Saturday, February 27, 2010
Ayn Rand: Admirer of Serial Killer
Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
Mark Ames' AlterNet article details her admiration for a sociopath, based on Jennifer Burns reports of Rand's early notebooks.
The article details William Edward Hickman's most gruesome murder, and how Rand admired his attitude.
Ames attempts to tarbrush prominent Rand fans such as Alan Greenspan, Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Sanford. with this pathology of Rand's. However, the objectivist classification of opponents as "parasites" is merely the beginning of the objectivist disdain for other people and democracy.
His conclusion doesn't need serial killers to stand on its own:
"Too many critics of Ayn Rand-- until I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed. But it can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as The Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere."
Thanks to THE Rich Rosen for the lead. Rich also has a good (and funny) article on Rand: When Atlas Shrugs, People Listen... But Why?
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11 comments:
Saw an interesting documentary about The Phoenix Strangler that you defenately shouldn´t miss, check it out here: The Phoenix Strangler Documentary
Michael Prescott covered this material several years ago:
Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman
I ran into Prescott's post about this last year, and I also contributed this:
http://kazimskorner.blogspot.com/2009/03/ayn-rands-weird-obsession-with-killer.html
I also discussed it on a message board and had a surreal justification in which an objectivist first denied that this happened, then defended Rand's position on the killer as noble, and finally told me that I was worse than the killer because I am of course a socialist Nazi who believes in Big Government.
Isn't it grand that Rand is now outed as a serial killer groupie?
It speaks volumes about the nature of her hyper-individualist philosophy.
Rand did express hostility towards little girls in her novels. An unemployed auto worker in Atlas Shrugged tells Dagny about "Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean, ugly little eight-year-old" with an overbite who received braces through his former company's health plan. A disgruntled fellow employee of the car company then saw Millie wearing the braces, struck her in the face and knocked out all her teeth!
Because Rand shows that your physical appearance signals your character, the way she describes the Millie episode makes it sound as if the little girl who received the orthodontic work (a decision she didn't make for herself) deserved the assault.
Well, if according to you, the killing of about 100 million people does not necessarily make communists wrong, than why would admiration of a particular killer's psyche make objectvism wrong?
Hyper individualist as Ayn Rand certainly is, my freedom always ends where yor freedom starts, her teachings are no different. Ayn Rand never said it was okay for Hickman to kill the girl, she was merely fascinated by the killer's lack of remorse, even after he had commited such a heineous crime, while private business owners were made remorseful by society just for being rich. She never said Hickman was a "Superman", as all the articles mindlessly repeat, but had "psychology of a Superman", understood as unbridled individualism. Note that Superman was also "accidentally" killing quite a lot of _innocent_ bystanders to achieve their individualistic goals, especially in the Golden Age (Batman was even worse), so it's not like she was comparing Hickman to some saint.
If you want to attribute something to me, cite me. Don't put words in my mouth, or I'll block you from this site for gross violations of the policy.
By the same standard, capitalist tobacco companies kill about 3 million a year worldwide, for a total of well over a hundred million. Does that make capitalism wrong?
Well, sooner or later you'll block me anyway, for gross violation of whatever, this is your private site ;)
Same standard? Communists actually killed all those people, not just sold people something unhealthy. End result same? End result does not define standards, I could get my wife pregnant by raping her, achieving same result, but that wouldn't be same standard.
As I said before, do not attribute intentions to me that you make up.
I've yet to block anybody at my site in six years.
So if somebody sold you some poison and lied about it being dangerous, you'd be satisfied to die from it?
Please do.
If you had the sense to check your sources, most of the 100 million you claim would be found to have died of indirect causes. Bringing about deaths indirectly does not exculpate private actors whether they control nations or corporations.
I have never met any smoker who thinks that smoking is healthy, so if tobacco companies kill about 3 million a year worldwide, they kill according to the will of the killed, so a victimless crime.
Again, end result same, but not same standard, unless you want to argue that political prisoners knew gulags were unhealthy but went there for fun anyways.
The problem and stupidity of people like a Mark Ames is that they take things out of context. Doing that you can make anyone say anything! The stupidity is we all know what you did Mark. Apparently the author of this post did not!
If you are interested in finding out the real deal about Ayn Rand and what is going on today visit the inviolate truth website!! www.theinviolatetruth.com
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