Francisco Ferrer

The linked article is a classic case of cherry-picking a text to prove a foreordained conclusion. In opposition there are plenty of references in Atlas to the once ideal U.S. government. Francisco, for example, says, America was “built on the supremacy of reason – and for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world.” That aside, one can make the case that the strikers' hideout, Galt's Gulch, is a proprietary community of choice rather than anything resembling the Founding Fathers' vision. It certainly comes closer to anarcho-capitalism than, say, the Jefferson administration.

Yes, Reagan did meet with the Taliban, but the quote above was in reference to a another group of tax feeders.

"If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." This is the mindset not just of the military, but of everyone inside government.

If a thief found a skeleton key that allowed him to enter any home in a town, then homeowners would respond by replacing their locks with a more secure design. The only effective response then is better encryption. See The NSA Hasn't 'Cracked' Basic Internet Encryption. This is not to minimize the threat posed by the omnipotent spy state, which Democrats and Republicans are trying to build--with our money.

If valid, this study offers a ray of hope: on their own people will reject the shallow and vapid provided they are given works of genuine achievement as an alternative. The problem is--and this is based on guesswork--most people who like Kinkaide have never seen Millais.

What is the source of your sweeping statements about what is and is not satire? Can you name one serious reference which supports your view that all satire is comedy or that no dystopian novel may be considered satirical? If your definitions are ad hoc, fine. But don't presume to tell me how to use the word "satire" when my usage is consistent with established reference sources, which I've taken the trouble to list. On dystopian literature see Wiki which lists three satires as examples. See also vocabulary.com which lists the satirical Animal Farm as an example.

You say, "Satire, whatever its other purposes, is always aimed at amusing with humor." (My emphasis) Yet the examples of famous satires with a predominantly non-humorous, non-comedic tone refutes this claim. Consider a few Juvenalian satires from the Wiki link I provided: Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451. Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange. Burroughs, William, Naked Lunch. Ellis, Bret Easton, American Psycho. Golding, William, Lord of the Flies. Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World. Again, the point is not that Atlas Shrugged is fundamentally a satire. I never said it was. Rather, within its vast canvas it contains characters (consider just the names "Orren Boyle" and "Wesley Mouch") and incidents (20th Century Motors) that demonstrate to an appreciable extent the "the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vice." I'm rather surprised that this is even a controversial issue. For years, Rand's serious fans have highlighted her mocking of the political and intellectual classes. Robert Mayhew has given talks on the satirical elements of The Fountainhead. To be sure they are more prevalent in The Fountainhead than in Atlas, but they can be found in both books. To ignore the satire in Atlas is to shut oneself off from part of its genius.

A perfect demonstration of the great man theory in recent history is Martin Luther King, Jr. If the young King had pursued another path in his lifetime, inevitably there would have been other African-American civil rights leaders, perhaps other martyrs. But King's unique contribution was to import Mahatma Gandhi's tactics of non-violent resistance in order to overturn Jim Crow laws in the deep South. Without King, the civil rights movement might have run a much slower course through political campaigns and congressional lobbying. Or it may have taken the violent course that Malcolm X at one time advocated. Notice that in the aftermath of King's death, despite many contenders, there has been no U.S. civil rights leader who has ever commanded the same amount of respect and influence.

This is new to me. I didn't think of looking back that far. The Norman conquest of England most likely only served to reinforce it. The Normans actually suppressed de-centralism, giving the head of state allodial title to all property in the kingdom: an early form of government land monopoly. As a precaution against reprisals, the Norman overlords also placed some distance between themselves and the Saxon commoners, administering them from behind high stone walls. The Tower of London and a great many other fortified seats of power were built in the years after the Conquest. This was in stark contrast to the Saxon kings who ruled from the same level as their subjects.

There's something unique about Great Britain, methinks. Culturally, they were relatively free of the monarch-worship suffered by other peoples in Europe. The citizenry of that country always had something of an everyman disposition. This is a very important insight. Some historians have traced the English people's distrust of absolutism to the relative democracy of early Anglo-Saxon tribes, whose leaders lived among them and ruled largely with their consent.

FF, I'm not going to argue this except to say you exhibit no notion of how concepts emerged in literature--especially from the ancient concepts of tragedy and comedy. Feel free to attach odd meanings to words as you deny their normal meanings. But you come off as a crackpot when you try to instruct people about things you do not know. I predict you will always have communication problems. This is supposed to be a place for ideas, not crackpot semantics. And I'm not into doing semantics to play gotcha and little competition games like you do all the time. So affirm to your heart's content. I won't be joining you on this one. You are wrong. You say I am wrong. Whoop-de-do. Michael No one denies satire's association with comedy in Greek and Roman verse and theater. But ancient meanings do not dictate present day usage. If that were true, we would have to insist that to call Atlas a novel is to call it a short story, for the word "novel" is derived from the Italian word "novella," meaning "'short story,' originally 'new story' from Latin novella 'new things.'" As for the accusation that I employ an odd meaning to "satire," consider the Wikipedia definition: Satire is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement. Wiki goes on to add: Laughter is not an essential component of satire; in fact there are types of satire that are not meant to be "funny" at all. Conversely, not all humour, even on such topics as politics, religion or art is necessarily "satirical", even when it uses the satirical tools of irony, parody, and burlesque. Thus there is nothing odd about including a work of literature with a serious tone or serious theme in the category of satire. I have previously linked to two thoughtful essays that treat Orwell's two grave novels about socialist dictatorships as satires. So if you wish to take me to task for my "odd" way of not defining "satire" exclusively within the realm of comedy, you'll have to do the same with the "crackpot" Wiki, Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com, Reference.com, and many others.

