“This author deserves to die on welfare”
She criticized society, yet chose to participate in it. Curious!
To borrow a Britishism: Are you daft, mate?
You want her to live out in the woods? That’s basically a death sentence, yeah?
Oh! That’s some good stuff. But then why didn’t you upload the reference, fam? Or at least add “/s”? ^^
I should’ve, I thought it was more obvious.
Poe’s Law, fam! ^^
She did technically die on welfare.
Thatsthejoke.jpeg.zip
tbh I thought that was Tilda Swinton
Pure poetry!
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.
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.
Read it when young as well, though I was luckily enough to read a quick bio of her. Escaped Communism, worked in Hollywood.
Felt that this was more a rant about trying to be passionate when stuck in a system, be it the horrible Communist system, or an uncaring bureaucratic one.
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.
Haha thanks. There were parts I enjoyed and I don’t get a chance to talk about them much without people thinking I’m crazy, or worse, in the cult.
Re: The super engineer. I also was lucky there that I read it before my technical education, now it would probably bug me. Still, the escapism of being the superman “I CAN do it all!” can be fun, but it is just that: escapist fantasy. Problems arise when people forget that.
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.
“slog” absolutely defines my experience. A really tough read.
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.
I got to that part, and it was at that point i shruged.
Slow down there, Atlas
Yeah I got that impression from the other comments. I might go back to just that part for the hell of it. Seems to be kind of a meme.
Beware, it’s a 3hr long monologue.
I’m the guy from above who said I liked the “quantity over quality” she had because it let me get lost. Even I skipped “the speech” lmfao. It just repeats the shitty, not subtle, ideas that have been repeated 100x by that point, and even within itself it repeats the same damn thing over and over and over.
I can see it being a nifty writing technique to basically have an academic paper micro-version of the whole work diogenically within your philosophy tilted book, but the problem is if that was the intent, it’s a paper that no one would publish because it sucks.
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
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.
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.
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.
Reading Atlas Shrugged is more like a hazing ritual conservatives inflict on each other.
I look back and my parents let me read this in high school without comment…like wtf mom and dad.
It’s an intelligence test. Either smart enough to smell the bullshit, or you need to be tutored on critical thinking.
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.
You mean the ones that can read anything longer than a National Enquirer piece. There must be dozens of them!
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)
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.
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.
Even if they had robots they would still need to be tooled ;)
This would have been a welcome addition to the book.
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.
Did you get to the part where Galt had a magical machine that generated power from static electricity that would power his entire society? See? All we need for an objectivist paradise is to forget about all that “science” nonsense and make it happen through willpower!
Nah I didn’t make it that far. I couldn’t take too much of that character. It doesn’t surprise me that it gets even more ridiculous though.
Competition is a great idea to these bozos until they realize that it’s possible for them to lose.
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.
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
Atlas Nodded
Illuminatus?
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?
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.
That explains a lot about Frank Gehry. That and a complete lack of aesthetic sensibilities.
Is that where Ted’s ego came from in HIMYM? I thought it was just Ted, but maybe all architects are horrible?
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.
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.
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.
In my experience the story doesn’t end with them being fired it ends with them yelling at me for not anticipating what they wanted, getting backcharges because why not, and years of fights inside and outside of work.
But hey why shouldn’t we all just do our work professionally and go home?
Generally firing an architect midway through a project means the project is dead, particularly since they control the permitting and if they are the arch of record they have their stamp on it. Wonder how that went.
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…
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.
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 selfless.
Rand was a monster
She literally said altruism was evil. I mean what the ever-living fuck?
Oh boy let me tell you about some horribly written books often touted as the words of God.
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.
Among other books in the same spirit. Collections of folk tales twisted into horrible cults.
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.
Yeah but Ayn Rand’s reputation would be ruined and she would never have started “Objectivisim”
“The question isn’t if I am allowed to do these things, but rather who is going to stop me?” - Ayn Rand, not even pretending she isn’t the villain.
That question probably hit different in 1955 than it did in 2005
There has always been a market for telling people what they want to hear.
It will probably tie back to mind control efforts fighting communism.
That title tho.
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.)
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.
None of the main characters feel like real people.
Apparently she did that on purpose. From Wikipedia:
She wanted her fiction to present the world “as it could be and should be”, rather than as it was. This approach led her to create highly stylized situations and characters.
I consider that to be a wishful revisionism on her part. The truth is shes just a bad writer.
The charactors in her first book “Anthem” are exactly as wooden and fake as the charactors in “Atlas shrugged.” She never developed any finesse or depth because real people aren’t as shallow as the imaginary people she dreamt about.
The Fountainhead too. Howard Roark was just a cardboard cutout with a bunch of notes pinned to it.
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.
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.
Chuck Tingle? You’re on Lemmy?
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.)
He used to advertise that ‘Hi Piers’ newsletter on TV commercials. How weird was that?
What the heck, really? I just remember him always mentioning it in his author’s notes at the end of his books (and for a while there I think there was also a 1-800-HI-PIERS phone number or something?). I remember as a kid wanting to subscribe to the newsletter, but I’m glad in retrospect I didn’t, yikes.
Really. It was bizarre to me as a non-fan that an author would go to that length. And yes, the 800-number was featured. I tried to find it on YouTube, but it appears to have gone down the memory hole. I think he only advertised on cable, but it still couldn’t have been cheap. Did that really translate into money for him?
EDIT: Also, it was just him sitting in a chair, talking. No fantasy scenes or even artwork.
I hate how much I like the idea of the Incarnations series. Dead like me is one of my favorite TV shows (reaper was OK too)
But I cannot go back to all of the rape
