What more need be said about it?
What more need be said about it?
175 comments
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Personally I love reading novels of worlds that have no basis in reality. I also love authors that repeat themselves over and over because I have memory issues and can't remember the last sentence I've read.
Oh, and I also love reading novels of worlds that have no basis in reality.
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I don’t know. She sucks you in with the atrocious writing and two dimensional characters who are all just stand-ins for an opinionated author, but she really seals the deal with the fetishization of rape culture and how it inexorably ties in with hyper-capitalist American culture. It’s really the whole package.
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I just think it's fascinating that racists can write. Like, good for them.
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"This book is a testament to how even the most stupid among us can write a fully fledged book with words, chapters, and everything." ~@tea
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I struggle to see how anyone could have written the Turner Diaries and not have either been trolling or gotten some serious "Are we the baddies?" Energy in the process....
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Yeah, honestly, I don’t mind reading novels that argue points I disagree with, but the repetitiveness is unbelievable. One of the reasons John Galt’s 60 page speech is so tedious is that all of the points he makes in it had already been made two or three times before by other characters.
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I like science fiction too!
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Since everyone else is talking about Ayn, let me tell you about Dorothy Parker.
You know that movie, "A Star Is Born?" She wrote the original version. She was a famous writer, known for her devastating insults. She was also an early Anti-Fascist and supporter of Martin Luther King, JR.
Totally underappreciated and far more deserving of fame than Ms. Rand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker
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And one of the greatest wits of American history. She deserves to be up there with Twain.
If nothing else, she should be remembered for all time for coming up with the phrase "what fresh hell is this?"
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If nothing else, she should be remembered for all time for coming up with the phrase “what fresh hell is this?”
Well there you go, I know nothing else about her and she’s already my new favourite person.
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Also famously an early lgbt ally. Before the term gay existed in the 20s and 30s the polite way of asking if a man was homosexual was if they were a friend of Dorothy.
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TIL. I always thought that only referred to the 'Wizard Of Oz.'
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"Heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common."
Another great Parker quote.
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Now the 3rd song in the musical from the IT Crowd's "Work Outing" episode makes sense.
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I'm the person who basically never throws a book away (I did once, but I bought a replacement after the old version literally broke apart in several places). But I would light a chimney with "Atlas shrugged", if only to prevent it from falling in gullible hands.
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Our high school literature teacher gave the class each a copy of Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead as a graduation gift. This was before I knew anything about these books, but once I figured it out it explained a lot about her. Nice for the most part, overdramatic and cheap at times, mostly just went to work or the casino, and smoked like a chimney.
Never read those books though I might still have them somewhere, I'm bad at throwing out gifts.
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It does not spark joy. Don't let it take up your precious real estate. Out it goes.
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I still cannot believe a novel this terrible inspired a successful movement that was thoroughly endorsed by presidents.
If I had a time machine I would go back in time and publish it, but make sure that it only had a limited release. Never got super big just big enough so that some people had heard of it, and then I would sue Ayn Rand when she published her version. Win easily and announce that I wrote it as a parody, mocking people who think that being overly self reliant and rejecting community is a good way to live, for they are like house cats.. overly dependent on others yet thoroughly convinced of their own independence. "As Ms. Rand demonstrated by stealing my book and claiming it as her own."
Then I'd put a time capsule with the fucking source code to Bioshock 1, 2, and Infinite somewhere to preserve those games in the timeline.
The damage that book has done to this world...
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Win easily and announce that I wrote it as a parody, mocking people
Then watch it backfire horribly. Conservatives (including those who call themselves libertarian) are blind to satire. You might remember that the_donald was satirical at the start. So was the game Monopoly.
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Really elaborate plan that will probably end up failing because the book, and its author, only got big because it gave greedy bastards an excuse to be so unashamedly greedy. If not this trash then another work of trash.
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Ayn Rand did more than write a book, she actually started a movement and even had a fling with L. Ron Hubbard to learn how to properly cult...
She never believed in scientology and thought L. Ron was a great man for running such a successful con.
She also hated religion in general, for she saw it as a form of collective bargaining and hated it for encouraging people to not be selflish.
Rand was a monster
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There has always been a market for telling people what they want to hear.
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Oh boy let me tell you about some horribly written books often touted as the words of God.
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If you're talking about the Bible. Religious texts typically require historians and theologians to figure out the meaning of.. lots of hard to understand passages requiring a context not easily understood in the modern age.
