At comment 297, you are way down the list, but make the best points.
His snarky review is both flippant and sad. The man so wants to belong, to be taken seriously.
He does get the writing style down when with backhanded praise he tells of Atlas Shrugged putting him in a fugue state and saving his sanity on a long bus ride.
The writing style is in some ways like a baroque fugue. Pure, clean, logical. And like a great Bach or Handel piece, the theme is hammered home, and pounded out.
The rest of his review is crap.

Bear in mind Scalzi is a "Progressive" and an Obama-ite. His toadyish commenters mostly exist to praise his wit & wisdom. You won't get anywhere in that forum, but you'll surely get cut off if you display any tenacity - observe Eric on that thread.

Genocide means mass killing, and there are tons of examples -- like the Nazis herding Jews into killing pits and gas chambers, the Turks slaughtering Armenians, Hutus butchering Tutsis, etc.

If Galt is guilty of genocide then so is Rachel Carson. And surely those who doubted Global Warming soon will be! And so on, until the word no longer has meaning. Except to communitarians.

Reminds me of Godwin's Law.

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Just like Eric, I've found out that posting comments on his blog can be a contact sport.

It's fun, however, if you're in the right frame of mind for it.

"Social justice is always wonderful when other people are being forced to pay for it, isn't it?"

That's their game. Always claim the moral high ground no matter what. Example, to them the old way health care was handled was bad and social justice demanded a change. Now the new system will screw more people but not on basis of money. Any of those screwed are bad angry people, pay no attention to their demands for justice from the system...

It's time to rip the privilege of abusing our better natures out of the Left's hands. Scalzi, being a hard-left sort, won't like it, but then, leftists need their grievances to remain happy (Bill Moyers).

This is an Orwellian use of the term "work ethic."

"Work ethic" in American culture has always meant that, if you want something, you put down the liquor bottle, quit whining, get up in the morning and go build or earn what you want. It meant that you DON'T expect someone to build it for you.

"Social justice" is about exactly that: the expectation that those who put out the effort to build something owe part or all of it to those who would rather drink whiskey and stay in bed all day. It's a lie. Furthermore, it's downright evil.

The "work ethic" has never meant "the ethic of working for no reward."

Rand may not have been the best writer of fiction, but she was a pretty good at defining basic moral principles.

WRT the John Galt character, I have a question for Scalzi and anyone else who thinks it was "genocide" for him to refuse to be a slave.

We agree that forcing a man to dig ditches or pick cotton all day is slavery, and morally wrong. How is it morally right to force a man to program computers or design solar panels all day, then?

Exactly, Barry. And it won't end there: pretty soon we'll be told doctors are "mass murderers" when they retire rather than work for Medicare rates. The pharma and medical device corps will be similarly excoriated.

Why did the Soviet Union fall? Why did the Chicoms, the Vietcoms, and most recently the Cubans embrace the free market? Why is North Korea so poor and South Korea so rich (a 10:1 disparity)? The answer to all these is the same: the marginal propensity to produce.

I found the most interest idea in the whole of Scalzi's comment section (most of which was just people declaring their ignorance of the book) to be the question of ownership of the d'Anconia Copper and Francisco's right to destroy the value of the company. I will admit that the question of the morality of that particular action escaped me before. I think its at least worth some more thought.

@ Tall Dave

I would respond to such a challenge by noting that Francisco (and Galt and others, with perhaps the exception of Ragnar, whom even his fellow strikers squirm at from time to time) would simply say that they are living by the morality that the world is living by.

That is, that money is evil, creating value and the act of production is evil, and profiting from the work of others in pursuit of profit is evil - and if you happen to be the owner of that productive activity and controller of its value, then Heaven help you.

Therefore, destroying whatever value Francisco had in his own company is conforming exactly what the looters and moochers and collectivists preached as a profoundly moral action.

Becuase, after all, money is the root of all evil, and teh profit motive itself is profoundly evil and inhuman.

Fine. No more company, no more "exploitation of labor," no more people pursuing profit or self interest, nothing.

A perfect collectivist society. The looters and moochers and collectivists should be happy.

Why aren't they?

Sorry - my comment should have been directed at RJWarrior's comment, not Tall Dave.

