— Musings —11.17.2011 03:39 PM
LuLuLunatics
…so, they’ve turned to Ayn Rand as their muse? Ayn Rand?
Overheard at the branding meeting: “You know, we’re tired of selling gym pants that make your ass look great. We’ve decided we’re all about a bizarre, crypto-fascist subculture that trivializes rape. Let’s go, team!”
Boy, marketing people sure are smart.
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Warren, if you haven’t heard of it, I might suggest you also look up a kooky cultish ‘personal development course’ called The Landmark Forum, originally founded by Werner Erhart, who’s philosophy has links to Scientology. Lululemon staff are encouraged to take this course.
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You just got my attention-BIG TIME! This stuff is not a cult but it has an undisclosed spiritual message and is actually considered an ‘abusive organization” and they use 27 forms of mind abuse techniques in combination, to shift a person’s paradigms. There are well over 5oo “transformational technology” companies around and many are clones/spon offs of Erhart and landmark is one of them.
Employees who do not take the course will end up unemployed because they are seen as the great unwashed
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I should have also mentioned that Landmark and several others are part of the “Human Potential Movement”.
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I never read Rand, though I enjoyed some bits and pieces of John Galt’s speech. Most notably this aphorism: “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.”
We’ve all had those moments in life where people try to take advantage of us. But, sometimes, we have family and friends who need us. In the end, I enjoy their company, in spite of their flaws. But if I do them a favor, I tell them that if I ever fall flat on my ass, that I hope they don’t mind if I go couch surfing at their place until I get myself back on my feet again
From my understanding of Objectivist philogophy, Ayn Rand justified selfishness as a virtue and charity as evil. Yes, there are instances where rational self-interest should take priority and that charity can be misplaced. But it shouldn’t be argued that all charity is bad, and that all self interest is a good thing.
Rand cheated on her husband for many years, and poached a young follower away from his wife. Then she had the temerity to get mad at her lover whose marriage she wrecked when he cheated on her with a younger woman.
The world isn’t as black and white as Rand points out. There are times and places when taxes and regulation are necessary. It’s for the conservative opposition to make a case that excessive red tape should be done away with, and make regulations more efficient. Perhaps the repeal of Glass-Steagall was misguided, and even Newt Gingrich concedes this and now says it should be reimplemented.
One of the articles linked referred to Whittaker Chambers’ critique of _Atlas Shrugged_, which is a good one. That he was a conservative gives it more credibility that Rand shouldn’t be taken all that seriously:
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Whittaker Chambers famously wrote in the National Review, “Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche’s ‘last men’, both deformed in a way to sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Marnia… [In her vision] resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and , in fact, reason itself enjoins them. From almost every page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, “To a gas chamber – go!”
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I’m sorry, I was distracted by the young lady walking in front of me in the yoga pants. Can you repeat that?
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I guess Che Guevara and Hammers and sickles are okay, though.
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Well yeah, cuz Che looks cool on a T-shirt. Ayn Rand doesn’t. This is, after all, about fashion.
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Yawn, the effort by yourself to connect liberals and communists has been done to death. Try again.
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Already had eleventybillion reasons not to shop there, but this one is the best by far. Can you imagine any mindset less likely to be associated with yoga than the one Rand promoted. A yi yi …
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I just checked and LULU does send people to Landmark, but it is voluntary. This may not sound like a big deal to most and possibly of little interest on Warren’s Musings, but this is a very serious corporate problem. Staff have sued companies in the US for sending them to this tye of Human Potential Movement /Paradigm Shifting Seminars. The medical condition resulting from this type of training is often referred to as Transpersonal Psychopathology. Anyway, I’ve been lecturing on this for 20 years and few listen until its too late.
What is written on the Bags, is a good indication of the Human Potential/Transformational Technology Movement.
Warren I promise I will not say anything further, otherwise you will kick me out as a fanatic.
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I have a friend who got sucked into that Landmark stuff – spent thousands, and it sure seemed like a cult. Would be useful to get more information out there about it.
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hey, when we were teenagers, we didn’t have Twilight; we had to make do with Ayn Rand. It was all so deep, desperate and meaningful. And then we grew up and put aside childish things.
it’s a little embarrassing for Lulu’s management though. Now everything they have achieved in business is minimized because they have demonstrated that they are clearly putzes.
.
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Unless they’re targetting the Blogging Tories demo…
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Not sure I would like to see ANY of them in yoga pants….
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Do a little alternate nostril breathing and you will feel better
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Poor old Ayn Rand. Her philosophy worked so well for her that she spent the last few years of her life living on social security. Such a bitter, revolting person. Her old henpecked husband and submissive friends waited on her hand and foot.
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Been waiting AGES to use this one- I forget who wrote it-
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs”.
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OMG that is so awesome
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well remembered
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Raj Patel from “The Value of Nothing.” Good book.
http://95books.tumblr.com/post/404362530/8-the-value-of-nothing-raj-patel
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Ops. Saw Michael S’s post below…. It’s still a good book.
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Original quote here, http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html, by John Rogers, a stand up comic and screenwriter.
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Cognitive dissonance generator. Conservatives are responsible for the debt, Ayn hated Ronald Reagan, it makes as much sense as facist yoga.
http://thinkingaboot.blogspot.com/search?q=Ayn+Rand
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Also, Ronald Reagan believed Rand’s fictions were how-to manuals. Go figure.
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I can’t believe I read that book when I was 18.
Oh, here’s something else… a sign outside the gym up the street…
“It’s not the pants that make you look fat… It’s the fat.”