And oh, the sweet objectivist tears from their FAQ:

"Isn't this ironic?

No. Kickstarter represents a "free market" and the very embodiment of what Atlas Shrugged is all about.

The real irony is that detractors continue to use the word "irony" to describe a voluntary value-for-value trade amongst individuals as being in opposition to Rand's philosophy."

I guess that's the same logic that let Rand live off the dole in her later years?

Wait a minute, me giving money to a homeless guy is a value-for-value trade as well. I give him or her money and he or she stops asking me for money!

HOOKER YOUR LOGIC IS ILLEGITIMATE. Because I just said so, and I felt smug doing it.

That's quite a stretch for "Value for value trade." I wonder what special gifts the big donors get.

You can PAY THEM 00 to do a job that a union show would PAY YOU to do?

In Anne Rand's world, poor people would go to kickstarter to pay for their food stamps.

3 stars. I shrugged.

"Anne" Rand? Sorry I just woke up.

Look, A is _equal_ to A you motherfuckers, so give me all of your money!

Las Vegas, living in a showbiz bubble, and probably making a living off of his genuine talent.

What some talented people don't realize is that not even close to everyone can do what they did, though they say it's easy (in their later years) or at least possible (the closest they come to actual honesty unless they also use the word "luck"). When you succeed like he has, sometimes this bubble goes up around you and you start believing that everyone could be just as successful if they'd get off their asses and do what you did.

This is akin to a championship NASCAR driver thinking the speed limit should be raised to 150 and those who can't drive like they can shouldn't own cars because they're too lazy to learn how to drive more skillfully at high speeds.

It always breaks my heart when a celebrity becomes a right-winger.

Do you remember the old Disney cartoon version of "The Ant and the Grasshopper"? The industrious ants toil hard building up stores of food for the winter while the slacker grasshopper plays his fiddle and mocks the ants for working too hard.

Then the winter comes and the ants are warm and snug in their hill, living off the bounty of their harvest while the poor grasshopper is out in the freezing cold. In the old fable, the grasshopper dies, but in this version the ants take pity on him and bring him inside.

The ants share their food with the grasshopper and the grateful grasshopper entertains them with music from his fiddle and agrees to share in the work next year. The ants also realize their lives are a lot more fun with the grasshopper around.

Some celebrities forget they're just grasshoppers.

Fucking A, Binro. That was deep.

Honestly I think he was always like this and just got more self-satisfied and flamboyant about it as he got more famous. There are enough hints of it in those first couple P&T books.

SteamPoweredKleenex, I don't know what's sadder, when what you described happens to someone talented, or when someone talented thinks what they do is easy and ends up never valuing it or going anywhere with it because of that.

*slow clap for Binro*

Thank you for putting so eloquently what I was going to comment on. But I'll add that people in the entertainment industry are especially prone to this bullshit because it is so hard to compete. Magic is not a huge industry, and there are only so many magicians that are talented enough to make a huge dent and he probably feels like that makes him want validation more. And then that validation leads to the insanity that convinces people that they deserve so, so, so much more than they will ever need, and convince everyone ELSE that they deserve it because that justifies it. Not that I hate him for being rich, but he needs to shut the fuck up and make something disappear.

It's like the closer people are to power, the more they empathize with everyone in power, and associate positions of power as being deserved to the point where they accomplish nothing and pat themselves on the back because they are convinced of their superiority from their own spin. The closer they are, the more they want to believe that everyone else in power is like them, and since no one wants to believe they are a bad person...thence cometh the justification again.

There are innovative, gifted people in the world and the idea that only they deserve true reward while the rest of humanity cheers them on only appeals to someone with a huge ego problem.

My wife had a brief celebrity crush infatuation with Penn Gillette, and everytime that Penn spewed some Randian bullshit she had to struggle through a haze of cognitive dissonance to explain why his awful beliefs didn't conflict with her own leftist values. The one example I really remember was that Penn signed some sort of school voucher petition (which my wife is against) but later claimed he hadn't read the fine print in which it mentioned giving money to religious schools. My wife insisted that this meant that he didn't really support school vouchers at all and it was all just a big misunderstanding and SURELY Penn must actually support public schools, despite Penn's apparent confusion having nothing to do with the meat of the petition, just the small details. I pointed out that signing things without reading the fine print was exactly the sort of thing that he mocked hippies for doing in his TV show, and that was the beginning of the end for her Gillette love. The final nail was when she tried to post about this on Penn Gillette's forum and got banned.

Now she hates that smug asshole and I couldn't be happier.

Goddamn Binro, take 'em.

Wait, wait...

Do you think it would be possible to pledge enough money that they would allow us to re-write the ending? I'm thinking something along the lines of the Bob the Angry Flower Strip "Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later".

If they're desperate enough to finish the trilogy, we might be able to pull it off.

No, no, no. You have to look at this with OBJECTIVISM.

If this third movie can be made for 0,000, you should be outraged that the first movie wasted over 29 million dollars. Obviously those running this were grossly overpaid. Why, they practically STOLE the money, for which they should spend the rest of their lives in debtors' prison at the very least, working off their ill-gotten gains.

I've seen both parts and the funny thing is that the million movie is fantastically more entertaining (it never becomes _actually_ entertaining, mind you) than the million one.

My favorite part about Kickstarted are the people that pay for the privilege to insult, and the shitstorms they tend to cause.

Like all those idiots who gave money to Anita Sarskeezian.

I love their refutation of Will. It's akin to saying that god exists because www.godisrealnotalie.com.

Yes.

If they're measuring it in dollars lost, damage to the economy, and human misery, it's very influential. Maybe it beat out Mein Kampf because the asshole who wrote it went on to put it into practice, which is hardly influencing someone, really.

Will yours have blackjack and hookers?