Wow. I didn't know that Whittaker Chambers was Scalzi's hero.

"TallDave", that was an excellent comment you left on Scalzi's blog. Your comment was in high contrast to the others and succinctly highlighted the chasm between the basic intelligence and being intellectual.

Re Francisco's destruction of d'Antonio Copper: The took the reasoning to be that his was the last 'global' mining production of any worth and therefore destruction of it was necessary to ensure removal of the elite's power. Slow degradation would have enabled the elite to continue for far longer causing greater damage.

I am a huge Atlas Shrugged fan. I've read it 20-25 times since first discovering it in 1969. I have used it as a text in an MBA course I taught "Business, government and Society"

I had not thought of Galt as Genocidal until I read Scalzi's review. Scalzi may have a point.

As someone noted here, failure to prevent the collapse of society, which will foreseeably result in deaths, is not genocide.

However, Galt goes beyond that. He removes the props of society: Energy (Wyatt, the coal guy) Transportation (Taggart), Banking (Mulligan) etc.

Does this cause the collapse? Probably not. The collapse would happen anyway. Probably would happen anyway, a miracle could occur.

It certainly hastens the collapse, though.

One could argue that hastening the collapse will result in fewer deaths than letting it occur naturally.

On the other hand, that is like the old ethical question of what should you do when you can save 5 children from probable death by pushing one old man to certain death.

So I don't know. Was Galt genocidal?

John Henry

Please note that Scalzi uses the term genocide incorrectly. The mass deaths that Scalzi claims Galt is responsible for are not targeted towards any particular racial or ethnic group. I think that needs to happen for it to technically be genocide.

He uses the term as a stand-in for mass murder. In my previous note I used it in the same sense.

John Henry

John Henry,

Well, remember, this is a book about the evils of coercion. Did Galt assassinate those people holding up society? Did he kidnap them? Did he threaten them?

No. All Galt did was offer them a chance to emigrate somewhere better, somewhere they could produce without being slaves to the looters. If that's genocide, then U.S. immigration policy has been genocidal too.

I like Scalzi, and enjoy most of his writing, both fiction and commentary, but I think he really swung and hit air on this one.

In inferring that Galt is somewhow responsible for the collapse - even if some of his actions hasten it - people are heading down a dark road. Are we really to the point of arguing that someone has a duty to work for others, regardless of their own wishes or freely entered obligations?

This is increasingly becoming a real problem. I'm tired of listening to people rant about how they're somehow entitled to however much of my output as they choose to help themselves to, simply because they outnumber me or because I can do what they cannot.

He proclaims Galt to be "genocidal" - but what exactly does he suggest should happen to us if we refuse to cooperate?

If this is what Scalzi is supporting, then perhaps it is not in my best interests to give him any more of my money.

I find John Scalzi to be smarmy and overrated as a writer, and his politics are the usual boatload of envy-based leftist twaddle. I got into trouble with him and his blog minions five years ago when I mocked a self-pitying column of his about how awful it was to be so poor that you lived in a neighborhood where there was broken glass on the sidewalk.

That being said, I agree with him that Atlas Shrugged has too many speeches, which you can safely skip (especially Galt's long one in the middle, which is all the speeches that were in the book before repeated at longer length), and her heroic characters are pretty cardboardy. But he leaves me behind when he starts going on about the book appealing to nerds who got pushed around in high school because they see themselves as the Galt character (if anything, the weakling character of Dagny's brother is the closest representation of the sort of kid who got pushed into his locker and had towels snapped at him in the gym). And of course the idea that to be unwilling to chain oneself to a failing society and ideology is genocide comes straight out of the communist handbook, where everyone's life belongs to the State.

@Jo:
You are touching one of Rand's core ideas: That need does not establish right. In Rand's morality, the fact that someone needs your help does not establish at all their right to get it. They can buy it, beg for it, call on a prior contract to deliver it, appeal to various forms of your self interest - but in absence of a prior commitment, it is entirely your choice, and if you walk away, no guilt attaches. (Conversely, if you do help, you do it of your own choice, and should expect no gratitude - if you wanted to be compensated, negotiate first.) So in Rand's world, walking away is never a source of guilt. If you are not free to walk away from need, you are not free at all.

