A truly epic review of Atlas Shrugged II, Electric Boogaloo:
Though Michael Milken turned finance on its head on the way to securing capital for previously overlooked companies (think CNN and MCI among many others), he was in prison for the “violation” of laws that were undefined, and that previously no courts had ever pursued. Milken’s true “offense”, one that the blue chip investment banks wouldn’t dare admit, was that he’d cleaned their clocks. While in prison, it’s notable that Milken was the recipient of countless copies of Atlas Shrugged; copies sent by Rand devotees who well knew his only offense was success.
And then later in the ‘90s, Bill Gates of Microsoft found his company under attack from the U.S. Justice Department; Gates’s mistake one of “antitrust” for having given consumers some of what they wanted for free. Gates’s actions violated what regulators deemed fair, and right out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged and Rearden, Gates lacked “a man in Washington” to do his bidding.
Microsoft soon learned its lesson, and now it’s got a major Washington operation, including lobbyists seeking to do to Microsoft’s competitors what competitors used to do to Microsoft. Needless to say, Gates wasted years defending his company, and when the DOJ ruled against it, I sent Gates a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Full of Randian vigor throughout this period, I would regularly ask why the “vital few” in society would put up with barriers placed in the way of their economy-enhancing achievement by the ankle-biters of the political and regulatory class. Why not just disappear, and let society’s takers and wealth gap worriers figure out just how brutal life would be absent the genius of the talented?
Maybe I’m just another hopeless liberal dreamer, but I’d like to think that at times like this, when the breaks are beating the boys, that everyone on the left — Obots and Firebaggers, principled progressives and Manichean monsters, hapless deniers and clear-eyed Sullivanites — can join hands and laugh at poorly written glibertarian nonsense.
burnspbesq
You really, really suck for making me read that twaddle.
This may be forgiven, but it will not be forgotten.
justawriter
I’ll drink to that.
Hell, I’ll even buy a round.
chopper
i aint readin that dreck. sorry doug.
Xecky Gilchrist
I’d like to think that […] everyone on the left […] can join hands and laugh at poorly written glibertarian nonsense.
Indeed, when we lose that we have lost at Life.
Fax Paladin
“…the other, of course, involves orcs.”
? Martin
I go to Forbes for all of my movie recommendations.
SatanicPanic
“Full of Randian vigor throughout this period”
beltane
There is such an animal as a Sullivanite? That is news to me.
One of the great tragedies of this country is that a second-rate writer with a third-rate mind like Ayn Rand has managed to achieve such influence over the years. Is this the best we can do?
Steve
It’s a given that if you write a sentence about “poorly written nonsense” you’ll accidentally include something like “when the breaks are beating that boys” in the same sentence.
burnspbesq
@? Martin:
And Cahiers du Cinema for investment advice?
Eric U.
netflix streaming can’t decide which genre to put Atlas Shrugged I under. I think it’s finally settled down to Scifi and Fantasy
KG
There’s so much stupid there, even by glibertarian standards, I don’t know where to start. And I say this as a fairly libertarian commenter.
Ben Franklin
OT. Haven’t seen any mention here.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9598851/US-troops-operating-in-Jordan-near-Syria-border.html
Lots of hubbub in the ME. I question the timing.
Aet
I dunno, I actually liked this article. It’s a level of crazy that’s surprisingly readable. Just look at this first sentence.
It’s something a cultist or a supervillain would say.
It like when those crazies rant about the beauty of a cleansing flame. Death of a civilization? Totally uplifting.
Keith
Poor, innocent Michael Milken…forced to PLEAD GUILTY.
Gates shit the bed as a witness, and MS failed to adequately explain the relationship between a core OS and its components to technical neophytes.
NCSteve
You mean as opposed to all that well-written glibertarian nonsense?
Joel
It’s too bad these movies won’t be successful enough to have porn movie knockoffs:
“Atlas Jugs (feat. Pam Geller)”
“Atlas Tugs”
I feel like the second one could launch the career of as-yet-to-be-invented gay porn star, “Ryan Paul”.