It's not like Ayn Rand which was an incomprehensible mess from its inception.
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It will probably tie back to mind control efforts fighting communism.
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Back when I was in junior high in the early 1980s, I found a copy of Atlas Shrugged on my father's bookshelf, and started reading it. I can't remember how far I got into it, but I do remember thinking it was just awful in just about every way: story, writing, pacing, everything.
I asked Dad about it, "Oh, that. It's terrible, isn't it?" A friend had given it to him. Neither one of us finished reading it and after that it ended up at a book reseller.
On the plus side, he'd gone through his books and gave me James Clavell's Shogun to read, which was an awesome novel.-
I tried reading it twice and didn't finish either time.
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The only other book I struggled with was Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The travel-log sections were entertaining, and the relationship with his son was interesting, but the discussions on the nature of quality were completely lost on me.
I did get through Zen on the second attempt because I thought it was worth it. I saw no value in Atlas Shrugged at all.
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The audiobook isn't so bad. It's certainly 64hrs of audio... And took me 3 months.
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That's how I ingested it. I did it on work related cross country drives at 1.3x speed. It was... underwhelming and made me ask "What the hell is this?" and "She can't seriously see the world like this, right?" many, many times.
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Was your father an English teacher? That's how I ended up reading those books around that age. Add some Hesse and the Gulag Archipelago and we may be related.
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Dad had an interesting career. Started as an office clerk for a railway with only high school education. Then he got into using an IBM 650 (IIRC) for doing freight rate calculations. How he managed that transition, I have no idea. He didn't care for being cooped up all day flipping switches, dealing with punch cards and tapes.
He switched to marketing and got on there very well and retired after 37 years as a regional director.
He always has a book on the go, even now at 83. He has an eclectic pile of them that he kept, from Zane Grey to an early history of the Civil War written around 1870.
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Shogun is a good one. My favourite book for a long time, and it currently sits on my bedside table for a second read. I’m just amazed that you mentioned it.
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I remember not picking up another book for some time after finishing Shogun. I wanted to hang onto it as long as I could. It's epic.
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Reading Atlas Shrugged is more like a hazing ritual conservatives inflict on each other.
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I look back and my parents let me read this in high school without comment...like wtf mom and dad.
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It’s an intelligence test. Either smart enough to smell the bullshit, or you need to be tutored on critical thinking.
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You mean the ones that can read anything longer than a National Enquirer piece. There must be dozens of them!
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I dunno, when I was in high school there were a number of Ayn Rand essay contests with prize money.
I won’t say they’re good books but I did make good money from reading them.
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I remember reading The Foundtainhead and, when I finished I realized what a lousy, shitty philosopher Ayn Rand was.
And that all my architect friends had terrible egos.
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Is that where Ted's ego came from in HIMYM? I thought it was just Ted, but maybe all architects are horrible?
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That's my experience, I framed houses for a few years after college and the architects thought they were gifts from God. Engineers were mostly cool, though. Most of them would understand "Your design is dumb and here's why. We're gonna have to change it" and they'd usually learn from it.
My best day on a job site was watching the architect wearing zero safety gear walk right into a temporary support for a wall. It was fantastic.
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That explains a lot about Frank Gehry. That and a complete lack of aesthetic sensibilities.
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And that all my architect friends had terrible egos.
Not as bad as engineers but in my experience yes. Which is fine, it would be nice to have a few unique buildings to look at.
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Very early on in my career in consulting engineering, I had an architect tee-off on me for changing the ceiling heights of the office space she'd designed.
I'm electrical, all I was concerned with was circuiting her lights, that was it. I had documentation showing that I'd worked off of exactly the same ceiling heights she had sent me. Heights that she'd apparently changed somewhere along the line without informing the client, who was an international conglomerate, and notoriously picky to work for.
That could have blown over, had she not berated me over email while CCing the client, my management and just about anyone else involved with the project. I made sure to "reply all" showing where the change had happened. She was replaced on the project the following week.
After that I stuck to industrial projects, where the buildings were non-descript concrete and steel boxes with no architectural involvement.
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100% 👍👍👍 the BBC did a great docu-series on Raynd. If you're wondering what it is that you can't quite put your finger on about her work, it's that she's utterly miserable. A person whose geat intellect can't even make them joyful is a person whose intellect has turned against them.
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In addition to her just being a miserable person, her actual composition is just awful. The following quote is a sentence:
“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only traveller you choose to share your journey and must be traveller going on their own power in the same direction.”
