Bizarre, Media, Politics, Society

Meet Janis Lane: Tea Party Leader And Anti-Feminist

Janis Lane is the Tea Party leader in Mississippi and she appears to long for the days when women were happy chattel. Lane had made headlines in complaining that women are inherently poorly suited to not just serve as bosses but to vote.


Lane explained that “Probably the biggest turn we ever made was when the women got the right to vote. Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting.” A former marketing director who now leads the party in Central Mississippi, Lane further observed that “There is nothing worse than a bunch of mean, hateful women. They are diabolical in how than can skewer a person . . . I do not see that in men. The whole time I worked, I’d much rather have a male boss than a female boss. Double-minded, you never can trust them.”

Once again, it is remarkable how some of our radicalized citizens share striking similarity with our enemies like the Taliban who would agree wholeheartedly with Lane on her view of women.

Source: Daily Mail

289 thoughts on “Meet Janis Lane: Tea Party Leader And Anti-Feminist”

  1. Gene H:

    that isnt even good satire. Satire, to be good, should have some truth in it. There was none in that except maybe the 3 grams of gold part.

  3. Well, I suppose that puts the rest the question on whether or not Ayn Rand met the definitions of a sociopath.

  4. Gene and Mike S. nailed her. She fit clearly into the personalty disorder spectrum, and fits the definition of sociopath. She was narcissistic, lacked empathy, and exuded a kind of evil one typically only sees in movie villains, except hers is the real thing, not acting. But, like many villains, her demagoguery attracted followers, just like many other demagogues in history.

  6. Bron,

    Do you know what forensic psychologists do?

    I don’t think you do or you’d realize why OS’ agreeing with the diagnosis was critical.

    You get an atta boy for once again missing the point.

    The burden of proof was made by two standard diagnostic standards that Rand was a sociopath and got the concurrence of a professional trained to do remote psychological diagnostics. And I’m supposed to take your word, a civil engineer and proud Objectivist with a vested interest in saying Rand isn’t what she clear was over a clearly presented set of data that fit within the stated standard diagnostic framework so clearly that a layman made a case for her sociopathy and an professional concurred?

    I don’t think so.

    If I want to know how to build a water treatment plant, I’ll take your word on it. Otherwise, you need to prove she wasn’t a sociopath in the same scientifically based manner to meet your burden of proof on counterclaim. I stated sufficient proof for the claim and your response was the equivalent of “uh uh”. Not good enough.

    Get to work or accept that you cannot counter the assertion that Ayn Rand was a sociopath.

  8. Well since you arent a trained professional and you havent sat down with her to evaluate her in person, your diagnosis is lacking.

    But you do get an atta boy for the extra effort you put into trying to prove your point.

  9. Whether you folks realize it or not, equating this dottering old fool w/ the Taliban discredits virtually everrything you say. Ask the mother of the girl in the UK w/ a bullet in her head if it’s equivalent? Ask the loved ones of women beheaded and stoned to death if it’s even in the same ballpark. My eyes have been opened, MikeS and lottakatz. My eyes have been opened. And so have others.

  10. Bron,

    It has been demonstrated here that Rand meets the criteria of a sociopath by both the DSM and WHO diagnostic criteria. To whit:

    “‘As far as sociopath goes? How do you know that? Are you a trained mental health provider? Why do you think she was a sociopath? Because she didn’t give her money away and take a vow of poverty? By that yard stick we are most all sociopaths.

    I just looked at the profiles for sociopaths and psychopaths, she doesn’t fit them at least based on her writings (I did not know her personally).’

    Then you should have read more about her the person is all I can tell you.

    Here’s just one excerpt about her life:

    ‘Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote ‘a scathing denunciation of childhood,’ headed with a quote from Pascal: ‘I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.’

    But the Rosenbaums’ domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father’s pharmacy was seized ‘in the name of the people.’ For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be ‘on strike.’

    The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies—the America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.

    She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy—a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and ‘the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent’ who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is ‘mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned.’ It is evil to show kindness to these “lice”: The ‘only virtue’ is ‘selfishness.’

    She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented ‘the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.’ She called him ‘a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,’ shimmering with ‘immense, explicit egotism.’ Rand had only one regret: ‘A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.’

    It’s not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: ‘I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them.’

