In article
],
Ryan Cousineau wrote:

In article ,
Howard Kveck wrote:

In article ],
Ryan Cousineau wrote:

In article ,
Michael Press wrote:

I could not read Ayn Rand at length. Never got any traction,
and had to quit. And every time somebody kindly offers a
quotation that I take to be a succinct embodiment of one
of her notions I read it closely, scratch my head, read it
closely again, think, puzzle, associate, fit concepts together
as if they are jigsaw pieces, then throw up my hands and
admit that it is beyond my ken.

Seriously, Michael, agree or disagree, Ms. Rand's quote up there isn't
that hard to parse, even with the crazy structure.

She means that altruism is evil. She says that Stalinism was the
essential, pure, extreme form of altruism.

The first part says that she feels that subconsciously, modern
intellectuals (of all political ilks) know this, and it makes them
anxious.

I, as a good Catholic boy (albeit one with a weird libertarian bent that
has no business being there) think this is completely wrong: a mad
equivalency of totalitarianism and altruism. But it's not that hard to
understand.

The 2008 version of this is Jonah Goldberg's recent book that purports to
show
that liberals are fascists.

How I got involved in this political discussion, I don't know (actually,
I do know: because I am a dumbass). But while I haven't read the book, I
did hear him interviewed at length, and his subject is, more precisely,
that the statist impulses of fascism (and he's talking generally about
all the fascists here; Mussolini as much as Hitler, and probably Franco
too), and modern-day instances of the totalitarian dream.

He notes that in the rise of fascists, "totalitarianism" was the selling
point, not the nightmare. This is me speaking, but it might make sense
to think of totalitarian meaning to happy fascists what "holistic" is
taken to mean today: an all-encompassing philosophy.

Let's just say that the totalitarian impulse can be summed up by the
phrase, "it takes a village to raise a child."

Goldberg's a pretty serious small-government, borderline libertarian
right-winger, and his real concern is that he wishes to avoid the
totalitarian dream. I doubt he mentions it in the book, but in the
interview he specifically called out Huckabee as a disaster-candidate
(in his opinion) for his essentially populist-totalitarian impulses.

Found it:

http://instapundit.com/archives2/013336.php


ObBike: why have the Germans never acquired a reputation for making
serious road bikes? Is there some boutique make I'm missing?

Warning: Gratuitous Ethnic Stereotyping. Hide the kiddies.
http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,SoldierTech_Leopard2A6,,00.html

--
Michael Press