Atlas jerked off

Is being responsible for one's own pleasure what it means to go Galt?

[Atlas Shrugged is] a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. ... Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I’ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I’ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can’t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.  ...

Ayn Rand couldn't even fantasize a world in which her bullshit was plausible.

(h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice)

Jonah Goldberg newspeaks

As seen in Salon (h/t John Scalzi), here are some of the assertions of the type that have gotten Jonah Goldberg the nickname the Doughy Pantload:

• fascism = socialism
• nationalism = communitarianism
  
• national socialist = socialist
• totalitarian = organic
• totalitarian = holistic
• subordination = inclusion
• It Takes a Village = state parenting
• real militarism = metaphorical efforts against crime, poverty, drugs
• regimentation = consensus
• socialism = state-run economics, regardless of who benefits
• nationalized = socialized (Eisenhower must have socialized the National Guard!)
• marxist = fascist (!?)
• liberal = free market
• classless = socialist (So America is - or thinks it is - socialist?)
• populist = liberal (Tell that to George Wallace.)
  

Goldberg couldn't make a distinction between his ass and a hole in the ground. Hey, they're topologically similar; they must be the same thing.

Then there's this quote:

[T]he only reason [Mussolini] got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.

See Scalzi for the definitive smack-down of this ahistorical claptrap. Goldberg is essentially a fascism denier. This is his logic: Those Indians tried to sully our good name by having the nerve to catch smallpox from the blankets we Europeans gave them for that express purpose. Those Guantánamo terrorists are continuing their asymmetrical warfare against all right-thinking Murkins by trying to commit suicide. That Mussolini may have founded fascism and called it a right-wing movement, but he was really just an old lefty.

There is no worthwhile way to engage this sort of incoherent "argument" other than ridicule. Goldberg's rhetoric can't even fig leaf his obvious intent to propagandize. It's intellectually bankrupt in all aspects, a logorrhea-covered exercise in self-service colonoscopy.

Goldberg is using words that are in the dictionary, but he's making up their meanings as he goes along. Even worse, at whim or necessity, he can switch meanings within the confines of a single paragraph.

He says he's not making the argumentum ad hitlerum, but in nearly every paragraph that's exactly what he's doing. X breathed and was bad. Y breathes. Therefore, Y is bad. He is breathtakingly, uneducably, irredeemably stupid. With a big, albeit uncomprehended, vocabulary.

The completeness of his turgid, ridiculous unclarity is visible here to those of us who aren't wearing his bullshit-colored glasses:

You don't have conservative groups talking about what kind of condoms you should use or what positions you can be in.

Earth to Jonah! Talked to the Christian right lately? Oral o.k.? Anal? Gay? How's the Pope's tolerance of any use of condoms coming along? Masturbation? Fantasy?

In the end, Goldberg's words about Mussolini apply better to himself:

He was sort of a buffoon in that sense; he was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of pragmatic idea he had about politics.

I haven't read his book, and I won't. His own words in this interview irrefutably expose him as an ass, unworthy of even an hour wasted reading his prose.

What he wants to say - but which wouldn't get for him all this undeserved attention - is that liberals are not like him. Thanks be to god! Instead of defending that clear and unarguable thesis, he muddles all the meanings he touches.