? Martin
@burnspbesq: No, I take all of my investment advice from Android user forums.
David in NY
People forget that the backstory of Belle Waring’s famous “… and a pony” blog post is a wonderful summary of the libertarian fantasy world that, as Belle puts it “resembles nothing so much as a debate over some fine procedural point of end-stage communism, after the state has withered away.” Here, still good: http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html
burnspbesq
@beltane:
Faulkner doesn’t provide much in the way of glib defenses for narcissistic selfishness.
KG
@Keith: MS’s other problem was that they completely dominated the market at the time and were putting out a shitty product while doing so. The moral of the story is: if you’re going to dominate a market, don’t let quality control slip.
gbear
Is that review for real or is it snark? I can’t tell. I like it as snark though.
Brachiator
Ah. This explains Windows 8.
I asked in another thread if Atlas Shrugged 2 would be another movie night for DougJ and Mistermix. The subsequent review would be hilarious.
And somebody has got to ask Paul Ryan if he is going to see the movie. Might be fun if he takes some folks from a local senior center. Hijinks would ensue.
KG
@burnspbesq: and Twain used the N-word too much.
Warren Terra
That review you link is the most brilliant satire I’ve seen in a while. Any other interpretation of the review would leave me weeping for humanity.
PS my favorite part of the review may have been the bit about how the actress who plays Rearden’s “actual wife” really isn’t hot enough to be the bit of arm candy such a titan of industry deserves, and the actress who plays Dagny may not be, either.
PPS Also especially funny: the line about hoping one of the actors returns to play the same role in Part 3, a clever bit of snark aimed at those readers who realize that (1) the movie was completely recast between Part 1 and Part 2, and (2) the production of a Part 3 is rather uncertain.
burnspbesq
@Keith:
Gates’ deposition should be required viewing for any lawyer who is thinking about letting his client’s CEO testify.
David in NY
WhoTH is John Tamny anyway?
Rommie
Wow, that’s some Grade A parody and snark. You can almost believe the writing is heartfelt and not biting sarcasm.
But the part about ignoring any flaws because of AWESOME is too much, and breaks the spirit of the piece. Nobody actually does that in a serious review.
taylormattd
God, I love it so much when you are bitchy.
NCSteve
Speaking of which, btw . . .
http://xkcd.com/1118/
Thoroughly Pizzled
When I think of a great captain of industry, I think of Jerry Jones.
Culture of Truth
Truly life would have been brutal without MS DOS
burnspbesq
@gbear:
It’s in Forbes. That pretty much settles the “is it snark” question for me.
Rusty
What happened to the original cast of Part I? Did they go Galt on us? God knows, their acting ability was beyond me to comprehend. I was trying to figure out whether they were acting poorly, on purpose, or if it was bad direction. We know, of course, it couldn’t have been the fault of the underlying story.
runt
Feel free to go Galt at any time, Mr. Tamny. That’ll show us!
mathguy
I had never heard of Tamny before this. What a nutjob-he sounds like a libertarian version of a Soviet apparatchik from the 1950s.
Aet
@Rusty:
They went off and hid somewhere. Possibly a gulch of some kind.
lamh35
Way, way OT, but Booman has a write up of the story of Mitt Romney and the slain ex-Seal who died in the Benghazi attack, that Mitt had been talking about on the stump. Egads, Mitt Romney is a dick. It reads like it just can’t be real, and yet, it truly is. It incorporates the beginning of the story as Romney claimed it and puts together what the friend of the ex-Seal says and you basically come away with it realizing that basically Ann and Mitt crashed some family’s Christmas party and I guess never realized that they were party crashers. It is both the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard and yet it’s obviously so painfully believable that you just cringe.
