Ayn Rand’s ODE
Someone over at the the Ayn Rand Institute must be having fun trolling the the OP/Ed pages of the country’s college papers, and someone at the Emerald must be biting, because today’s paper featured not one but two letters from America’s favorite objectivist think tank. One’s about how it would be immoral not to invade Iran, the other is about stem cell research.
I’m a little surprised that the Ol’ Dirty published both of these. There is a name for the practice of low-rent advocacy organizations sending out mass LTEs to newspapers, but I don’t remember what it is called. Generally, when you see a letter or guest commentary from somewhere far away, and it isn’t in relation to a news story, it is because it was sent out en masse. I fell for this in rather embarrassing style when I was the Opinion Editor. (I received about eight or nine of these things over a period of a week.)
Still, if it weren’t for the tireless objectivist editors of the ODE, and their Randian overlords, we wouldn’t know that: “Retaliating against Iran doesn’t mean embarking on an Iraq-like crusade to bring its people the vote; instead, it means using military force to make the regime non-threatening-for the sake of defending American lives.”
I can’t wait until the next issue of the Emerald, when the Heritage Foundation will run two commentaries, an editorial and this cartoon.
No, what I received was spam, and that was embarrassing (all that shit about how Coke should spend money protecting the Polar Bears). These were legitimate letters from a crazy, crazy think tank. But they can be a little like message board trolls — you don’t want to feed them, or they keep coming back. All in all, highly entertaining having two in one paper (I know how hard it is to fill space, and it looks like you only have one columnist … discounting the freelancer who wrote about how technology is tearing us apart, blah blah blah). When I mention the Emerald, it’s all in good fun (as for some of the other guys on here, they have a baffling level of hatred toward the ODE).
Anyway, Tapatio indeed.
Tapatio!
Yeah, this is pretty embarassing in hindsight. Those were the first two of a subsequent deluge of crap I received from them, and I was too dumb to realize it was spam.
T: There’s a link to the PDF of the print version on the left column of their website. And yes, they did run two letters from the institute on the same day.
Ayn Rand makes that hot sauce (Tapatio!) that I just noticed I dripped on my keyboard last night seem profound.
But really. It was Tapatio. And that stuff’s pretty amazing anyways, even when not held up to a side-by-side comparison of ideas against Ayn Rand.
AYN RAND!
AYN RAND!
I’m no longer in Eugene, so I can’t. I would really appreciate it if someone could grab a print copy of the paper to verify that they actually ran two Ayn Rand Institute letters, from different people, on the same day, though.
Turn to the back page of today’s Emerald and see if you can spot the glaring error. It’s extra funny because it’s in an army advertisement.
Wow that was a really terrible article.
[quote]”no negotiations are possible with those who seek your destruction.”[/quote] Is that how the Iranians feel? Cause I think we found part of the problem!