Wikipedia Sucks!

This is the generic thread for discussing/laughing at Ayn Rand and her "camp followers".

Starting with a hilarious 2015 article about comic book characters:
https://www.polygon.com/2015/7/29/90602 ... h-watchmen

But where Silk Spectre shared some characteristics with Nightshade (Charlton) and Black Canary (DC), where the Comedian owes inspiration to The Peacemaker (Charlton) and Nick Fury (Marvel), Moore himself has established that Rorschach is based very deliberately on the Question and Mr. A (pictured left), two heroes created by legendary Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. If there's something else Ditko is famous for, it's for embracing Objectivism, and designing the Question and Mr. A explicitly as Objectivist superheroes. Moore intended Rorschach to reflect Ditko's leanings.

On those grounds, I can understand why a Republican candidate might become attached to Rorschach. Except that both Moore — and, most people would argue, Watchmen itself — has established that Rorschach is a man who gives plenty of lip service to living by a morally unassailable, black and white code, but who nevertheless picks and chooses much of what he considers to be right and wrong entirely according to his own personal prejudices. Possibly, Rorschach does this to a delusional extent.

Even funnier, he also accidentally described Jimbo Wales. Rorschach and Jimbo would get along great.

....Ooh boy now you've started it because I can utterly ruin the Objectivist "movement" for any neophyte with a list of links.

Go out and rent/buy/find Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult, which came out in the late-'90s....it's not perfect (Walker is a Libertarian, so he isn't snarky enough) but it goes though all the massive defects with the Nathaniel Branden Institute; how Rand and Branden met and their decade-plus affair, plus how it ruined Rand's husband Frank O'Connor and infuriated Branden's wife Barbara to the point where she later wrote an exposé of the whole cruddy experience; Ellen Plasil's 1985 book Therapist about her sexual abuse by Dr. Lonnie Leonard (Plasil and Leonard were Objectivists - if an Objectivist was seeing a shrink, they had to be "approved" by the NBI or the later Ayn Rand Institute); how Leonard Peikoff was nitpicked to death by Rand over his book The Ominous Parallels which was supposed to come out in 1968-69 as a jab at what was going on during the Presidential election on the Democratic Party side, but was held back for twelve years because Ayn was an unholy control freak and would have cut him off had he published on his original deadline.

I've linked to these guys before elsewhere, but Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature tears apart Rand's philosophy on classical philosophical grounds while also being snarky about Founder's College, John Aglialoro's insane-but-"successful" attempt at bringing an Atlas Shrugged film to movie theaters and DVD (Aglialoro being a gym equipment manufacturer (!) and neophyte film producer), and the Ayn Rand Institute's pointless-endless promotion of Atlas Shrugged because that novel (which has been read by more than 18 million people!) supposedly creates Objectivists, not The Fountainhead, and not We The Living (definitely not her Zamyatin's We-ripoff Anthem.) Because Objectivism is going nowhere fast, the blog doesn't update that often, but read it as a book, going back into the criticism from years ago because those posts are still factually accurate. They also nail Austrian Economics because it's somewhat interrelated.

There was this insane cult Neo-Tech/Zonpower that combined elements of Scientology with Objectivism; it was founded by Frank R. Wallace, who wrote books on how to play Poker, then books on how to cheat at Poker, then the "Neo-Tech" of Zonpower began. He was a boring chemist at DuPont before; maybe the beakergunk got to him. Here is an ex-cult.org rundown of the I&O group behind Zonpower, here is the long Neo-Tech FAQ; they were Usenet spammers in the 1990s and they earned the ire of the first cadre of Internet people. Wallace dropped dead jogging allegedly, and the cult moved to weird door-to-door and mail scams.

(more to follow)

Wikipedia's Objectivism article was what introduced me to the wacky world of Wikipedia. I stumbled on it, saw a "Dispute" template directing to its talkpage, and watched as Alienus and LazloWalrus tore each other apart over some matter. I didn't really care what the problem was, but the drama was interesting. It spread throughout various parts of Wikipedia: user talkpages, AN/I, Arbcom... the whole gamut. So, I owe a lot to that article to getting me into Wikipedia criticism.

Strelnikov wrote:There was this insane cult Neo-Tech/Zonpower

I'm sad that no one ever wrote a substantial book about Zonpower. Someone like Jon Ronson could have a field day. He specializes in crazy shit and this is "gold standard".