And I think I'll call it morning from now on

she-hulk-smash:

mohandasgandhi:

mohandasgandhi:

As per request, this post is now rebloggable, so that others may share in the disdain for Ayn Rand:

I’ve been awake for 2 days and can barely focus, let alone form any sort of a coherent thought. So, I’ll let her quotes simply speak for themselves.

• “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.” - Atlas Shrugged
• “Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.” - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
• “One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.” - The Fountainhead
• “What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem.” - Playboy Interview (March 1964)
• “Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups- workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers- exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society- the symbol of America.” - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
• “The hippies are a desperate herd looking for a master, to be taken over by anyone - anyone who would tell them how to live without demanding the effort of thinking. Theirs is the mentality ready for a fuhrer.” - Apollo and Dionysus
• “If you mean whose side one should be on, Israel or the Arabs, I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it’s bringing industry, intelligence, and modern technology into their stagnation.” [video]
• “The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don’t want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don’t wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I’ve contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.” - Ayn Rand Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974
• “They (Native Americans) didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.” - Address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974
• “Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and of existence, man has to maintain his life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work.” - The Virtue of Selfishness

Really, I could go on all day but reading her really makes me sick. It’s too easy for Rand to make herself look bad. Then, there’s also the fact that she dedicated her entire life towards criticizing those who relied on government assistance and actually relied on it herself.

With Paul Ryan on the Republican presidential ticket, the media has been questioning his confessed love of Ayn Rand. A lot of people have written great analyses of Ayn Rand’s philosophies but it’s difficult to get a good sense of just how problematic the woman was in full. Most of these works, however, tend to focus on her problematic economic views and rarely mention her views on race. I thought it would be fun to bring this back [I’ve added a few sources that people have asked for to the above] and explore a few more direct quotes from Ayn Rand herself:

• “Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.” - The Virtue of Selfishness
• “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” - Racism, An article published in the September, 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter and included as a chapter in the book, The Virtue of Selfishness - (See: Racist statements made by Ayn Rand in this post)
• “The racism of Nazi Germany — where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their ‘Aryan’ descent — has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their ‘proletarian’ descent.” - Ibid. - I don’t think those two things are the same, Ayn….
• “There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.” - Ibid.
• “It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life.  It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade… It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world.  It is the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the agrarian-feudal South in the United States.” - Ibid. - Didn’t capitalism give us the slave trade?
• “I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you’re a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn’t know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights - they didn’t have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal ‘cultures’—they didn’t have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It’s wrong to attack a country that respects (or even tries to respect) individual rights. If you do, you’re an aggressor and are morally wrong. But if a ‘country’ does not protect rights - if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief -why should you respect the ‘rights’ that they don’t have or respect? The same is true for a dictatorship. The citizens in it have individual rights, but the country has no rights and so anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in that country; and no individual or country can have its cake and eat it too—that is, you can’t claim one should respect the ‘rights’ of Indians, when they had no concept of rights and no respect for rights. But let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages - which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence; for their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched - to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it’s great that some of them did. The racist Indians today - those who condemn America - do not respect individual rights.” - The Virtue of Selfishness

Receipts for her fuckery. What a terrible human.

(via gabnats)