as opposed to the working poor he’d been growing up. He’s a great example of the system working to help motivated people move up from where they are. But rather than think, “Hey, this was a great thing for me; let’s make sure it’s there for other people” he whined about government “soaking the rich” and people getting government handouts.
Hell, my family was solidly middle-class and I’d have never been able to stay in my school without scholarships, Pell, etc.
mark f
Craig T. Nelson syndrome: “I been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No.”
My senator, Scott Brown, has a real bad case too. His predecessor did not, despite living off a billion-dollar family trust his whole life.
Matt
@Vibrant Pantload, fka Studly Pantload:
The tough is just an act – like every woman in Rand’s books, she’s secretly waiting to be ravished (ie, raped) by a true Galtian übermensch. For more info, check out a copy of the book from the library and look for the dog-eared parts – if the pages aren’t already stuck together, they’ll provide a helpful guidepost. ;)
Parrotlover77
The YouTube tells me that “this video is private.” Well, damn it! I want to see what all the fuss is about. I’m late to the concert!