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I have to be in the minority of sane people who enjoyed this book.
To be fair, I had no context and read the first 10 pages assuming it was satire. The rest of the experience was bizarre. In the first chapter the main character ignores the advice of the train employees and orders the train to run despite the signal being red. It's touted as taking responsibility when none else would. Utterly insane to me that someone who had been out of the area for decades, making management level decisions, would decide they know better than the worker on the ground who does the job daily. The contempt and arrogance leading to destruction - a great critique of management structure and survivor bias. How is it not satire?
Through the looking glass with a self important free capitalist narcissist, with almost no experience of the world and commerce outside their bubble, self hating tirade against perceived inability. Fascinating stuff
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I read 'The Fountainhead.' It was enjoyable the same way a book about talking bears who fly magical ponies would be fun, a fantasy not connected to actual human life.
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Started reading Atlas a couple of months ago and put it aside after a third or so. I am used to reading "conventionally boring" stuff but this was such a slog. Super sterile, the characters are stereotypical, the message Rand wants to bring across seems awfully clear very early on. It may be the historical context that makes it more interesting, I didn't see it, though. Just couldn't do it.
Reading your comments on this thread is a relief, maybe there is nothing wrong with me after all.
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Just wait till you get to the last third, where the ideas that weren't subtly telegraphed in the first two thirds will be even less subtly shouted in a hundred page long speach.
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I was lucky enough to read it young before I knew it was "a thing".
I loved the stream punky Sci fi stuff (yes I loved bioschock when it came out).
I enjoyed the rugged individualism stuff, but like, in the same way I enjoy James Bond committing extra judicial killings, Indiana Jones, cheesy ghost movies , or Hell in a Cell.
I was really confused when I found out it's got a cult. I just enjoyed my nifty train story.
The writing is dry, voluminous but not really good. I personally enjoyed getting lost in that much volume, but that's not going to be everyone. The philosophy stuff isn't bad or wrong within it's own universe, it's just not really applicable to real life. Basing a world view on it is like reading/watching the silo series and thinking that's how you should live in present day, rules about going outside and all. The conclusion isn't totally wrong, but the premise its valid under is so narrow it's useless, and that's how it got it's cult.
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Yeah I don't know, I remember something about extra super steel in the beginning, where it was kind of like "assertive entrepreneur makes eggheads do the impossible". That is just not how anything in engineering works at all. Was kind of a turn-off for me also.
But I am glad that this stuff made it into a cool train story for you. I like your sentiment.
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"slog" absolutely defines my experience. A really tough read.
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No no...at least get to the rapey bit...then you can solidify your hatred of that wretched wind bag in granite...its just before the speech that takes like 100 pages.
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There's at least a grain of truth in that book. Try starting a business or producing something.
Look at domestic attempts to mine lithium or building semiconductor plants. Try building anything here.
“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed.”
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I work in municipal development. You want to open a new business, build a house, or develop land in my city, you need my signature to do it.
I'm one of those officious pricks. I'm "the man" holding people down.
Because if I don't then all these rich fucks pave over everything, flood their neighbor's land, block traffic, poison their customers, and sell houses that'll collapse 10 minutes after The warranty expires.
So yeah, people have to get our permission to do things that affect the community.
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Where I live approval on average takes a year or more. Permits alone can cost like 50k for a house. All of those things you've mentioned would result in court cases and awards ..
Honestly even residential houses that are to code are sort of trash aren't they? Like laminated wood chips and saw dust more and more every year.
How many other approvals are required above you to build? How long and at what cost ? Mostly curious. Here its pretty bad IMO. Here being Canada.
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I am an engineer. I love making things. I work in a heavily regulated industry (Med device), and it is a huge pain in the ass. I have to fill out obscene amounts of paperwork for everything I do. I live in the woods with a well and a septic system. I am hoping to disconnect from the electric grid in a few years.
I bought into rugged individualism when I was younger, but I have come to realize it is a farce. I am really glad there is the structure and oversight for these things that can harm people. Complex systems require diverse areas of expertise and multiple layers of oversight and protection.
The sentiment that it is some great burden to "obtain permission from men who do nothing" is a blatant strawman for what the processes actually are.
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Yes the world would be a better place if people looking to profit in the world didn't have to ensure that their products were safe, regulated, and taxed appropriately. Business owners should just be able to make their own rules.