    She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman’s ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor—not out of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him, saying: ‘The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!’

    For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as ‘savages,’ ‘refuse,’ ‘inanimate objects,’ and ‘imitations of living beings,’ picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.

    Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don’t bow down before their manifest superiority.

    As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as ‘imbecilic’ and “anti-life” by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: ‘There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy.’

    Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: ‘I came to look on her as a killer of people.’ The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand’s claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.

    In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult’s No. 2, and she named him as her “intellectual heir”—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand’s philosophy ‘taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement.’ So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: ‘You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?’” (http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/)

    It corresponds to the other materials I have read. If you want to know more? Do your own homework. Now that you have some background and cannot feign ignorance . . .

    I’m not a trained mental health provider but there are two who post here who agree with me (although one is off on vacation, I know his stance from previous conversations). Why do I think she was a sociopath?

    The WHO ICD-10 criteria for sociopathy (which they call dissocial personality disorder) lists:

    1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of the capacity for empathy.

    Rand? Check. To the core.

    2. Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations.

    Rand? Check. By her own admission she care nothing for social norms, rules and obligations.

    3. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.

    Rand? Check. See Buckley and stories of other persons who fell into her disfavor. It was always something “they” did.

    4. Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence.

    Rand? Check on the low tolerance to frustration. See Buckley and stories of other persons who fell into her disfavor. She treated them like exiles and pariahs or browbeat them into submission.

    5. Incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment.

    Rand? Check. She had no empathy, so I really doubt she felt much if any guilt about doing others wrong.

    6. Markedly prone to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior bringing the subject into conflict.

    Rand? Check. People don’t deserve love except for those who met her narrow criteria and it’s their fault.

    7. Persistent irritability.

    Rand? From what I’ve read and seen, she was an unpleasant bitch, check.

    So on the WHO ICD-10 criteria? Scoring a perfect seven out of seven, Ayn Rand was a sociopath.

    Of the DSM-IV criteria for antisocial personality disorder (of which sociopathy is a subset), she only meets two and a halves of the seven criteria and three are required for diagnosis:

    1. failure to conform to social norms and although the DSM requires manifestations of violence and/or arrest, it can be argued (successfully I think) she engaged in emotional violence as a proxy (see her treatment of those who fell into disfavor) – since this point is debatable, I’m calling this is a half until OS or Mike S. weigh in on this point.

    2. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults – again, it can be argued she engaged in emotional violence as a proxy – since this point is debatable, I’m calling this is a half until OS or Mike S. weigh in on this point.;

    5. reckless disregard for safety of others – if they aren’t her ubermench, Ayn could give a damn about others as evidenced by her mischaracterization of altruism as evil and her hero worship of a serial killer for his inhuman personality traits;

    7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another – her entire “philosophy” is built around a lack of empathy rationalized away as “rational (i.e. enlightened) self-interest”.

    Since two halves make a whole, I’m saying she meets the DSM-IV criteria of three of the seven traits. This, combined with her stunning sweep of the WHO ICD-10 criteria?

    I’m going to stand by the statement Ayn Rand was a sociopath. It may have been a result of post traumatic stress or simply her disposition, but either way? She was effectively a sociopath. I’ll also standing by the statement that her “philosophy” appeals only to the selfish, narcissists, and other borderline disorders up to and including true full blown sociopaths. You’re all engaging in the religion of “me, Me, ME! and fuck everyone else”.

    Rationalizations for selfishness and greed, no matter how they are clothed, are still just rationalizations. Which brings us to another feature of mental illnesses. Those suffering them often do not or cannot acknowledge that they have a problem and will rationalize things away or blame them on others.

    Just like Rand and her followers.” – Buddha Is Laughing http://jonathanturley.org/2011/04/23/ayn-rand-and-christianity/#comment-226069

    To which Otteray Scribe, a well respected forensic psychologist, said, “I am about to turn in, but will comment on the Buddha’s comment above. Short version: What he said.
    FWIW I am one of the two he mentions who does have the wallpaper that says I am qualified to comment.”

    So given that she meets the criteria described fully in BIL’s post and it has the concurrence of a professional in such diagnosis, I’m going to go with the statement “Ayn Rand was a sociopath” is a truthful statement.