(D'Ancona's sort-of sabotage does fit this idea: in Rand's view, he is drafted to run his family's expropriated business for the governments who took it, and he chooses to reject their claim on his work by working incompetently - the in-joke being that his government bosses don't see this because they don't understand wealth creation, only wealth transfers. There's also an element of - deeply Marxian - Creator's Right here; D'Ancona and his family created this wealth, so it's theirs to destroy, all previous investors already having been expropriated by government action.)

The practical point, also expounded at length in the book, is that there will always be someone who needs your assistance. If you accept a moral duty to help everyone who needs your help, you are a slave: you will be compelled to spend your life helping others, and there will still be many left who might be helped if you worked ever harder, to exhaustion and self-destruction. What's left is merely a haggle over who is your master, to tell you which needs are to take priority. If you are not free to walk away from need, you are not free at all. (You may still end up a pariah - this is about guilt, not shame.)

Rand's ideas are based on strict individualism; she recognizes no obligations inherited by growing up in a society. Recall that she grew up where Communism was dissolving Russian society; and then moved to a country she had no prior ties to. Most of us find it more reasonable to acknowledge some allegiance to our places of birth and residence, and to the various social groups we interact with - which leaves us with the question of what the terms of those deals are. Much moral philosophy has been spent on that question - social contracts, natural rights, whether and how those attach to individuals or groups, and what circumstances entitle us to break these bonds.

Cheers
-- perry

Good post Perry, thanks for sharing.

I don't seem to have been smacked down yet... there's something to be said for exercising restraint in the form of how one goes about dismantling their opponent's argument.

I find it more than a bit intriguing that Scalzi appears to be acting, as near as I can tell, as if I haven't said a word.

Rand's favorite novelist was Victor Hugo. In discussing his writings she criticized him for putting long historical essays in works like Les Miserables. She said that they were brilliant, and in most cases the novels would be lacking without them, but that they distracted from the story, and that she considered them a major fault.

And yet she did the very same thing, but couched her philosophical exposition in dialogue.

Hugo is forgiven. But Rand will never be, because those attacking her writing usually have another ax to grind.

Are we really to the point of arguing that someone has a duty to work for others, regardless of their own wishes or freely entered obligations?

Oh come on now, you can't seriously be just cluing in to that *now*? The entirety of mainstream political dialogue has already conceded the point and has merely been haggling over the price for over a hundred years now. People trade away their liberty for the merest trinkets today.

Ayn Rand is the only one to shout an uncompromised No to it all, and that is the sin for which "whip-wielding 'friends of humanity'" (her apt words) like Scalzi excoriate her to this day.

Good point seerak.

It's a tribute to Rand's brilliance that even 53 years later, you can still pretty easily describe her critics' arguments in terms from the book itself.

Beginning with post #424 in that thread, I believe I have systematically and thoroughly dismantled both the initial arguments as well as the rebuttals offered to my observations. I think I've added more relevant, substantive content to that thread than any other individual, including Scalzi himself.

And through all of that, Scalzi has said not one word in response to what I've written. He's responded many times to others in the last 72 hours, but his behavior has been as if I had written not one word of counter-argument to his assertions.

Now, he's certainly under no obligation to engage me... but it's gotten almost comical at this point. My arguments have become a kind of elephant in the middle of his living room, and his lack of even acknowledging that is interesting in its own right.

I had been wondering what the endgame strategy would be in addressing that. I think we saw that last night, with post #544 from John Scalzi:

"Folks:

This page is now taking a fair amount of time to load due to the large number of comments, so be aware I will probably close the thread by about noon tomorrow (Friday) Eastern time. So if you have something you want to say, go ahead and get it in now."

I have a few hypotheses as to exactly what will happen when thread-ending time rolls around. To avoid tipping the scales, should John or others in his circle be reading this, I'll wait to comment on those until after the thread closes, rather than offering predictions beforehand.

That's why Atlas Shrugged is second only to the Bible in influence -- it's so well-argued that even half a century later its detractors are left stymied in any reasonable debate, and eventually left to slink away in (usually unacknowledged) defeat.

Yeoman work, much appreciated.

And, it ends with #552: "John Scalzi on 08 Oct 2010 at 12:17 pm

Actually, I get the last word. Because I’m me!