Nah man I'd say that shit it stupid too. It's difficult to build a lithium mine in the United States for pretty good reasons, especially surrounding regulation and safety.
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Australia has some of the tightest safety regulations and strongest unions on the planet. We are opening lithium mines left right and centre.
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It's cheaper to mine lithium in other countries because the labor is cheaper, the labor is cheaper because we live in a country with a more advanced economy, that same economy became more advanced under more stringent regulations. Who gives a shit if they don't mine lithium here when we designed the machines that mine lithium all over the world. There's a reason people are beating down the doors to come here.
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Like most things it's balance .. No one wants the ecological damage of the 60s again. I'd say the vast majority of the things people are buying are imported from less regulated markets.. Lead in the kids toys am I right? If things are produced here at least you can take those companies to court when they do harm.
Good reasons being ? I've seen projects cancelled due to a few arrow heads and tool parts being found .. Massive overruns due to turtle eggs. Private companies just don't build here if they can avoid it. Building and producing things is never perfectly safe and will always cause some ecological damage. The things we consume are actually built overseas in the most destructive and unregulated way possible mostly .. Are they not?
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That's how you trick the gullible, start with a bit of truth they can understand and then jump off the deep end into lunacy.
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The same can be said about basically anything, that's why you have a brain to evaluate what parts are grounded in the truth and what is a conclusion drawn from truth that serves the specific needs of whoever is spinning the narrative.
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I mean, why SHOULDN'T I be able to expose people and the environment to harmful conditions in order to maximize profit?
I'm allowed to do that in other countries, and I can also pay those slaves in beans so that I can make even more money.
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Some environmental impact is unavoidable. I think people are maybe a bit more aware and if I knew a company was being unnecessarily wreckless I'd personally not give them a dime. Also this is what lawsuits are for. These companies should be sued into nonexistence.
Why are domestic companies forced to compete on an uneven playing field like that? Why are companies able to just go abroad and import at very favourable rates. That's profoundly unfair .. But have you thought about what would happen to the cost of goods if there was an equal playing field? All the worst things are still done they just happen elsewhere.
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Sure. Try it. Try making a railroad without eminent domain.
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Eniment domain doesn't appear to be the problem here lmao
It's more like
Try making a railroad when the industry has been captured by regulations written by the big players whose purpose is to erect barriers to entry for any new railroad companies that might want to start up, and reduce costs by reducing safety. Also, you need angel investors to give you billions and anyone with the means to do that is already in bed with the big boys so they're not going to give you shit.
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The protagonist being in a privileged position due to government seisuze of private property is certainly an excellent point. I just feel the state exercising power in the other direction, against productive ventures instead of property owners, may be a little too in vogue these days.
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I've read all of Rand and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But not for the right reasons.
Coming from a background myself of community art > touring performance artist > clown/circus school > comedy and improv... I found things like "I'ma write a book where a character delivers a speech on capitalism longer than the communist manifesto" to be quite funny.
The way people spoke to each other, the ridiculous melodrama from the perspective of a soy bean stuck on a train, a community made from pure gold inside a hologram inside a volcano, how people can only have sex if they bite each other, the amazing lazzi (sketch) of the rich man accidentally giving a homeless man $100 bill instead of $1 and the homeless man not caring because it was an accident, the guy putting out a steel furnace in meltdown while naked with his bare hands...
I thought it was very funny. I chortled all the way through. a perfect 7/10.
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It seems to me this passage speaks against the bankers, intellectual property owners, monopolists, land owners and the like. All gate keepers of resources.
Perhaps Atlas is actually someone else than Rand thought.
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Eh, it wasn't bad as a revenge fantasy. You might like it if you enjoy thinking about how all the people who don't appreciate you would be screwed if you just left. The political philosophy being proposed won't be too offensive if you already lean libertarian.
My main objection to the book (other than the infamous speech, which I admit I couldn't read all the way through) is that it's a sort of morality play with with exaggerated good and bad and no shades of gray, but it keeps denying this and insisting that the real world really is that black and white. The reader ought to take it with more than a little pinch of salt.
Oh, and that Ayn Rand's self-insert has a BDSM fetish I really would have preferred not to know about. (Why do authors keep inserting their kinks into books? I'm looking at you, Robert Jordan. And especially at you, Piers Anthony.)
