The Loony Left Coming For Evil Thomas the Tank Engine

[BrilloPad]

Ignore Tracy the troll. She just hates disabled children.

Thomas is very popular amogst autistic children. Some people just like to have a go at anyone who is different.

[MicrosoftBob]

Yeah, man.

You haven't lived, man, until you've mainlined a pen or two.

Perhaps she gets her pens from Pen Island ?

[BrilloPad]

Yeah, man.

You haven't lived, man, until you've mainlined a pen or two.

Is that how you tried to chat up the lustee?

No wonder she is the ex-lustee....

[CloudWalker]

I've always liked Thomas the Tank Engine, but with 2 Daughters all I get to watch is Frozen again and again!

[SpontaneousOrder]

Oh dear... I feel a blatant lie coming on - one which is provable as a lie by dipping into the 'Journals of Ayn Rand' and reading the source directly.

Blame pjc for taking this OT.

From the link - part 3:

This was most famously demonstrated by her admiration for a pathetic little serial killer.

The one she called a degenerate?

The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

No. She modelled Danny on a particular character trait which Hickman exhibited (Hickman was big news at the time).

The model for the boy is Hickman. Very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.

-- Ayn Rand

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This quality stands out to her in contrast to the vulgar collective consciousness of the mob. She's not condoning his actions - only recognising something about this man that makes him different from others.

In her own words:

This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised that fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended it that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.

-- Ayn Rand

Contrasting in the next paragraph:

A mob’s feeling of omnipotence is its most jealously guarded possession and therefore a dangerous thing to wound. The mob can forgive any insult or crime except one: [the act of] challenging its ultimate power. It can forgive a criminal who erred, but who is just one of itself, i.e., has the same soul and ideas and bends to the same gods. But to see a man who has freed himself from it entirely, who has nothing in common with it, a man who does not need it and who openly disdains it—this is the one crime a mob can never forgive.

She disliked the rabid animalistic, blood-lustful, response to the crime displayed by the collective consciousness of the time:

The newsboy I saw on a crowded downtown corner, a heavy, unshaven young fellow, with a [sickly] complexion, fat lips, narrow forehead and spectacles, who was yelling: “They’re gonna hang him!” when the first extras with the sentence appeared. Other adult newsboys, yelling with a bloodthirsty delight: “Hickman to hang! Hickman to hang by the neck!”
The drunken man who murdered his wife for no particular reason, and then regretted it, was Hickman’s cell-mate in jail—and beat Hickman up, thinking himself superior.
The twelve-year-old little girl, who wrote a letter to Hickman, asking him “to get religion so that little girls everywhere would stop being afraid of him.”
Dale Budlong and other prisoners who “don’t want to be mixed” with Hickman, considering themselves so much better.
The woman who wrote a letter to the authorities asking for permission to be present at Hickman’s hanging. A great number of other letters making the same request. (!) (The bloodthirsty, blind, carnivorous beast that is hidden beneath the polished surface of our “civilized,” religious, respectable citizens!)
All the dirty stories about Hickman. In this case they are probably true, but how easily they could have been manufactured to throw dirt at the object of the public’s hatred (which will be the case in my book).

--Ayn Rand

From the link that the blog post refers to:

I'll get to where Rand picked up her silly superman blather later -- but first, let's meet William Hickman, the "genuinely beautiful soul"

No. If you read the Journals of Ayn Rand, around page 20, you'll see that it's Danny Renehan that she describes as a "genuinely beautiful soul". (we already saw that she thought Hickman was a degenerate)

The boy is a perfectly straight being, unbending and uncompromising. He cannot be a hypocrite. He shows how impossible it is for a genuinely beautiful soul to succeed at present; for in all [aspects of] modern life, one has to be a hypocrite, to bend and tolerate. This boy wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of. He could not compromise with that which he despised and knew he had a right to despise. All life is compromising, at present. A man that could not compromise.

--Ayn Rand




Why do you insist on quoting utter morons pjclarke? Don't you think you might want to verify that they're saying before you associate yourself with them by posting their lies? You like telling lies? Is all of your AGW crap lies too?

[BrilloPad]

Why do you insist on quoting utter morons pjclarke? Don't you think you might want to verify that they're saying before you associate yourself with them by posting their lies? You like telling lies? Is all of your AGW crap lies too?

Why do you insist on quoting the utter moron pjclarke?

[LisaContractorUmbrella]

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman | Michael Prescott

Do you ever have any thoughts of your own?

[SpontaneousOrder]

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman | Michael Prescott

I can see why you like this one:

Not having a copy of Journals of Ayn Rand...

Are you guys in the same "I haven't read the book, BUT..." club?

At least he's made a huge effort to backtrack on himself since i read this several years back. At least now he's attributing Rand's praising comments to the character Danny, rather than Hickman as he did originally. Unfortunately now his entire article is a mess of self-contradiction - which could only possibly be ex post facto reconciled from this snapshot of an article without any context of her actual journal entries.

Wait.... oh, yeah. He hasn't actually read them because he doesn't have a copy

<----- this is more of a suggestion for you, btw.

[original PM]

I've always liked Thomas the Tank Engine, but with 2 Daughters all I get to watch is Frozen again and again!

Let it go.....



On another note I cannot believe you are all using black text in this thread you are all so racialist

[SpontaneousOrder]

Why do you insist on quoting the utter moron pjclarke?

Because I like to see liars exposed as liars. My mummy told me that lying is bad. I agree.
If everyone realises that pjclarke is just a googlebot with no mind of his own, then they won't be tempted to waste time trawling through his AGW threads. It's a public service