I can go to ssa.gov and click the button that says "log into your account."

Yeah, we can't really fault people for thinking something the government itself says.

The phrasing doesn’t make sense anyway. I think I have an individual social security account where they track how much I’ve paid and how much that will entitle me to receive. I also think I have an individual savings account with my bank, and an individual investment account with my brokerage. In none of these perceptions do I think there is a little bin with my money in it stored separately from everyone else’s money.

And the title of the book is "The Fountainhead," not "The Fountain Head."

And that reduces the length of the title by about 1/10. Something the rest of the book could have benefitted from as well.

Not only 1/10 though. That book's pretty much just a very painful to read piece of propaganda.

I would say a good editor could easily cut 1/3. A good writer could have cut 1/2.

What makes it propaganda? I haven’t read any of Ayn Rands work but have had some exposure to objectivism its general axioms seem to be pretty consistent.

A while since I read it, but it hides it's core ideas in an absurd story that goes on rather too long.

You'll find a consistent set of axioms in most bigger theories. The question is if their model maps well onto the real world (which is fuzzy and inconsistent) or if it needs a lot of "if we only do a little more of X, it might finally work".

My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda.

What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners.

So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet.

In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.

Fountainhead was pretty decent imo. Certainly better written than atlas shrugged

I'm not so sure. Every so often I browse Metafilter (remember Metafilter?) out of morbid fascination, and it's a total trainwreck. I don't think it's a model for success.

"My wife types my work..."

Those five words render the entire essay meaningless.

I think you'll appreciate the first response in the "Letters" section - the one that starts off with "Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife - a low-tech energy-saving device."

It got a chuckle out of me, for sure.

Shocking that a wife might willingly want to help her husband with something important to him.

I'm sure she does, but that's beside the point. Why should we pay any attention to the opinions of a person on replacing something he doesn't use with something else he won't use. He may as well say that he won't buy a snowblower because his groundskeeper uses a shovel and does just fine.

I get your point, but good luck with that. Most (every?) influential figure had has something problematic about their person. If you can't see the good through the bad, then you will quickly find yourself with nothing.

I'm probably a crackpot, but I'm convinced it's the other way around--matter emerges from mind. The only refutation I'm familiar with is Samuel Johnson kicking a rock, which I don't find very persuasive.

Hank and Hal are also short for Henry.

The only example I can think of is "munchkin" which was apparently coined by Frank Baum for The Wizard of Oz.

An amazing project, and I love that he always calls it "Joan's organ." What a tribute.

...and the opening of the Rush song YYZ.

A chapter in Chemerinsky's casebook on Constitutional law is titled "Speech in Authoritarian Environments: Military, Prisons, and Schools."