New blog

The url is http://paralian.chanlu.org.

I solemnly swear that I am up to no good

I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

In the end, yes.

When I first read this book and thought about this idea and laissez-faire capitalism, my immediate reaction was that it was kind of unfair to those who (by no choice of their own) had something wrong with them - missing an arm or born with a genetic disease.

Then I realized: the motor of the world was stopped like in Atlas Shrugged, and they also stopped the motor of natural selection. In a coldly logical way, it's natural selection of those who do not have diseases they will transfer to their children. Also, there are no second chances in nature.

But we're different than that. We're different from most animals because we can afford to help people to live when they would have died otherwise. People throughout the years have used their minds and found cures for things. Cures that may be expensive, (especially if you're in one of those backwards places like the States where you have to pay hospital bills.)

Public health care is excellent in my opinion - nobody chooses to be sick, and people don't deserve to have to worry about never being able to pay for treatment when they're sick in hospital. I don't mind paying taxes in order to have the security of knowing I won't be left to die if I suddenly were to hurt myself or get sick.

I don't mind paying taxes in order to have the security of knowing I won't be left to die if I suddenly were to hurt myself or get sick.

Now I get it. Well, I get it in an ideal world:

When paying taxes you are paying for the security you get knowing that there are doctors and police-folks and those dudes that patch up the roads so you don't break your car driving over the potholes. Ideally, it's a fair trade.

If I donate money to charity it's not because I think I'm expected to, it's because I end up with the satisfaction of knowing that a tiny bit of my money that I won't miss, went to helping someone else.

What would Henry Rearden (from Atlas Shrugged) do?

Atlas Shrugged is taking a long time to read.

I was on Yahoo Answers, and asked a question about it.

Henry Rearden, from Atlas Shrugged is a "self made man".

His brother Philip doesn't do anything, and expects Rearden to support him financially. The whole society ends up doing the same sort of thing: not producing anything of their own but relying on the successful industrialists, like Rearden and Dagny, to give up their time and effort.

This all makes sense, in a world where people like Philip Rearden could get up off their arses, get a real job, and turn their lives around.

What if Rearden lived in Germany during the second world war. What if he were put in the place of Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List. Would he scoff at the government but say to himself that it's useless to try to change them? Or would he end up using his personal money to save people, at no benefit to himself?

Here's my opinion:

The more I think about it, the more I think that Rearden is very similar to Schindler. I think because of the fact that he's a self-made man, he understands the value of work, and doesn't like getting work for free.

Somewhere in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand says something about how Rearden was adamant that a business deal had to be beneficial to both sides.

I think he would have the same kind of struggle in his mind, and eventually come to the same conclusion: his money wouldn't mean anything if it was earned by the blood and tears of slaves.

I think Rearden would do almost the same thing as Schindler: except he might stubbornly still try to make the factory productive. Even though he'd be supporting a group of "looters".

Uh...now I have to think up a title for this?

I haven't blogged for awhile. I think I might have lost my ability to be concise.

I've been reading Atlas Shrugged, ever since I got home for Christmas. I was planning on reading it in the airport and on the plane, then to stop reading it once I got home. But I didn't. I couldn't figure it out, but there was something about it that I really liked. It was exciting to like a book and not immediately know the reason.

What I like is competence.

That's why I almost understood Dagny and Reardon's affair: it wasn't some romance for the sake of being a romance. It was two smart, competent people, who work hard during the day and present an unemotional image to the rest of the world.

There was something I was going to say, someone in real life I was going to mention. Someone who's competent, good-looking, a year younger than I, of the opposite gender, fun to be with, and I think he likes me too.

Aside from those things, I think subconsciously that I consider us equals. I don't consider myself any better than him, nor do I consider him hopelessly better than me.

This guy does interesting things in his free time (not like some people who play video games all the time). He's good at what he does and wants to learn more things.

I'm not too good for him, and he is not too good for me as long as I don't get lazy. As long as I try my best in whatever I do, I think we're equal in terms of competence.

I had a thought a while ago, that I was different than a lot of girls. That I don't blog about a guy that I like. Of course, a while ago I thought I might be gay, also a while ago I thought that the notion of intimacy was "icky" and for "adults".

Hm...he could read this, and would probably know it's him I'm talking about. Oh well, I'm still posting it anyway.

(Image from someone's flickr.)

And...some footnotes:

* (competence...ah the irony.) When I first discovered Atlas Shrugged was when they sent out a free copy after I entered a scholarship contest. The scholarship contest was to write an essay on The Fountainhead. I read over half of the book then ran out of time and sent in an essay that was mediocre at best. The funny thing is, I don't like mediocrity much.

** (sure, edward presents an unemotional image too.) But Dagny and Reardon are more real, more human, and more interesting than Edward Cullen. Also, Edward is creepy and watches Bella sleep (Sorry, fans of TWILIGHT!!!1 I'm not saying it's a bad book, I just like books that make me think, and in which the main female character doesn't lose all her ability to think out of her own free will.)

*** (of the opposite gender.) Not that being of the opposite gender is too important, because I don't mind the idea of being homosexual and have entertained this idea in my mind. In the end, though, I think I'm straight. And it's a relief, even though I could've accepted being gay.

Friday tie day blogging

It seems as though I'm reduced to Friday X blogging these days. Oh well I did say I wanted to blog less. Every friday (except Halloween) at our school is tie day, so i bought an awesome tie

My new favourite word is meritocracy. It's something I was trying to say in this entry about the internets.

From the dictionary on the comuter:
meritocracy |ˌmeriˈtäkrəsē|
noun ( pl. -cies)
government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability.
• a society governed by such people or in which such people hold power.
• a ruling or influential class of educated or skilled people.

Friday Futurama Blogging

Image from somewhere on the wide internets.

I just started watching Futurama. It's pretty shiny.

In other news...Black man given nation's worst job.

I don't follow politics much, but I think there's some hope there...

Finally, someone who's better at googling than me

M. has discovered my blog.

I told him three things about it: it's at blogspot.com, the title is a (misquoted) firefly quote, and some of the categories I have are...um...let me see I have one called life, one called university, and one called couchland...that's coulchland without a space.

So he discovered my blog while drunk on his iPhone. Wow...next thing I'll do is get him to try and find Ainoa, and if he does he will be the ultimate googler.