Frequently Asked Questions

I am not actually asked any questions frequently. But I thought it would be good to have an FAQ post just in case.

Is your real name Isabel?

No. It's a pseudonym chosen in honor of the protagonist of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, one of my favorite novels. Isabel reminds me of me in a lot of ways. Yes, I realize I don't flatter myself in saying so.

Why the title "To My Parents, Ayn Rand, and God?"

It's an Oxford comma joke. I chose it because:

a)I am something of a grammar junkie. Several of my friends and I have elaborate comma-related in-jokes. No, really.

b)As with many self-identified libertarians, it all began with Ayn Rand.

c)Like many blogs, I expect this one to have quite a tiny readership for a while. Thus, it's as though I am writing for an audience consisting of my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.

I came across this blog when doing a Google search about a legal matter. I think I found something that answered my question. Thanks!

Hold your horses there! Yes, I do intend to use this blog as a forum to kick around legal ideas every once in a while; such writing can be a great way to sharpen my analytical skills. That said, laws can change rapidly, and different lawyers' interpretations of cases and statutes can differ. Therefore, please, please do not rely on this blog for legal advice.

If you are looking for legal help, I encourage you to contact the American Bar Association or a state or local bar association. These groups have referral services that can put you in touch with someone who can help you.

Can you help me with my divorce/child custody issue/death penalty appeal?

No. If you attempt to ask me to provide you with legal representation through comments to this blog, I will refuse. You are warned now. I'm probably not competent to help you with your particular issue. Also, this blog is not intended as advertising or solicitation.

Isabel, what are you doing blogging? It's dangerous, highly narcissistic, and unprofessional. You could sabotage your career!

I've laid out certain guidelines for myself regarding what to blog and what not to blog about. Things I will definitely never blog about include my sex life; similarly personal or intimate matters; and client disclosures covered by the attorney-client privilege and/or duty of confidentiality. I also intend to avoid complaining about co-workers, friends, or otherwise writing negatively about specific and identifiable people. Things I will blog about include mini op-eds on political topics, and thoughts on things I'm reading, watching, or listening to.

For what it's worth, I've met many bloggers who work in similar fields and have followed guidelines similar to those above. All seem to have been fine. Nonetheless, I realize that line drawing can be difficult. If you have reservations about the content of a particular post, please feel free to contact me directly about it. I'll be happy to consider deletion or revision. I realize my judgment is far from perfect, and I welcome advice on how to improve it.

I fear that people who criticize bloggers in this fashion overlook the benefits of writing online. As a quotation posted to my Facebook profile reads:

An employer may infer that the absence of an applicant's social networking profile shows 'probity, circumspection, good judgment and discretion,' but it could just as well be evidence of 'technological unsophistication, ignorance, estrangement from the community of one's peers, or an unhealthy absorption with one's own public persona.
-- Ian Byrnside, Note: Six Clicks of Separation: The Legal Ramifications of Employers Using Social Networking Sites to Research Applicants, 10 VAND. J. ENT. & TECH. L. 445 (2008).

Please be clear also that any views expressed here are my personal opinions alone, and are not necessarily those of past or present employers or other groups with which I've been affiliated.

Do you think it's a good idea to let employers know that you're libertarian?

I seriously question the research skills of any employer who can't figure out from my resume that I'm a libertarian. Let's just say that I've been "tagged" for a long time now.

Your writing is atrocious and your reasoning skills are terrible. Has it occurred to you that you're a total idiot? And that stupid people like you should just get off the Internet?

Regarding the first question, on a daily basis. Scratch that, actually: make that on an hourly basis.

I find, however, that sitting in my apartment marinating in my own stupidity isn't making me smarter. Likewise, I fail to see how I can improve my analytical skills by not using them. I've started this project hoping that engagement with other people will help show me where I'm right and wrong. So if I say something unbelievably stupid, please call me out on it.

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is one of my favorite books. In it, he explains at length the importance of free, open-ended, honest debate in combating error. If done right, blogging can be a good way to create that kind of debate.

While I have a relatively thick skin, I'm more likely to listen to you if your keep your criticisms civil. I don't entirely take kindly to ad hominem insults. Also, be warned that emotional rhetoric doesn't do much to sway me. The more calm and sane you are, the more likely I am to change my mind.

Atlas Shrugged: The Movie

Pnin and I saw Atlas Shrugged, Part One last night. As he says in that post, I expected either to love or hate it. Generally, the people directing the movie of a book one once loved either get it very, very right or very, very wrong.

This movie was a mix of very, very right and very, very wrong. Some observations:

1. The visuals are actually pretty well done. There are lots of lovely scenes of the Colorado countryside, the Taggart trains, and the beautiful hotels of wealthy capitalist New York that really get across the Objectivist "sense of life" that holds onto so many people even after one's leanings toward harder Objectivist doctrine have fallen away. I highly recommend watching this movie with the sound off and closed-captioning on once it comes to DVD. If Taylor Schilling did not have to talk at all, this movie really would be quite lovely.

