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Atlas Shrugged the TV series?

The most amusing thing for me about the band of literal pirates shoe-horned into the story is how the unashamed thief and murderer Ragnar Danneskjöld tries to defend his own actions later (essentially, that he was only getting everyone's income tax money back, and anyways, everyone else was stealing stuff and killing people so why shouldn't he get his?)

It's like an open admission that what Rand is really pushing for is a kleptocracy, that none of the moneyed twats in Galt's Gulch see any difference between what they do and what Ragnar does because there is no difference between what they do and what Ragnar does.
 
Ayn Rand. I have her to thank for my brief period of whatever the fuck it's called-ism that still embarrasses me to this day.

The movies were shit. Any TV series will be equally shitty. I say they cast Kevin Sorbo as John Galt and get any misconceptions about quality over and done with right away.
 
Here is a famous class of WWII freighters:  Liberty ship Statistics:
Displacement (mass) 14,000 metric tons
Dimensions: length 135 m / 442 ft, beam (width) 17 m / 57 ft, draft (depth under water) 8.5 m / 28 ft
Engine power 1,900 kW / 2,500 hp
Speed 11 knots / 21 km/h / 13 mph
Range 20,000 nmi / 37,000 km / 23,000 mi
Crew 40 - 60 (US Merchant Marine), 20 - 40 (US Navy Armed Guards)

In AS, the looters who rule the US send a lot of supplies to the looters who rule the other nations. One would need lots of freighters for that, and freighters aren't very fast ships, either in WWII or in the present. They'd be easy pickings unless organized into convoys protected by warships. Or did Ayn Rand want to imply that the looters that rule the US are so uncreative that they've never heard of convoys? That would seem to be in character with another part of AS.

Atlas Shrugged: Randian Fidelity
On the night of October 15, a copper wire broke in New York City, in an underground control tower of the Taggart Terminal, extinguishing the lights of the signals.

It was only the breach of one wire, but it produced a short circuit in the interlocking traffic system, and the signals of motion or danger disappeared from the panels of the control towers and from among the strands of rail… On the edge of the city, a cluster of trains gathered at the entrance to the Terminal tunnels and grew through the minutes of stillness, like blood dammed by a clot inside a vein, unable to rush into the chambers of the heart.

Dagny gets an emergency telephone call, saying that all train traffic is at a standstill and no one knows what to do. Glad of the opportunity to do something useful, she excuses herself and hails a cab. Arriving at the terminal, she takes command:

“Call all of your unskilled laborers,” she said to the assistant manager, “the section hands, trackwalkers, engine wipers, whoever’s in the Terminal right now, and have them come here at once… have them bring here every lantern they can lay their hands on, any sort of lantern, conductors’ lanterns, storm lanterns, anything…. We’re going to move trains and we’re going to move them manually.”

“Manually?” said the signal engineer.

“Yes, brother! Now why should you be shocked?” She could not resist it. “Man is only muscles, isn’t he? We’re going back — back to where there were no interlocking systems, no semaphores, no electricity — back to the time when train signals were not steel and wire, but men holding lanterns. Physical men, serving as lampposts. You’ve advocated it long enough — you got what you wanted.”
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So it was only Dagny Taggart who could organize alternative signaling for those trains?
 
A real leader would get her electrical engineers to track down the fault and fix the wire. And really, these engineers would not need to be led to do this. With in minutes, they would be on the site. Another contrived Anus Rand problem that is totally unlikely.

Rand's world is an alternative Universe, where everybody but her heros have an IQ of 78.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
A real leader would get her electrical engineers to track down the fault and fix the wire. And really, these engineers would not need to be led to do this. With in minutes, they would be on the site. Another contrived Anus Rand problem that is totally unlikely.
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Yes indeed. In fact, railroads often have "operations & maintenance departments", as they are called.
Rand's world is an alternative Universe, where everybody but her heros have an IQ of 78.
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Cute.

Atlas Shrugged: Signal Passed at Danger

When we first meet Dagny properly, she’s on an overnight train, heading back to New York from a business meeting.

Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body. [p.20]

We’re told that she hasn’t slept in two nights, which is treated as only a minor inconvenience; Randian protagonists treat such things as annoying distractions from what they really love to do, namely spending time at the office. But what does inconvenience her is when she nods off briefly, only to find that the train has been diverted into a side track and has been stuck for an hour at a stop signal, waiting for the red light to change. Dagny jumps up and runs to the engine car, where she berates the train crew for doing what common sense and prudence would seemingly dictate:

“This is the Taggart Comet,” she said. “The Comet has never been late.”
“She’s the only one in the country that hasn’t,” said the engineer.
“There’s always a first time,” said the fireman. [p.23]
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They are clearly doing the right thing, not running a red light. Yes, railroad lines also have traffic lights. There are very good reasons to wait at red lights, just as with vehicles on the flat kind of road.
  • Another train coming on the track in the opposite direction. Many suburban and intercity railroad lines are single-tracked, and that means that a train must wait for an opposite-direction train to pass before proceeding.
  • A switch may not be set properly for the train to pass, like for another train entering or existing the track, coming from or going to a siding or a branchline.
  • Some malfunction or obstruction that must be fixed by a maintenance crew, like a broken rail or a stuck switch or a tree that fell on the tracks or a car that is stuck on the tracks.
If the signal is broken, then one ought to call in to the train dispatchers for instructions, someone who is likely to know if there are other trains on the tracks up ahead or other such things.

But AR implies that the train crew is a bunch of whimpering cowards.
“Lady, I don’t intend to stick my neck out,” he said.
“He means,” said the fireman, “that our job’s to wait for orders.”
“Your job is to run this train.”
“Not against a red light. If the light says stop, we stop.”
“A red light means danger, lady,” said the passenger.
“We’re not taking any chances,” said the engineer. “Whoever’s responsible for it, he’ll switch the blame to us if we move. So we’re not moving until somebody tells us to.” [p.23]
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Though Adam Lee is not a train driver, he has the right idea.
Dozens of deadly train collisions and derailments have been caused by train crews who missed or ignored a stop signal, including one of the worst in recent history, a head-on collision between two trains in Los Angeles in 2008 that caused 25 deaths and dozens of serious injuries.
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All from running red lights. Running a Red Light | Dangers of Driving Through a Red Light
In the end, Dagny pulls rank, identifies herself and orders the train to proceed through the signal. Because this is Atlas and the protagonists are never wrong, we’re not meant to think of this as a foolhardy and dangerous decision. We’re meant to admire her for her bold and daring decisiveness while everyone else stands around helplessly wringing their hands – “the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action,” as the text puts it.

But what it actually shows is that in Rand’s world, there’s an author on board, arranging events so that her dashing capitalists are always right, even when they make decisions that in reality could easily prove disastrous. (Can you imagine the newspaper headlines? “22 Dead in Train Collision Caused by Railroad Executive Who Didn’t Want To Be Late For Meeting”?) Since many people take Atlas as a guide for how they should act in reality, you can start to see the danger of this book.
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May it be that they lose $$$ producing this turd. And maybe, the results will be so ludicrous that it turns a new generation to ridiculing Anus Rand.
 
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