In many respects the rebels did not go far enough. Had the Levellers prevailed, political privilege would have ended, natural rights given more emphasis, and Great Britain might have had a government resembling the early American Republic.

Sort of a morbid fact of life. I'm trying and failing to find a relevant quotation for this. I disagree with the tenet of Objectivism that says altruism is the cause/sanction of totalitarianism. Delusions of grandeur among the leader(s) and delusions of salvation brought by a messiah are the two things needed for a government or a movement to turn out terribly. Perfectly true, all of it. The fact remains: history is made not by the gods or economic forces but by great leaders.

Unfortunate. Cromwell was a bad general who wasted a the lives of his own people unnecessarily. Ba'al Chatzaf All wars are a waste of lives. By any fair estimate the Royalists should have won the Civil War: they had every material advantage. The Roundheads had very little going for them other than religious fervor. Cromwell, a man with virtually no military training, made the best of matters. See in particular this work.

Calling satire a form of comedy is equivalent to calling animated film a form of comedy. That is to say, it is in every single case--except in the many cases where it is not. We need look no further than Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm to find political satires with little or no comic relief. To call Rand a satirist in no way diminishes her stature as a novelist; rather it enhances it. To take just one example from Atlas Shrugged: what is the sub-plot of 20th Century Motors if not a scathing satire of Marxism and its useful idiots in the West? Read the great Anthony Sutton's account of the event that may have inspired Rand's satirical wrath.

Among other things, Atlas Shrugged is a satire. Its depiction of an economy breaking down under a barrage of increasingly impossible directives from dim-witted and corrupt bureaucrats is not futuristic fantasy. It was a slap at disturbing developments in the decade in which she wrote (and which, unfortunately, continue to the present). Isaac Deutscher once made a similar observation about 1984: it wasn't about the future so much as the present.

We should never underestimate the importance of a commander's personality in convincing men to throw themselves into the heat of battle. In that regard, Cromwell was brilliant.

Too bad this Bircher campaign never got much traction.

To one who is old enough to have been directly threatened by the maw of the Vietnam War, the placards in the photos above are eerily reminiscent of a key anti-war argument of the 1960s: the conflict raging between north and south in Vietnam was essentially a civil war in which the U.S. should not be a party.

No, but in countries where glory is defined in terms of human sacrifice, the higher the cost in lives, the more hallowed the cause. Thus the War to Discover the Holy Grail of Hidden WMDs was much like the great Crusades or the War to Free Southern Slaves. We will be kneeling in front of the monuments to the Americans who died in Iraq long after we've forgotten why they were sent there.

Let's not forget that Obama is only following the paradigm established by his predecessor: Before Bush II launched the $2.2 trillion juggernaut on Iraq, he lamented, "Saddam Hussein is a man who is willing to gas his own people, willing to use weapons of mass destruction against Iraq citizens." The upward estimate of those killed in the 1988 Halabja poison gas attack is 5,000. By comparison, the number of people killed in the conflict initiated by the U.S. president who wept for the victims at Halabja is 190,000. Other estimates are higher. Of course, some may argue that with Saddam gone the world is now a safer place, that war is hell, and that a few hundred thousand lives are a small price for making sure that no dictator will ever use chemical weapons again.

Thank you. That needed to be said. In the 1950s and early 60s, the JBS was the great bête noire of the liberal media and has never fully been able to restore its reputation after the storm of insults and false accusations. It didn't help that the organ of establishment conservatism, National Review, read the Birchers out of the movement around the same time and in much the same manner as it booted out Ayn Rand and other godless or extreme libertarians. Visit the JBS website. The society stands for reducing the size of government, sound money and individual responsibility. There is not a whiff of racism. However, you will find a nice response to the Mark Levin Con-con idea.

The Wikipedia article gives Beria too much credit for the Soviets' acquisition of the atomic bomb. The secret of the bomb and the materials needed to manufacture it were dropped in the Soviets' lap through America's Lend-Lease program, as overseen by FDR adviser and New Deal architect Henry Hopkins. See here and here. (The American taxpayer's arming of mass murderers should serve nicely as an example of the "ransom" Moralist "willingly pays" because it is "simply the cost of living in the reality of this world as it is, and not the utopian fantasy of how I think it should be.")

Me too. It makes me want to go back and carefully check my premises.

Sorry. People owe taxes to pay for the public infrastructure of which they enjoy the use. They don't owe taxes for redistribution of wealth. Can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. No. when the state creates coercive monopolies (on roads, utilities, schools, etc.) the public has no choice but to use them. To take just one example, neither I nor my parents "owe" the state anything for the miserable indoctrination center I was forced to attend as a child. If anything, the statists owe me compensation for theft and kidnapping. While I agree with you... none of those quoted descriptors you listed is public infrastructure, which is a legitimate use of taxes. Even if we were to imagine that there is no waste, no corruption, no cost overruns in our socialist "infrastructure" (which presumably includes everything from my local tennis court to the new, bigger-than-the-Vatican embassy in Baghdad), taxes to pay for the infrastructure would still be illegitimate because there was no consent and thus no contractual obligation on the part of the taxpayer. If A has the right to force B to pay for something A bought, then I can charge you for my new pool table. But how, you may ask, are you responsible for something I own? Simple. I bought the table for the "public," and they may come over at any time (during posted hours) to use it. It's not my fault if they don't use it. I acted to promote the "general welfare," and people "owe" me whether they like pool or not. The public also "owes" me for the flowers I planted in my front yard. The public enjoys them as they drive by on their way to drop the kiddies off at the indoctrination center. So did the German Jews who died at Dachau create the Nazis in their own image? Did you create the American "feminized" liberal government that "abhors all fighting" in your own image? Why did you do that?