Colbert on Rand

Stephen Colbert over at the comedy channel skewered Rand last week in a segment entitled "The Rand Illusion." As usual with Colbert, he is far more interested in drawing laughs than in being fair; he is, after all, a comedian, not a critic or philosopher. Colbert's best dig comes at the expense of John Reale, whose site goingjohngalt.org contains a solicitation for programming work.

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The Word - Rand Illusion

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Anvilicious!

TV Tropes, the site dedicated to popular culture cliches, takes a hilarious look at the various cliches populating "Atlas Shrugged". Particularly good are "Nice Job Breaking It, Hero", the "Author Filibuster", and the spot-on neologism for Rand's writing style, "Anvilicious."

Anvilicious: A portmanteau of anvil and either delicious or malicious, depending on the usage, anvilicious describes a writer's and/or director's use of an artistic element, be it line of dialogue, visual motif, or plot point, to so obviously or unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head. Frequently, the element becomes anvilicious through unnecessary repetition, but true masters can achieve anviliciousness with a single stroke

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(Hat tip to The Atheist Experience)

Objectivism: The Video Game

Game Developer Ken Levine's hit Bioshock was developed, he says, due to his fascination with "utopian civilizations" and his "discomfort with extreme ideology." Perhaps it's little surprise then that he chose Objectivism as the underlying philosophy behind Bioshock's virtual dystopia. This Randian influence has attracted comment from the ARI's Executive Director Yaron Brook, who claims that while Levine has "misrepresented" Rand, nevertheless "any publicity is good publicity."

Ayn Rand as Pop Culture Shrapnel

"If you discovered the existence of a Martian who had a rational mind, but a spider's body, would you classify him as a rational animal, i.e, as man?...In the case of the rational spider from Mars (if such a creature was possible) the differences between him and man would be so great that the study of one would scarcely apply to the other, and, therefore, the formation of a new concept to designate the Martians would be objectively mandatory." - "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology", Ayn Rand, p73, 1968




- "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars", David Bowie, 1972