"The Ayn Rand rant", revisited. Part 1.

Like I said yesterday, I'm revisiting this thing after 11 years with all that I've learned since.

"This thing", being "Francisco's money speech, by Ayn Rand- Nitpicked".

Here we go....

Cyan= Ayn Rand

Yellow= 2009 me

White= 2020 me

Ho, boy, is this gonna get me in trouble with some folks I know.

Fuck 'em.

Well, sorry, but I've had Ayn Rand twisting around in the gears of my mind for awhile now, and as part of my personal quest to evolve intellectually, and to keep my sanity, I just finally had to reject some of these ideas, so, this is something I have to do to exorcise the bad ju-ju from my noggin.

Don't apologize.

The fascist trash don't deserve it.

Not one sand grain of it.

I think these ideas have gnawed at me like an animal worse than religion.

Definitely more hours out of more days.

Poor bastard.

The Nazis really did a number on him.

I'm still not sure exactly what my politics are, definitely left-leaning, but there's stuff about naked socialism I distrust.

Because of them.

Be socialist.

You went to Canada in 1995 for chrissakes.

It's fucking utopia.

How the hell do you let internet morons persuade you otherwise?

One thing I figured out by letting Randism chew me up and spit me out, is rigid ideologies don't work.

Right or left.

They give you a nice little boxed in computer program for a nice boxed in little life, but...I'm not that kind of animal.

I tried for a long time.

Not gonna happen.

There's not going to be a "normal", life for me, I'm an odd-fucking-ball.

Socialists would let you be an oddball.

Try getting that same deal from Nazis.

Rand was an odd-fucking-ball too, but yikes, did she ever try to beat the world to fit into her little digital cubes.

She wasn't odd, she was a fucking psychopath.

Stop easing into it for the WF fascists.

They'll hate you anyway.

Hate is what they do.

Its their thing.

It was a nice try, Aynie, but...tch...

Anyway, here we go....

The Money Speech!

(I had a link to it before, but the link is dead, and Google is fighting me, so...you Google it if you want. There's even a Youtube clip of it from the shitty movie that I can't bring myself to watch without puking)

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia.

Well, no, not really, but that's never been my problem with capitalism or conservatism, but as we'll see, Aynie lives in a world of consistent black and white.

No, money is the root of all evil.

Go fuck yourself, conservatives.

Can't believe I tried to be compromising with these monsters.

"Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange,

Kay, with ya so far...

Yep, and you have money under socialism, so it's not a choice between money or anarchy.

..which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them.

Uh-huh.

And they love these men (and women) who produce goods so much, they trade with countries that have suicide nets under the windows of Apple factories to keep people from self defenestrating.

Money is the material shape of the principle...

Okay, then right away she veers off into language that makes me grind my teeth.

Right off we get a vibe of a religious object.

And my worries are well founded as the thing unfolds...

Religious objects with slave owners and genocidal tyrants on them.

And when we tried to get Harriet Tubman on the 20, conservatives sabotaged it to death.

Y'know cuz they hate slavery and love freedom so much.

They're not racist though.

Perish that thought.

Even though their hero is Reagan, who was caught on tape being racist.

And Reagan's hero was Ayn Rand.

But pay none of that any heed.

Nope.

Plug your ears, and hum.

...that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.

Okay, this sounds nice and logical, but this is the thing with Rand, she starts with seeds of good ideas, then they start to slowly veer off into batshitville, and you don't know why at first, because she walked you up to it so seductively.

Let's dig our fingers into this "value for value", notion, because she just skims past it as an ad-hoc assumption, and it's really not as simple as that, and the component I've personally struggled with for some time.

My overall queasiness with Randism is how things like this are just carelessly bludgeoned past to get to her pre-ordained conclusions.

I'll get back to this, but let's just mentally bookmark it for now.

No need to mentally bookmark this time, I'll get right fucking to it.

Money doesn't vanish when you spend it like a fucking video game.

It moves around, and eventually trickles up to a corporation.

It needs to be sent back down to the bottom so it keeps circulating, otherwise, it just falls into a blackhole, and becomes fucking useless.

Like a bottle of Mountain Dew trapped in a glacier.

You just stare at it, helplessly.

We smash up that glacier by taxing the fuck out of the rich.

Randroids cry and scream that this is theft.

Bull-fucking-shit.

They got their wealth through subsidies, a labor force that went to public schools, and who drive to their factories and offices on public roads.

They've sucked out of the system, they have to pay it the fuck back.

That's "value for value", just as much as popping change into the fucking candy bar machine.

When they don't pay their due, they're the thieves.

Did I mention that The Ayn Rand Institute took PPP money?

I did?

It bears repeating.

Forever.

Never forget this shit.

Save the receipts.

Hold a fucking grudge.