Thanks everyone for the comments and your thoughts. It was all very interesting, and I mean that in a good way and not as a euphemism."

Here were my speculations as to the form of the ending:

1. "These aren't the droids you're looking for..."

Basically, acknowledge in general terms that it's been a good thread, possibly throw a few crumbs at specific individuals, and then shut it down without actually engaging the good arguments. Act as if this never happened, and it'll all just go away with no one noticing. I had assigned a prior probability of about 20-25% to this scenario, if only for consistency with the rest of his apparent strategy of picking off the arguments and points of contention he thought he could handle (culling the weak from the herd, if you will), while studiously ignoring the serious challenge. And this is the one he opted for. Not the worst possibility... but still, dude, that's really WEAK.

2. The Talk Show Host Gambit. Many radio talk-show hosts that I've heard will use a technique when they are dealing with a caller that's making them look bad, of quietly disconnecting the caller and then, knowing that they are perfectly insulated from rebuttal, offer their own assessment / summary of the real point, and throw in a few additional points they had been saving to boot. I had assigned a probability of about 30-35% to that outcome, which may be uncharitable to John... but it simply didn't strike me that he was approaching this matter in an intellectually serious or intellectually honest way, so I didn't put this possibility past him. I'm glad to see he didn't opt for this, because that's beyond weak... it's utterly lame.

3. The "vanishing window" gambit. Actually engaging the arguments I presented, but waiting until very late in the self-imposed window of time before the deadline to do it. In this scenario, I envisioned John having marshalled together an array of counter-arguments to address the various points that I had raised, putting them out there, and then watching the clock to see how much of a gap he could build up while hoping I didn't counter, leaving him with the appearance of having "won" the argument through the last word. I've had this one pulled on me multiple times on various sites controlled by an individual I was arguing with. I had certainly hoped he wouldn't resort to this kind of jerk move, and he didn't, so fair play to John on that aspect. I had only assigned a probability of about 10% to this outcome.

4. Reconsideration and engagement. In this version, John would have set the stage for his being magnanimous by forgoing his deadline in the interests of making sure things got addressed, and had a window available for us to go at it hammer-and-tongs directly... perhaps watching for an opportunity to call me out for being out of line, and knowing that at any time he can fall back on the "out" of having let the window stretch long enough. This would have likely been my preferable outcome, but I assigned only a 10-15% chance of it manifesting.

5. Something quite unexpected, which I obviously can't quantify. I was open to being surprised, either positively or negatively. This gets the remainder of the probability in my guesswork.

Am I disappointed? Sure. I expected better from someone who clearly has the intellectual capacity to tackle a challenge like this, as evidenced from his truly excellent work in Old Man's War. It really is my second-most-recommended SF title to others, behind Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep".

But, like all of us, he's human... and susceptible to the same failings and foibles as the rest. I don't hold his politics against him, nor do I even think that influenced his approach in this matter.

In retrospect, if I had to assign an emotional reason he might have chosen not to engage me, it might be his being miffed over my rightly (gently) calling him out in #436 for having (erroneously, as far as I can tell) chided someone for having repeated a point that had been made up-thread... which appears to have not been made after all.

I was offering him a graceful way to admit his error (as I think the wrongfully accused, Jeff R was as well), but he seemed to give that notion as much of an "ignore it" treatment as he did everthing else I wrote. And that's understandable, too. Not everyone is comfortable "manning up" and admitting that they've wronged someone else when they are in a controlled (and controlling) setting. It's his site, why would he want to make himself look bad?

Still, disappointing and sad. Hopefully, someone got some value out of what I put into that. I'll save a copy for future reference.

I feel you, I had a similar experience with Stross a few years. He not only fled the scene but shut down the board entirely. Heh.

I guess what I learned is that good fiction authors are good at... fiction. It's a wonderful talent but the real world generally isn't their forte.

Both those books you mention are excellent. I might also suggest Barnes' "Armies of Memory" as a very good look at the future (I tried another in the trilogy but quickly got bored with it.) I'll throw out "Resonance," "Metaplanetary," and "Singularity's Ring" as also possibly worthy of your time.

Fiction stories makes us wonder what is beyond. I like it!