Comments on: Wingnuts of the World Unite!

By: HCG

HCG — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:04:01 +0000

Joined the Facebook group – thanks for setting it up! (More fun even than 1,000,000 Strong Against Officers Leaving Meryton!) (which is really for Jane Austen fans).

It appears, however, that some of your FB members are taking the whole thing seriously?

By: David

David — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:39:05 +0000

I did read (almost) the entirety of “Atlas Shrugged.” I read it in one marathon 24 hour period before the start of my senior year in high school. Read nearly every word, too, until I got to the speech (christ, radio? A real forward thinker). I read 3 or 4 pages, skimmed a bit and then skipped to the last 3 or 4. I can’t possibly have missed anything of significance. I’ve never been tempted to reread it and it obviously failed to have an impact on me (my lesser mind, I suppose), much like organized religion and cults in general (except Macintosh, of course. what OS would Ayn use?). As I’ve said, no one over the age of 20 should expect to be taken seriously if they are reading this stuff.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:23:18 +0000

All that time I spent looking forward to the troll bunker party post-election… but the actual outturn has been slower, less dramatic, but much more unnerving than I expected.

By: Martin Bento

Martin Bento — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:05:19 +0000

John,

Amy Jayne who? Googling she seems to be a military families advocate. You’ve been saying, I think half-seriously, this whole thing could be a “Galtian ratf*ck”, though I’m not sure what you meant, as I have remained unwashed by Atlas. Is this what you meant?

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:51:05 +0000

Dear John Galts,

Would you kindly take your hard-earned wealth and use it to build a utopian paradise under the seas? There you would be free to earn the fruits of your labour without the Marxist man in Washington plucking them from you to give to the lazy poor. What’s more, you could use the abundant Adam to fulfil your transhumanist dreams. What could go wrong?

Yours,

Frank Fontaine

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:44:33 +0000

“Galt the Slacker”

I LIKE that! Got a REAL MENTAL PICTURE of that….mheh.

Damn you Matt Heath! Beat me to the punch. ‘Cept you forgot that it’s the plural—as in “turtles all the way down.”

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:06:18 +0000

Or ‘Galt that I think sounds good but has no actual relevance to what I’m talking about’.

By: Slocum

Slocum — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:30:04 +0000

Oh, I understand—but the meme spreading around the intertubes shouldn’t be taken so literally (after all, how many of those talking about ‘going Galt’ do you think have actually ever bothered to wade through Atlas Shrugged?) Think ‘Galt-lite’ or maybe ‘Galt the Slacker’.

By: Matt Heath

Matt Heath — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:26:15 +0000

He could stand on the turtle

By: Preachy Preach

Preachy Preach — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:31:30 +0000

Atlas played keepy-uppy

By: belle le triste

belle le triste — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:11:26 +0000

or be carrying it with his feet

By: belle le triste

belle le triste — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:10:31 +0000

presumably he could stand on the heavens, but he would have to be upside down

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:03:34 +0000

By the way, Atlas, of course, carried the heavens on his shoulders, not the earth as Francisco d’Anconia claims. That’s the whole point of that episode in the labours of Heracles, and in any case, if he was carrying the earth, what would he stand on?

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:59:39 +0000

No, I don’t think you’re right on that, Slocum – there were artists and composers in Galt’s Gulch and they went “on strike” by refusing to continue to share their works with the looting, mooching society. It would actually be quite feasible to create a “virtual Galt’s Gulch”, whereby all wingnut blogs were password protected (possibly with that phrase about “live my life for another man”), although this would presumably have an effect on advertising revenue.

By: Slocum

Slocum — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:56:00 +0000

Wouldn’t ‘going Galt’ mean shutting up? In which case I’m all for it.

Oh no—of course not. It would mean working less or not at all and having much, much more time for things like blogging. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? And I wonder who’s going to be the first enterprising refusenik to get a book contract to write about ‘going Galt’ for a year (you know, in the same vein as people with book contracts to write about making their family give up toilet paper or eating only meat they shoot themselves—or both).