Some Bus Slogan Fun

Why am I in moderation?

Keep the laughs coming Michael.

You make me laugh and I like that.

“He’s Probably GOD, So Stop Complaining, And Fall To Your Knees!

Michael,

I would like to point out that the nature of slogan is necessarily brief, often to the point of excising almost every important detail. If people could tell an entire dissertation in a slogan, they would, but mathematically, the information simply vanishes when you compress it that much. When you take a complicated topic marked by social interaction, psychology, personal culpability weighted against circumstance and environment, and so on, and reduce it to a cute saying, you lose a lot of the crucial points.

That being said, no, that denial is nowhere intended in my little slogan. Instead, I’m merely making a message to people that their lives are their own to live, so they should take charge of it. It is kind of like with that Despair.com poster, entitled “Dysfunction”, with the caption “The only consistent feature of all of your dissatisfying relationships is you.” It glosses over a lot, but has a pointed message, and it is fun to read.

Lighten up, Michael. Have some fun. What would your bus slogan say?

“This blog has elements that remind me of meetings of the College Libertarians that got too rowdy, you know, whenever too much Mountain Dew was consumed and too many stories of first adolescent encounters with Ayn Rand were shared.”

heh. I thought that was pretty funny, although I’m not sure how accurate it was given Rand’s hatred for all things Catholic.

Ryan,

…just having fun with you…

For whatever it’s worth, I enjoy quite a bit of your posts.

You put much thought in what you write and attempt to be very fair with your interlocutors.

I also see that you are not afraid to alter your opinions, having the healthy awareness and the humimility to realize that we are all “on our way”, in the attainment of a fuller wisdom.

Mark.,

Thank you. I really appreciate it. And don’t worry. I was just having fun in my reply. I’ve read some of Ayn Rand–a collection of essays, and I might someday try to finish Atlas Shrugged. But while I consider myself a fairly staunch capitalist, I think she goes way, way, way too far. Her economy theory of the virtue of selfishness is, in my opinion, off the mark and quite naive in many ways. I do, however, have something of a love affair with Mountain Dew that I’m trying to break off before it ruins my marriage…

Still, this is supposed to be a threat where we have fun with bus slogans. What would you post up? (And by the way, this goes to everyone, not just Mark and Michael.)

Nevertheless, I wonder how many AC bloggers appreciate Rand’s thought. It’s not uncommon for Catholics to “overlook” her anti-Christian views because they are just oh-so into her philosophy. My Jesuit alma mater’s business department literally hands a copy of Atlas Shrugged to every incoming freshman business major and sponsors an Ayn Rand lecture series.

If so that’s pretty pathetic. Rand was lousy as an economist, as a political philosopher, and as a writer. I’m pretty sure that the economics departments at places like University of Chicago and George Mason would never hand out Atlas Shrugged to freshman as if it were serious writing. If the business department at your college did, they sound like they were clueless more than free market.

Mark,

Do we lose to much of what you want to say if we abbreviate to: “Jesus humbly shared in our humanity…”? I don’t want to break the phrase across colors, but your first clause is too long to fit entirely in the purple.

My first encounter with Rand was right after highschool. A few of my friends had fallen in love with her stuff and just wouldn’t shut up about her. Finally, after a lot of cajoling, I agreed to read Atlas Shrugged. I got about two thirds of the way through it, but when they arrived at the libertarian paradise where no one did anything for anyone except for pay and therefore everything cost a nickle, I was no longer able to continue.

Atlas shrugged was a pretty puerile novel, as most overtly political novels are. It sold well no doubt due to the dollops of sex that Rand poured into it, at a time when such elements were still a relative rarity in respectable novels. Whittaker Chambers had Rand’s number as both a novelist and a philosopher in perhaps the most devastating review written in America in the last century.

http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/flashback200501050715.asp

Since that review “Objectivists” and main stream conservatives have largely gone their separate ways.

Ryan,

Thanks for the websearchs. Now I see I could have easliy googled it myself.
——–
I am embarassed to admit, but I got a ‘little drunk and enamored’ as a 17 year old, reading The Fountainhead. But looking back, I wonder if I understood even a word of what she was getting at. I read so voraciously and indiscriminately pre-college.

Mark,

There’s certainly various aspects of Ayn Rand’s works that greatly appeal, especially to a society that has become increasingly materialistic. Before my reversion back to the Church, I held her economic policies as absolute, and it has taken a while and some earnest soul-searching to understand why she was so devastatingly wrong overall. But hey, life is about learning, about approaching Truth and appreciating it as it is, as opposed to how we selfishly want it to be, right?

And speaking of selfishness, one of the things that finally convinced me how Rand was wrong was her extolling the capitalist’s selfishness. The whole reason her “looters” looted was because of selfishness. How could selfishness be a vice for one group of people, but a virtue for others? Ah, but the others were enlightened, and thus their selfishness was good. At which point I can only scratch my head and say, “huh?”

What I find amusing here is that BA described the point in Atlas Shrugged where I kind of gave up reading. The Utopian society was part of the problem, but I also had an issue with the main female protagonist sleeping with every main male protagonist across the course of the book. It is hard to keep sympathizing with someone who you feel is unfaithful in one of the most devastating ways to be unfaithful.

Sorry, but every time I hear Ayn Rand mentioned, I flashback to the South Park episode in which Officer Barbrady learns to read.

Let’s not further ridicule them with such anecdotes.

Right. Let’s ignore their conservative tendencies so you can keep insisting that they are “liberals” and “dissidents.”