Sometimes you fucking need to.

Money is not the tool of the moochers, 

Like The Ayn Rand Institute who took PPP money.

who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

All right, so she's setting up a nice little logical dichotomy here, if we don't exchange money, then what we're left with is robbery, or mooching.

Fine, okay.

...course it leaves out barter, but eh...

"Moochers who claim your product by tears", refers to welfare people.

Black welfare people.

How do I know?

Logic.

1. Find me a black Randroid.

2. The Ayn Rand Institute loves welfare just fine, and they can't be talking about themselves.

No, it's "those other", welfare recipients.

It's not a dog whistle, it's a dog kazoo.

"The looters who take it by force", are the IRS.

The IRS does a lot of dirty shit, no one likes them, they need reforming, but again, this is this "taxes are theft!", bullshit.

Fuck you, conservatives.

You're living in a fairy tale, except your fairy castle is Snake Mountain, and your fairy is Evil Lynn.

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others.

Uh huh, okay....

It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow.

A little batshitty in the rhetoric, but okay...

No, not okay.

True, it's not tears or guns that turn money into bread, it's the labor class that the conservative movement sucks the blood out of.

And again, there's money in socialist countries.

And their money doesn't have racists on it.

Funny that.

Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold,

Okay, whining about the loss of the gold standard, let's mentally bookmark this too.

Again, no need to mentally bookmark this time, I'll cut right to it.

The gold standard is stupid bullshit for people who think like toddlers.

And the swine with one more IQ point than them willing to exploit them.

Gold is as much fiat currency as paper or digits in a computer.

I bet the amount of Randroids who play with bitcoin isn't zero.

are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

Okay, another veering off into an appeal to pseudo-religious idolatry that makes me grind my teeth...

No, money is a technology, and she just already admitted it's a tool, anything you project onto it above that is ideological or superstitious.

She proceeds to veer in and out of this, first it's a tool, then it's magic, then it's a tool, then it's magic..

"A token of honor".

Yeah, scarfing up that PPP money was really honorable.

"Your claim upon the energy of men who produce".

Like factory workers and small business owners?

I don't recall them giving the ARI permission to slurp up their tax dollars during a viral crisis.

Doesn't sound like "value for value", to me.

Sounds like that "mooching", thing Rand is screeching about.

Your wallet is your statement of hope

*Teeth grind*

that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

Okay, so, you have money, you're going to spend it, the guy you give it to is going to spend it, and so on.

And all of us swapping our dollars around by definition aren't robbing each other.

Fine.

There's nothing magical about that, that's just civilization ticking along.

Yep.

Like I've said a couple times already, there's money in socialist countries.

It's not a choice between money and anarchy.

Rand lies as feverishly as Joseph Goebbels.

Or Fox News.

Which is a good thing, excellent even.

Got no problem with it.

In principle, anyway....

But she glues this extra rhetorical pseudo-holy flourish to it, which she then incorporates into her logic pattern down the road, and it's an old trick to wind up a punch you don't see coming.

And that ain't logic, that's brainwashing.

Or at the least, manipulation.

So, I'm zapping that like a Space Invader ahead of time by keeping your mind awake with this bit of nit-pickery. ;)

Goe-fucking-bbels.

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

Uh-huh, okay, lovely...

Nope, not lovely.

She just called laborers "unthinking brutes".

She sees them as cogs.

Like Jeff Bezos does.

She's saying the inventor of the widget deserves all the money.

Like Jeff Bezos.

Except Jeff Bezos didn't invent the internet, DARPA funded by American tax dollars did.

And he didn't invent web pages, which is all Amazon really is.

And he didn't even invent selling shit online.

And he didn't even invent a spectacularly good way of selling shit online.

I mean, it's high tech NOW, but early Amazon looked like a million other cheap little HTML catalog sites.

No, he PT Barnum-ed a bunch of greedy investors.

That's it.

And he takes subsidies.

He's almost literally a fucking trillionaire (for readers of the future, he's probably crossed that by now), and he took PPP money.

He's a thief, and a fraud.

And he treats his labor force like dogshit.

Fuck Jeff Bezos, and fuck Ayn Rand for painting bastards like him as heroes.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak?

And here we go...

What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles.

Yeah, it fucking is.

Trump is marching fascist riot police into American streets to hurt innocent protestors, medics, and even people just trying to get home or to work.

Trump, the guy the entire Republican party is solidly behind to the grim fucking death.

And it's not a corrupted new batch, it's old fuckers who've been around since fucking Nixon.

They know better.

This is who they really are.

The party of Reagan.

The party of Rand.

That had Rand's third-in-command as fucking treasury secretary.

And what are the protestors protesting?

Police violence.

Against blacks.

But they're not racist though.

