I was thinking of something while writing, Ralph Fiennes Makes Coriolanus Even More Fascist. In that article, I referred to “[Ayn] Rand’s proto-fascist philosophy.” And I fear that many people would take exception to this. I know that my first wife would argue that Rand didn’t believe in violence, for example. Well, as I discussed in Ayn Rand and Indians, this isn’t really true. Like most political radicals, she often fell into apologetics on behalf of violence for her cause.
Rand is a strange character. She considered herself a philosopher. But she is a great example of the Dunning–Kruger effect. This describes how the less someone knows about a subject, the more they overestimate their abilities in it. So Rand claimed that all of her work sprang from Aristotle and she got nothing from anyone else. At the same time, she never missed an opportunity to bash Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. She misunderstood Kant to such a level that it is quite embarrassing. But much more problematic for her was her relationship with Nietzsche.
The whole of Rand’s philosophy is pretty much Nietzsche as understood by a 16-year-old boy. And this is why I call her proto-fascist. Her idea of the übermensch goes right along with fascist thinking of the 1920s and 1930s. Her major works didn’t come until long afterward. Her philosophical work didn’t really start until the late 1950s, following Atlas Shrugged. So she was forced to spin her thinking, which was largely in accordance with fascism, as something else. Instead of the elevation (in theory anyway) of the worker in communism, she elevated the businessman. But this really is little different from fascism. And on a practical level, the elimination of the state would only lead to a country of “makers” and, not “moochers,” but serfs.
But if you find this all too theoretical. Let’s talk about rape. In The Fountainhead, Roark rapes Dominique. Rand did later justify herself against criticism by saying it was, “rape by engraved invitation.” But her notes from the writing of the novel show that this was not what she meant when writing it. Then, in her play Night of January 16th, Bjorn Faulkner rapes Karen Andre. Yes, Ayn Rand had some real emotional hangups and if you are interested in them, read Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. The point is that Rand admired the idea of Hitler’s “brutal youth.” Sure, she softened it and created apologias for it. How could she not after Hitler and Stalin? But that was what she was pitching.
The kind of social Darwinian thinking that so many on the right have is undercut by one problem: actual Darwinian evolution. Humans are animals of both individualistic traits and communal traits. So both “sides” of the debate are wrong. The communists were wrong to think that we can all work together for the common good. People need to feel special and distinguish themselves from others. But the counter to that, Rand’s thinking, or libertarianism more generally, is wrong for thinking that all that motivates us is personal gain: we are hungry, we take food; we are horny, we take a woman we find attractive. If that’s how we really were, we would have gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago.
Some will note that fascism was a communal system as well. It really wasn’t. It was a pure social Darwinian system that was sold being for the good of the masses. We mustn’t mistake the marketing for the message. Ayn Rand had the luxury of being more blunt because she wasn’t a politician — just a cult leader. But she wanted an anti-democratic world where “great” men just take what they want and everyone cowers before them as befits the demigods.
The great film writer and director 
What made Dwight Eisenhower a great leader is not so much his presidency. What made him great was how he balanced all the different interests on the Allied Forces in World War II. But he was just doing a job — a job that many politicians asked him to do. It is hard to get people who nominally want to work together to actually work together, but it is far harder to get people to be willing to even try to work together. Maybe it was just a question of desperation — the fascists in Europe were a huge threat. Throughout my life, I’ve never seen anything like it. If I were to sum up the foreign policy of the United States for my entire life, I could do it in one word: stupid.
I just caught a tiny bit of the show Shark Tank. Regular readers will know that I hate this show. In November of last year, I wrote about how evil it is the way we deify these people, 
Enter the stupidest of the “sharks” (which says a lot): Kevin O’Leary. He asks, more or less, “Why should I invest in this? If you are giving away one pair of socks for each one you sell, aren’t you cutting your profits in half?” This is like saying to the CEO of Coke, “Why should I invest in your company when you are spending all this money on advertising? I mean, you’re just throwing away profits!” But it’s worse than this. And it gets at one of the reasons I hate these kinds of “social justice” companies.
I don’t know if are aware of the H P Lovecraft short story “Cool Air.” In it, the narrator explains why it is he has an aversion to cold. He tells the story of meeting a doctor who lived upstairs from him. Through the use of a refrigeration system he has built and continues to build, he keeps his entire apartment extremely cold for unknown reasons. Eventually, the system breaks down and the narrator is forced to help the doctor stay cold with buckets of ice. But in the morning, after getting back with the replacement parts for the air conditioner, he finds the doctor in a hideous state of decomposition because he had actually been dead for 18 years, just keeping himself “alive” with his various chemical concoctions and the cool air.
On this day in 1917, the great magician 
Last night, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Napoleon and Antosia
I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about the possibility that Ben Carson might run for president. Why not? I’m sure he will have another book out that he wants to sell. Perhaps, “One Nation: We Can Save America’s Future by Killing the Poor.” But a presidential run by him would be very typical of the Republican Party, in that they think one doesn’t need to know anything about governing in order to govern. And 
I spend more time than a sane man would thinking about bloodletting and leeches. You may be aware that Mozart was likely killed by his doctors who bled him to death in the name of curing what was probably a minor problem. We look back on this and think, “How could they be so stupid?!” I don’t do that. I look around the world and wonder what it is we are doing today that future generations will look back on and think, “How could they be so stupid?!” Although in our case I don’t think it will be as much “stupid” as “cruel.” Take, for example, the way we treat drug users — although there is a whole lot of stupid in that too.
I was thinking about this because Paul Krugman wrote, 
One of my favorite songs is Janis Ian’s “Watercolors” off here