Not a Normal Person
by BooMan
burnspbesq
Esai Morales? Hoo boy, we are in for some serious scenery-chewing.
crosspalms
It should be Atlas Shrugged, Also, II
Keith
@KG: While WinME was definite crap, the trial was largely about IE. And lemme tell you, from a technical standpoint, IE was WAYYYY better than the competition (Navigator). The renderer was COM-based rather than monolithic, so other companies (ie AOL) could release customized browsers based on IE. And IE 4 added OS integration (ActiveDesktop) that had the hella-cool-but-underused taskbar HTML rendering. And it also introduced the flat toolbars to the UI (aka CoolBar/ReBar, which was the start of MS cleaning ot the UI to something more modern and less stone-like.
ranchandsyrup
The funny thing to me is that objectivism holds so much contempt for the institution it purports to love so much, the free fucking market. Fine, check out, go galt, etc. But don’t tell us that the market you love so much won’t make up for your absence. My objectivist friends that won’t admit they’re objectivists believe that the quality of the galtian superheroes’ talent cannot be replaced but it’s just their belief/projection.
Ghost of Joe Liebling's Dog
Esteemed Jefe de Oro,
As always, if it is your wish it will be my foremost goal to make it so, but I am also honor-bound to point out that you are full of Randian vigor yet again …
DPS
So awesome.
matt
Civilization would collapse if Gates went Galt? Has this subhuman drool bucket ever even used a computer?
lamh35
Obama Internal Polls Still Show Leads in Swing States
beltane
@ranchandsyrup: That’s because Objectivism is really Subjectivism, the cult of MeMeMeMeMe. Once you realize this you’ll understand the futility of expecting any sort of intellectual consistency from these people.
yam
Is there a glibertarian equivalent to Poe’s Law?
yam
Is there a glibertarian equivalent to Poe’s Law?
JPL
@Ben Franklin: There was an article in the NYTimes.. call me biased but I think it was more informative. link
Amir Khalid
The frustrated copy editor in me desperately wants to correct the “you’re” in the post headline to “you are”. But I’m afeared Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ might say that that’s how it goes in the song lyric/poem/movie/novel he’s quoting, thus exposing a gap in my pop-culture knowledge for everyone to see.
Brachiator
And here’s more fun, Nate Silver on the BBC Math show More or Less.
He predicts an Obama win.
It’s a 10 minute program, available from the BBC site or as a iTunes download.
John Galt, on the other hand, not much with numbers.
SatanicPanic
@yam:
Glibertarians are fundamentalists.
Calouste
@matt:
Gates retired from Microsoft a few years back.
And considering that he not only is giving away about 99.99% of his own wealth, but also convinced Warren Buffett to do the same, he might not be all that much in to Randianism.
ranchandsyrup
@beltane: I hear ya beltane. I guess I’m not looking for consistency from these guys. I just try get them to the point where they could conceivably see the contradiction. The weight they assign to it is up to them.
dr. bloor
There are times I wish I could trot Bill Gates into the frame ala Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall to tell assclowns like this that he stayed in the corrupt, excessively regulated game because he still made a fuckton of money by doing so.
MikeJ
@burnspbesq: I did not know until today that Jean-Luc Godard’s DP[1] shot Pootie Tang.
[1]Masculin Féminin, Far From Vietnam
Robert Sneddon
@Keith: My ISP used to give away copies of Netscape Navigator to its customers way back when. They switched over to IE in, I think, 1995 when Win95 came out. When asked about this change they explained that one company wanted a million bucks in licencing fees and the other company said their browser was free. Guess which was which.
Nowadays the idea of an OS without a bundled browser in the package is incredible tending towards impossible — there’s a lot of code functionality out there that requires the ability to parse HTML and CSS even outside the field of rendering webpages. Indeed building a simple webpage browser is one of the easier code examples in Visual Studio as it’s basically a wrapper around the HTML/CSS rendering engine that’s built into the OS itself.
? Martin
@lamh35:
Would you ever invite them to your christmas party? Crashing might be their only hope at an audience that doesn’t have their noses perfectly glued to their asses.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
Just saw a commercial for the movie, and cracked up over its self-importance:
OK, I’ll be the judge:
This has been another edition of simple answers to stupid questions.
Mike G
Being a Randbot is kind of like believing in reincarnation. Reincarnation believers always think they were oriental kings, daring explorers or famous philosophers in past lives; very few imagine they were unglamorous types like illiterate goatherders in Dark Ages Belgium.