Don't ever say that, it hurts their feefees.

But, conservative violence against protest isn't new.

There were the Pinkerton Men during the early labor movement days.

Trey Garrison used to think they were the bees knees.

Then there was the time John D. Rockefeller, Jr. used the National Guard to massacre women and children and bragged about it, and got off scott-free.

Y'know, Rockefeller, the guy a plaza in New York is named after.

Where they light the fucking Christmas tree every year.

Yeah, that motherfucker.

This. Is who. They. ARE.

They. Are. Fascists.

Okay, here we go into black/white, yes/no, up/down town...

....get your galoshes...

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it?

Nope, but so what?

That's not the dichotomy that interest me, and none of this is the basis to my objections to the inequality of the system.

But, you're supposed to answer "no", to all of these and go "wow! Capitalism is magic! I love you money! I love you, evil hateful boss! I want to be an Übermensch like you!".

But they're not for the guy who invented the motor.

They're just as happy to heap kudos in the form of dollars over the head of the guy who stole the fucking motor.

All you have to do, is look at the story of Nicola Tesla, Elisha Gray, the Winklevoss twins, and countless others whose names we don't even know.

Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools?

Well, YEAH!

Look at the music industry!

Look at fucking TV!

The idiots are catered to!

No!

Wrong, past-me!

Trump is proof that "our betters", are not only not smarter than us, but outright fucking moronic.

Steve Jobs believed in curing his cancer with transcendental meditation.

Elon Musk is a covid denier who wants his workers back on the line dying of the plague.

These people are fucking trash to be mocked by anyone with a brain.

And the recording industry is my past-self's example of smarties exploiting the dummies?

Any low-grade pre-school educated dimwit could crayon scribble the lyrics to most of today's hits.

Get back to me when the typing monkey effect accidentally creates a Pink Floyd song.

By the able at the expense of the incompetent?

..not really.

There's a lot of incompetent motherfuckers running around grabbing levers of powers they shouldn't be anywhere near.

Ah, faith in past-me restored.

You go, little fella!

You can doo eet!

By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy?

Not consistently, no.

And this is a common thread in conservatism that's been annoying me.

"Ambition", as a magic buzzword.

As if it were good in itself.

Serial killers are pretty ambitious.

As are child molesters.

As are stock swindlers.

Et cetera et cetera.

I'd prefer if some of those fuckers discovered some laziness.

Maybe some of the lazy fucks out there are unrealized psychos.

Good on 'em, keep being lazy.

But yeah, again, Rand with her black & white.

Y'know what's lazy?

Taking PPP money for basically keeping up a web page.

Y'know what's evil?

Taking that money away from productive citizens, and calling THEM lazy.

Y'know who did that latter one?

The party of Reagan.

Fuck. Ayn. Rand!

Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability.

Okey-dokey.

No, not okey-dokey.

I've already established that she only sees the ownership class as worth a damn.

And I've demonstrated pretty damned conclusively that the owner can be an outright fucking thief.

Of ideas, of money, and of labor.

"Honest man", my ass.

It's about money ending up in the hands of white supremacist pirates by any means necessary.

Up to and including socialism.

...course, we can never know the content of the person's character beyond that they punch a clock, and make their little bucks.

Maybe they go home, and smack the wife around, and kick the dog.

Is that okay in Rand-land?

We don't know, it's all about money in this rant.

You get the vibe that if you had two wife beaters, and one sat on the couch watching soaps all day, and the other pumped gas, the gas pumper would be "better".

Well...he'd have 8 less hours to smack his bitch up I guess, but still...

...it's a facet I find troubling...

She's not fucking talking about Jim and Tammy punch-clock.

She doesn't give a fuck about them.

If she were alive, she'd be telling them to get their lazy asses to work, and risk the fucking coronavirus.

And it's a thought pattern I see woven into conservatism at large.

"The working man's an honest man!",..and it doesn't matter how much of an asshole he is otherwise.

Sorry, I beg to differ.

But that's me, I'm an odd-fucking-ball.

Again, she doesn't give a fuck about "the working man".

What past-me is reacting to is the fucking "get a jeeerrrb!!!", anvil he got smashed over the head with day in day out by these fucking Randroid Nazi shit-piles.

All the while they themselves were getting fucked deep up the ass with a sandpaper dildo hooked to a jackhammer by the people Rand was really talking to.

That's some real sadomasochistic shit, admiring your fucking abuser, and wanting to replace them, and do the same exact shit.

That value system is right out of "Swimming With Sharks".

Trey Garrison loved that fucking movie.

Un-ironically.

Holy shitballs, I'm not even halfway through this fucking thing.

I'm gonna have to tackle it in chunks.

I'm stopping today.

It's all I can stand.

I'll do a part two tomorrow.

See you then!