    Feel free to try to prove otherwise, Bron, as you’ve done futilely before.

    1. Gene,

      Rand was unquestionably a sociopath and her life snd writings prove it beyond doubt. Your summary of her history proves it as well. Her sppeal to people was she provided rationales for their selfish behavior. Were she to ever gain power, her reign would have been Hitlerian.

  11. “but why do liberals not recognize that Rand was also a champion of individual rights, was outspoken against racism, bigotry and discrimination against minorities, and most notably was ahead of her time in championing women’s rights and demonstrating through her novels (and films) that women are as smart as men, as tough-minded as men, as hard-working as men, as ambitious as men, and can even run an industrial enterprise as good as if not better than men?”

    a sociopath? Nah, sociopaths dont care for the rights of other people and use bully/thuggish tactics to stifle dissent. Rand was all about ideas and their free, unimpeded exchange among free people.

  12. Anonymously Yours, (Hey there!)
    They’re in more places than Mississippi unfortunately, we just don’t hear from them.

    Nick,
    Actually, the most conservative end of the Christian spectrum are exactly like the Taliban in that they advocate a strict patriarchal societal model that controls the family and all decision making. That control extends to all members of the family until they leave the household including who women and men children (even as adults) marry and when they marry. Women have no public role beyond what is biblically appropriate and all such decisions are left to the patriarch and minister- if a minister is in the picture. Withdrawal from society, home-schooling, home-churching and limited societal/media input for children is the ideal.

    There is another aspect of that end of the spectrum called the “Quiverfull” movement which directs that it is desirable that women have as many children as Dog wills (often leaving medical and birthing matters in the hands of the Lard) as their Xian duty with 6-8-10 and more desired. This is also a plan to overwhelm the population in 3-4 generations with like-minded souls that will vote for candidates into office that will turn the country into a fundamentalist Xian nation.

    Now they rely on shunning and Christian (corporal) discipline (spend some time on those websites!) to keep the wives and children in line. It’s a sick societal model and if they ever were successful in taking over the nation the stoning would follow as surely as night from day. Since the blueprint/operating manual (Old Testament) for the society was OK with things like slavery and other separation factors among the populous one wonders what else they have in mind.

    If you start looking at the positions and statements of many politicians, primarily Republicans, this is the direction they are moving, they may not be able to implement the ideal but if you modify enough laws at the state or federal level you can certainly impose many of the restrictions on women’s pubic activities that are desired and influence the intellectual upbringing of children.

    ***
    I won’t post the link or my posting will be moderated but do a search on “Christian Discipline” for how to’s on the why, authority for and methods of disciplining ones wife and children. A couple of quotes from one of the sites:

    ….”Likewise, women struggle with sins that men may not even recognize as being sin issues. Here’s a bare-bones sketch of the dynamics:

    1.Women by their peculiar sin nature resist earthly authority and trust.
    2.Women will seek earthly security at the expense of emotional and/or spiritual security. ….

    2.Rebuke and Lash. This is the harshest discipline a husband should administer, and it should always be done privately and with Godly, Biblical love. Usually, exhortation will have already taken place before this method is used, but there may come situations where this is the first step. The rebuke and lashing should be administered with a calm heart. Talk to your wife, let her know you are serious, and tell her why she is to be disciplined physically.

    When administering physical discipline, take caution not to deliver the lashes anywhere but the buttocks. The first attempt at this punishment should only be delivered by hand so you can get an idea of how many lashings are needed. The best position will be for you ….”
    ***

    “Quiverfull: Why it don’t work the way David Crank imagines it” – Also check out the David Crank link (first two words of article) and read his multi-part manifesto:

    http://biblicalpersonhood.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/quiverfull-why-it-dont-work-the-way-david-crank-imagines-it/

    See posting #2:
    http://brucegerencser.net/series/guest-posts/

  13. Why Ayn Rand won’t go away?

    That’s easy.

    Her followers are as sociopathic as she was.

  15. Fairly, With a Shirley Ellis and Warren Zevon reference during the same afternoon of commenting. Can Lou Reed be next?

  16. Gyges, I also noticed it did not have any “support the troops” fake ribbons on it either. They are falling down on the job.

  18. I agree with much of what she says about women in the workplace and I hope that she does not vote.

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