Randbots all imagine themselves as part of the elite few geniuses without whom society would implode. They imagine the rich and powerful would buddy-up to them in a “just world”, they’d be welcome at the table of privilege and all the hot chicks who turned them down in high school would weep with remorse. When in reality they would be the chow upon which the predatory powerful would feed in the absence of government.
arguingwithsignposts
@Calouste: He might not be into Randianism, but his foundation is apparently big in the high stakes testing/charter school business. Make of that what you will.
Emma
@Calouste: That’s what makes it so funny, I think. This is a guy who, for whatever reason, has chosen to use his money for the common good. Somehow the Galtian overlords always miss that part.
? Martin
@Robert Sneddon: Well, the injunction against IE had its intended effect. IE was forking HTML in a proprietary direction. The injunction allowed WebKit browsers (Safari and Chrome) to prosper and gave Firefox a much needed boost. These browsers reinforced the standards and forced IE to follow (which they’re still playing catch-up on)
With the threat of a proprietary forked HTML standard gone, including a browser is no longer contentious and the main features consumers look for in browsers are no longer compatibility, but speed and user interface – as it should be.
muddy
@? Martin: They could come right at the end and be designated drivers.
Emma
@arguingwithsignposts: He’s also single-handedly taken on world health and pours billions into children’s vaccination, HIV research, polio eradication, rice research, food productivity, and water sanitation.
Whatever his sins, Gates does great good too.
duck-billed placelot
YUP, he’s totally right! Today, gas is, similar to in this work of fiction, at nosebleed prices of $42/gallon! Or some variety like that! Or like an order of magnitude less!
This is a financial magazine of note, right? This is a McArdle level of maths ineptitude.
YellowJournalism
Samantha Mathis, what the hell are you doing in this movie? I’m not sure it’s acting.
Pay checks for everyone, I suppose.
Turgidson
@Emma:
Didn’t the IRS basically have to tell Gates to start forking over some of his eleventy-billion dollar fortune, though? I vaguely recall reading about how his philanthropy, which is now definitely quite great and worhty of praise, was something he had to be prodded into doing after being told he couldn’t possibly spend all that money even if he was buying new helicopters every few minutes.
I could be wrong, though.
The Sailor
@Fax Paladin: We seriously need a “like” button here.
bryan
When I was younger, a few minutes ago, I remember reading the comment “You really, really suck for making me read that twaddle.” and thinking, this person has seen the same things that I have seen. They have, for example, seen that you really,really suck, and that is no small thing.
Jay in Oregon
Using Atlas Shrugged as a guideline for social and economic policy makes as much sense as using Starship Troopers as a guide for foreign policy.
Comrade Dread
Possibly out of the very correct fear that they would be easily replaced by other, more intelligent men and women who gave a damn about other people and our society and were willing to do the same job and pay a reasonable amount in taxes.
Thlayli
“The cemeteries are full of indispensible men.” — Charles de Gaulle
Schlemizel
and win one for the ZIPPER!
and stop calling me Shirley
Schlemizel
@Jay in Oregon:
You say that now but just wait until the bugs land
Zillions of ’em, Sgt. Rico!
A moocher
@mathguy: Actually, Soviet apartchicks had a much more well-developed theory of political economy that had some basis in fact, that worked in some degree in practice and had humanist intentions. None of these things are true for Rand cultists, not for any value of True except False.
Rex Everything
Not that Forbes is a beacon of literary excellence, but I still can’t believe they published this. It seems more suited to the mimeographed weekly newsletter of a retirement home just outside of Phoenix (with even money saying it wouldn’t make the cut).
Jewish Steel
@SatanicPanic:
You kiss your mama with that mouth?
Roger Moore
@Thlayli:
This. There’s a constant turnover in business leaders- people die, retire, move up, or get fired- and things somehow manage to keep working. The number of business leaders who are genuinely indispensable is tiny, and most of the ones who fall in that category are there because they’ve deliberately avoided grooming replacements, not because they have truly unique ability.
tBone
Jesus. How many crusty socks did the author fill with Randian vigor while he was writing this review?
