• A Dark Truth 
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Capitalism  | Groping for the levers of outrage is an OK way to establish a narrative rapport with an audience, and giant and amoral corporations can provide a good fulcrum for hoisting all that righteous indignation, unless you're Ayn Rand or FreedomWorks or something.      View blog reactions

• Let Fury Have the Hour 
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Individualism  | Although it sets out to document a hopeful narrative of social change, Let Fury Have the Hour also demonstrates the clarifying and fertilizing effects of authoritarianism on artistic movements. [....] The [transatlantic conservatism that emerged in 1980], the film asserts, placed emphasis on personal acquisition and Randian individualism at the expense of the whole concept of the collective good. These attitudes persist today.      View blog reactions

• North Seas Texas: Belgian Boys Fall in Love 
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Recently, popular films about gay characters have started moving beyond the overarching plot about society's acceptance of sexual identity and the tricky navigability of a heteronormative world to instead just tell stories about people who aren't straight. This is a good and commendable development, because didacticism sucks ass and kills stories, as clearly demonstrated by Ayn Rand.      View blog reactions

• You’ve Been Trumped: The Ugly American 
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You've Been Trumped, directed by Anthony Baxter, is a document of a humble American businessman who, through some perspicacity and Abe Lincoln–style bootstraps-hoisting, wins the land and homes of a bunch of primitive, chattering Scottish natives who obviously don't use them to God's and Ayn Rand's intended purpose: for playing golf.      View blog reactions

• Europe: The forgotten continent 
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I am embarrassed to admit that I have read a book. But if the indignant comments occasionally left by Ayn Rand enthusiasts on certain Daily Briefs posts can be believed, I probably didn't understand it, and am also completely retarded, and anyway probably didn't even read it in the first place.      View blog reactions

• Sumo wrestling with Team Plog 
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Here's a pro-tip for attracting really angry comments: Say mean stuff about dead author Ayn Rand or boring boring boring boring National Public Radio.      View blog reactions

• • Air-quote, The health of the mother, end-air-quote. 
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Atlas Shrugged  | An article about the biological basis for altruism drives yet another nail into the already well-nailed-shut coffin of [...] Ayn Rand. Like my antipathy for Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Fight Club, it's not Rand's books that I hate as much as the dudez who are into them. And the books are pretty bad!      View blog reactions

• Creating a hostile work environment for the news since January 2008 
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Capitalism  | Obviously, I'm living with a global warming denier, which came as quite a shock. A quick battery of questions determined that (A) [My girlfriend] has never been a member of the John Birch society, (B) She does not agree with stinky old Ayn Rand that the poors should be turned out into the wilderness to fend for themselves, and (C) She does not support laissez-faire economic liberalism or abolishing Mexicans.      View blog reactions

• • Daily briefs: Action news for the post-ironic urbanite 
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Capitalism  | A poll commissioned by the city demonstrates a plurality of Kansas Citians favoring a half-cent sales tax for rapid transit. I don't doubt it, and truthfully, as a Libertarian Christian Anarchist Objectivist, I'm kind of torn. On the one hand, not only do I want to get the government out of peoples' lives, I also actively want to smash the state, preferably with the cheapest well-vodka-based molotov cocktails money can buy. I'm a budget anarchist. But, on the other Ayn Rand-reading hand, regressive sales taxes are satisfyingly tough on the sub-poverty Untouchable caste, whom the last fifteen grinding years of laissez-faire economic liberalism haven't yet crushed completely flat. So, there's that on top.      View blog reactions

• Daily Briefs: Downtown Kansas City is not as good as downtown Cleveland. PLUS: Guns and cigarettes. 
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I've somehow managed to reconcile my feminist sympathies with my patronage of illegal massage businesses. All that Ayn Rand I read in college sure comes in handy for convenient rationalizations.      View blog reactions