"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
<a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/a-is-not-a-it-seems/" rel="nofollow">http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/a-is-not-a-it-se...</a>
No better proof of the intellectual bankruptcy than the left can be found in the constant bashing of Ayn Rand -- and the companion ignoring of her philosophy - Objectivism. Or the book Atlas Shrugged, which is a 1,000 page logical argument of all the different ways that leftism is evil.<p>The left can't stand the risk of people actually reading the book before metaphorically burning it, and so they bash Rand and ignore Objectivism.<p>The reality is, if you read Atlas Shrugged, and you're a thinking being, you will no longer be a leftist afterwards.<p>Alas, now the Left wants to silence any dissent- calling it "hate speech" and on this site, literally making people who think independently invisible (if they aren't hellbanned.)<p>What a shame. What happened to tolerance? What happened to embracing facts, logic and reason?