I wish these douchesicles would hurry the fuck up and go Galt already. It would be like a more effective version of the Golgafrincham B-Ark.
Tonal Crow
Blah blah blah blah stop whining and go frickin’ Galt already chickenscat propagandist. There’s a bee-autiful piece of land where there’s no government, “God” is everywhere, everyone has a gun, and taxes are unheard-of. It’s called Somalia. Get thee hence posthaste, thou piece of GOP.
Lurking Canadian
There’s drinking the Kool-Aid, then there’s mainlining the Kool-Aid.
Roy G.
Did Sam Bacile direct this as well?
cckids
@Brachiator: And somebody has got to ask Paul Ryan if he is going to see the movie. Might be fun if he takes some folks from a local senior center.
I’d think that would be classified as elder abuse.
markus o'farkus
The article was amazing enough, but here’s the author explaining how the bailouts caused the financial crisis:
SiubhanDuinne
@crosspalms:
That is SO full of tasty, delicious win.
markus o'farkus
Ok, I failed at blockquoting (and trying to fix threw it in moderation). The short version: read the comments of the article to see the author explain how the bailouts caused the financial crisis.
It culminates in this classic: “Combine all three [of my insane points] and you have a crisis, none of it caused by markets, but a rush away from free markets.”
Rex Everything
@markus o’farkus:
I saw that. The guy is a raving loony.
I love how he sends people like Bill Gates copies of Atlas Shrugged. He’s like the Gideon of crap.
Lurking Canadian
Interesting that he doesn’t address the question of why *he* hasn’t gone Galt yet. Does he view himself as a moocher or a looter?
A moocher
@Rex Everything: exactly. Because a 70s-era computer geek who’s never been laid would never have run across a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
The Sailor
@Rex Everything:
Gideon is the Gideon of crap.
Sawgrass Stan
I think it’s time for a porn version of Atlas. We’ll crowd-source the script and casting in some future Open Thread.
I want to suggest a ripped and buff Paul Ryan as Galt, but he’d be way better as Howard Roark with that jackhammer and everything–“If Congress won’t pass my Medistarve bill without amendments, I’ll just blow it up!!”
DaddyJ
@David in NY:
Thanks for the refresher link to that classic Belle Waring essay. Even more gratifying to note that the original pony trope comes to us via that font of all wisdom, Calvin & Hobbes.
Monkey Business
If anything, the world might be a better place if more of these guys went Galt. If they want to carve out a little idyllic place in the middle of nowhere to live out their days by the sweat of their own brow and remove themselves from the national social equation because they feel us commoners aren’t genuflecting enough, they should totally go for it.
I’ve always wondered what Atlas Shrugged as told from the point of the workers might be. We’ll call it Atlas Stumbles.
Another Halocene Human
@Keith: Maybe if you were working in a closed environment, like a company intranet.
If you were trying to write html/css for the public web, that version of IE was a standards-flouting POS that forced you to write clunky, bad code just to keep from breaking everything else.
And when I had to use a computer with IE installed, the first thing I did was turn that ActiveX shit off. IE got owned faster and worse than any version of Mozilla I ever dealt with. The period of Internet Exploder’s superiority to the competition (ie, late vintage Netscrape, which used to crash when it hit a long webpage) was short indeed.
In fact, that was time I switched to Opera. Used lynx quite a bit too. Even installed it for OS 9 (Mac Classic). Then Mozilla came out and blew IE away although Opera was still better. All the good features of Firefox/IE now were stolen from Opera.
There was a period when geeks were quite eager to turn that IE shit off b/c of how insecure, crash-happy and sucky it was. So fuck Microsoft, anyway.
Another Halocene Human
@Robert Sneddon:
Greed as the mother of invention. Interesting.
The Sailor
@Another Halocene Human: The first thing we do with all of our PCs is use IE, (still bundled, so the lawsuit didn’t work very well), to d/l Firefox. Then we defenestrate IE.