Things that I dislike about Ayn Rand's writing:

The Fountainhead: Decisions characters make totally upset any suspension of disbelief. People in the sort of positions characters are introduced in do not get to those positions by having a tendency to make those decisions. Any reader who has actually met successful newspaper editors, for instance, will balk at the idea that one will run his established paper into the ground to prove a point of principle. (This extends to rich men in general, though of course exceptions exist. Having put so much blood, sweat, and tears into your company, will you throw it away to make a gesture that most people won't understand?)

Also, what jury are you going to find that accepts that illegally dynamiting a building without owner consent or proper safety procedures is OK? You can't even find a jury in the American South that thinks that being black is OK without the help of a high powered lawyer. God help you if you actually confess to dynamiting a building and then argue that your reasons are pure. That never works in court. (Admittedly, "legal realism" is something that a lot of authors are short on, due to not doing the research - but it still irks me.) More critically, why have the architect win in court at all? Isn't the court just an extension of society and its standards? By using a victory in court as the climax of the bookt, Ayn Rand lends legitimacy to the judicial process, a process that ultimately serves to enforce obligations to society. This is supposed to be the very thing she is against.

Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand is convinced that people see sex only through the lens of ideals they are for or against. This says a lot more about Ayn Rand than it does about humanity. I'm not saying that there isn't an attraction when someone has similar ideals to you; I'm saying that taking this as the only enjoyable element of sexual activity is absurd. It should be pretty obvious from modern advertising just how large a component superficial appeal (physical appearance, fashion, style, etc.) plays in sexuality. Characters who pretend that part doesn't exist are either robots or hypocrites. They are in some important way inhuman.

While we're on the topic of sexuality, I think The Fountainhead rape is inadvertently brilliant: it shows the logical conclusion of Ayn Rand's philosophy. In a battle between ideals, brute force prevails and the stronger ideal wins. But take this and put it into human interaction, and we wind up with rape. Humans are not ideas. Social niceties do hold people back from progress, but also, they help people identify that things like rape are wrong. This is why people unbound by social strictures are a little bit scary to us, even as we admire them: for a human, to be capable of anything is to be capable of great evil as well as great virtue.

Transcending your limits can be a good thing. Struggling against the system is noble. But Ayn Rand is honestly not the writer that her disciples glorify her as. Her works are akin to fan fiction: more masturbatory wish-fulfillment than actual examination of what would happen if people were to balk at answering society's demands.

Lunch: two white guys at another table are discussing what race is closest to Neanderthals.

The term 'dark people' drifts out.

A nearby table of blacks looks over.

Apparently hentai has made the list of neologisms - new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Originally used by the Japanese to mean "perverted," its use in English generally refers to sexually explicit material.

Join me in welcoming a new avenue of intellectual discourse.

I'm working on music again. Does that mean I'm discontent again?

Follow the money.
- Journalist's maxim

An interesting look at the finances that drive politics. This one focuses on the Tea Party. I wonder if anyone has done a similar article on the biggest funders of left-wing politicians.

I met a gamer from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and plane-clipping legs of stone
Spawned in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered vidscreen lies, whose sparks
And wrinkled skin and veneer of painted plastic
Tell that its body well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that smote them and the heart that bled.
And on the label these words appear:
`My name is Life, Game of Games:
Look at my EXP treadmill, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, friendless and bare,
The lone and level instance stretches far away."

(With apologies to Shelley.)

Well, I did something a little more tangible about my irritation at the way Fukushima is being presented in the media. This is an article in which I address some of the crazier attempts to sell Fukushima as a health risk to Americans (and by extension, Europeans or anyone else similarly far away.)

It's posted over at Bloggers4Japan, which is raising money for charities and keeping tabs on the situation.

QuantumStorm put this up:

It's a perfect example of how old, dead philosophies still have our society by the roots. In the Middle Ages, the philosophy of gardening was applied to students: it's totally OK for a gardener to lose a rose, or even a dozen roses, in pursuit of one perfect, single rose. It was similarly considered ethical for a teacher to sacrifice a poor student, who "would never amount to anything anyway," in a manner that gave object lessons to a first-rate student.

We don't believe in that anymore - or we say we don't - but many of our institutions persist from a time when that kind of thinking was the norm. Don't graduate students and postdocs still follow the master-journeyman-apprentice model? An undergraduate working in a lab aspires to be an apprentice; a graduate student is a direct apprentice; a postdoctorate is a journeyman, traveling to a new setting to further her education and capable of initiating projects but still requiring the input of a master.

When are we going to throw out the old system? Beats me. After all, we still shake hands, and that's a holdover from the Ancient Roman era (where it was done to check for knives up one's sleeves.) We are basically hurrying to meet the future while dragging the corpse of the past with us.

Is drinking Irish Car Bombs today a sign of respect or disrespect?

Unless your anus is now bleeding from the fury of a thousand papercuts, no, you were not just "literally assraped" by a test, no matter how much you metaphorically felt violated.

Please do not use "literally" as an intensifier when it does not apply.