2. Some of the actors are very good. Wesley Mouch is absolutely pitch perfect. James Taggart is cast younger and hotter here than I imagined him in the novel. He comes off as more immature ex-frat boy than evil villain. Oddly, this makes him more plausible than the reader imagines. Paul Larkin is a minor, minor character in the novel, but he's a little more complex and interesting here. One sees him actually struggling a little bit with the decision to take the ore mines from Rearden. He actually comes off as an innocent lamb with mixed intentions.

2. The actor who plays Rearden's very good. He understands the basics of what makes the character tick. On the other hand, he's a bit too alpha and not quite henpecked enough. One doesn't really see the same tension between happy professional life and miserable, neurotic family life that drives most of Rearden's character development in the novel.

3. Taylor Schilling, the actress who plays Dagny Taggart really is not at all the right fit for this movie. She nails a few scenes well -- e.g. the bracelet exchange with Lilian Rearden. But she just doesn't quite seem to grok what makes Dagny Taggart tick. In a few places, she tries to play the character as a "you go girl" feminist of the Hillary Clinton school. While Dagny Taggart is strong and ought to be a feminist icon, she's more....incandescent, in the sense that Virginia Woolf meant the word.... than that. So at moments when Dagny ought to be played as restrained, as in repressed pain, Schilling is icy and not altogether there. At others, e.g. the fire at Ellis Wyatt's house, she's too melodramatic by half.

4. Atlas is a big novel. Even with a three-part series, directors have to cut something. Though I have a few quibbles with this script, for the most part it's pretty good. It gives a feel for the story's important themes without bludgeoning viewers over the head.

5. Much has already been said about the decision to set the movie in the present day. I still have mixed feelings about that. As Pnin said in his review, the trick involving the oil price increase is silly and doesn't quite work. On the one hand, Rand's dialogue would feel less stilted and out of place in a costume drama. On the other, the incorporation of modern cable news and internet into the story allows the directors to communicate crucial world-building information quickly. That's valuable in a story of this length. Setting the story in the present day does give it added political salience, though it's not as though the political import of the story would've gone unnoticed had it been set in a 1930s dystopia.

6. Eddie Willers is black. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's not as though the novel ever mentions his race, and although it would've been a bit odd for the children of a 1920s railroad magnate to spend so much time with a friend of another race, it's not impossible. Rand herself was vocal in decrying racism as evil. On the other hand....there's something almost comical about a bunch of studio executives sitting around and saying, "How can we make a novel that has the sentence 'Money is the root of all good' in it more appealing to P.C. sensibilities?" and someone else crying out "Let's insert a token black character!" So that people will think that Objectivists are, like, cool with diversity!" It's not as though the pro-diversity crowd are suddenly going to cotton to Rand because there was a black guy in the movie. On the other other hand, as Pnin points out, moving the story forward to 2016 makes it less plausible that all of Taggart Transcontinental's senior people would be white.

7. Megan McArdle is right: the line about a "society where individual achievement is valued" fell flat. Other people in the Landmark E Street Cinema actually laughed aloud.

8. The "Cold Case File" style dossiers that pop up for the characters who've chosen to strike -- "Missing: Midas Mulligan" -- look slightly goofy in low-rent police procedurals. They look even sillier here. ACK. NO.

9. I was sad that the scene in which Dagny draws lots for the crew for the first run of the John Galt line was omitted. Not so much because that scene is crucial to the plot; it isn't. Rather, it's because one of the most unfortunate slanders against Rand - persisting since at least Whittaker Chambers's day -- is that she had no use for the honest, hard-working but intellectually limited workers. I've protested that this is at best overstated, but nobody else seems to want to take up the charge. It would've been nice to keep a couple of Rand's cameos of honest, hard-working blue collar types to show that she did notfavor sending large segments of the working class to the gas chambers.

10. The treatment of the discovery of the motor in this movie is odd. The original version has Hank and Dagny driving around the country when they decide to stop by an old factory and stumble upon the motor by chance. In the movie, Rearden has some inkling of what he's looking for in advance; he shows Dagny a blueprint of the motor in his office at one point. I can't understand the decision to make this change. It doesn't actually save time spent on exposition. And it makes the scene in the old Starnes factory less dramatic. Relatedly: Dagny is supposed to stumble on Hugh Akston running the diner by chance, rather than be sent there deliberately. Again, nothing is saved in the way of exposition, and something is actually lost in the way of drama.

**This post was not actually written in 1997, but rather in 2011. It's back-dated because it's difficult or impossible to do cut posts in Blogger, and I wanted to avoid spoilers for blog readers who might not have seen the movie.