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Ugh, Piers Anthony. I remember absolutely LOVING Piers Anthony’s books as a kid; I went back a while back to reread them as an adult (and read the ones I hadn’t read before) and good god, but I could not do it. Even beyond the terrible puns (not as fun when you’re not like ten years old) and the really regressive ideas of gender roles, after the third book with a young teen girl seducing a virtuous middle-aged man because he was the only one who truly loved her, I was just staring at my old books in horror.
(A few years back someone linked me to his Hi Piers newsletter, which moved to the Internet a while back. I got as far as seeing him talking about the sexual attractiveness of girls at menarche - their first period, which can be as young as 9 - and I had to stop because of the full-body shudders.)
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My main objection i similar to our but broader in scope. None of the main characters feel like real people. They are Platonic Ideals of Ayn Rand's fantasy lifestyle, full stop
That always annoys the shit out of me when not one well. It can be done well, but it takes a significantly better author.
I think author-kinks are a bit misrepresented (especially with Jordan, who I read more as commentary on power dynamics) but the point is not invalid at all.
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Why do authors keep inserting their kinks into books?
Oh... I suggest you don't read my books when they come out. They're romance novels entirely focused on my kinks.
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Chuck Tingle? You're on Lemmy?
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You might like it if you enjoy thinking about how all the people who don’t appreciate you would be screwed if you just left.
I see you have read my dream journal.
You really can't win. If you people are dependent on you it means more work if/when you take time off. If people don't need you, they don't need you and this world is just that colder.
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The amount of people with both the patience to read it and the inability to tell that it is describing a fantasy land with magic and wizards is worrying.
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So what's up with this novel? Can't find anything obvious about it - only that it's mighty popular among conservatives (which is usually a red flag)
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There are plenty of articles going into great detail- here is one- but essentially it is a showcase for Rand's moronic and hateful Objectivist philosophy and it has such ludicrous ideas in it as suggesting railroads would do great if it wasn't for the pesky government getting in their way and after society collapses, the brilliant industrialists will all live in paradise just as soon as we find a way to create electricity by violating the laws of physics.
For those who are already familiar, this cartoon summarizes the problem with Atlas Shrugged quite succinctly.
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I wanted to read this book so I could see what the fuss was all about. I’ve never made it 80% of the way through any other book and then intentionally stopped reading it. Everything about the way it is written is so bad. The characters are all made of cardboard. The situations that arise make no sense. Pretty much everything about the book makes no sense and is just to drive the story towards whatever idiotic conclusion Rand wanted.
When John Galt finally appeared and I realized he was just three incoherent speeches in a trench coat and not an actual attempt at writing a character, I basically abandoned finishing the book in disgust.
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Competition is a great idea to these bozos until they realize that it's possible for them to lose.
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Even if they had robots they would still need to be tooled ;)
This would have been a welcome addition to the book.
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It's just one of those novels that many bookish 17-19 years have read. I think it is worth reading in the sense that I think reading the Bible is worth reading. It is popular enough that you sorta have to have some familiarity with it. Popular because it is popular at this point.
Basic setting is (I am going to steel man it) the world is falling apart from communism and the US is pretty much the last functional country. However instead of slowly drifting down like everyone expects suddenly the US is declining much faster. The reason is all the Jeff Bezoses are going on strike secretly.
The plot follows an heiress to a train company as she tries to hold things together and has an affair with one of her clients.
Eventually everything falls apart and the Jeff Bezoses launch a plan to rebuild but with a new rule that they are running everything.
The end.
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what book would be the opposite of AS
edit: I guessed grapes of wrath, which was the pick of someone on a quora post on the topic - https://www.quora.com/What-book-might-be-considered-to-be-the-opposite-of-Ayn-Rand-author-s-Atlas-Shrugged
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Atlas Nodded
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?
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Illuminatus?
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Pure poetry!
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tbh I thought that was Tilda Swinton
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That title tho.
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I tried reading Atlas Shrugged. I had a friend that is a die-hard conservative. Neither of us had read Atlas Shrugged, but he referenced it all the time. I told him I'd read Atlas Shrugged with him if he read The Jungle when we were finished. Within a single chapter we both decided the book was trash and we didn't read it. Unfortunately that absolved him of his promise to read The Jungle and a learning opportunity was thwarted by Ayn Rand's inability to write a comprehensible novel.
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I am yet to read one actual criticism of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (or any of her other books) that’s about the content itself.
I bet most of you losers have not read any of it and just rely on what others have said…
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Calling people losers before they even respond to you is not a good way to get them to give you the information you want.
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175 comments