Submitted 1 year ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/02f5d8e0-94ed-4c71-9565-e4c1f1c5f893.jpeg
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.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker
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?”
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.
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.
TIL. I always thought that only referred to the ‘Wizard Of Oz.’
“Heterosexuality isn’t normal, it’s just common.”
Another great Parker quote.
Now the 3rd song in the musical from the IT Crowd’s “Work Outing” episode makes sense.
“This author deserves to die on welfare”
She did technically die on welfare.
Thatsthejoke.jpeg.zip
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.”
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.
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.
That already happened and continues to happen. Because corporations bribe the government to allow it. They call it lobbying. And you know this. The feigned ignorance is comical. Why do ISPs own the rights to public telephone poles and prevent municipal internet? Because people like you gave the ISPs those rights.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can agree with some principles of a work and reject others. What parts of her philosophy do you find to be lunacy?
That’s not a grain of truth…it’s an environmental protection.
That’s almost the most ironic Aryan Rand post you could make.
Yea, it’s a dump truck full of sand. Cities can’t build municipal fiber internet because spectrum owns the fucking pole. The assertion that this is an “environmental protection” is so insulting that my comment would be deleted if I told you what I really think about you.
Sure. Try it. Try making a railroad without eminent domain.
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.
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.
It speaks against a system where political favour dictates your success as a producer over your ability to compete. If you feel land owners and intellectual property owners are gate keepers in a society where your can have your own ideas and buy your own property I don’t know what to say.
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 bear hands…
I thought it was very funny. I chortled all the way through. a perfect 7/10.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does not spark joy. Don’t let it take up your precious real estate. Out it goes.
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.
The audiobook isn’t so bad. It’s certainly 64hrs of audio… And took me 3 months.
I like to fall asleep listening to audiobooks, except they have to be kinda dull otherwise I get actually invested. You may have just picked my next one!
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.
I remember not picking up another book for some time after finishing it. I wanted to hang onto it as long as I could. It's epic.
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.
You mean the ones that can read anything longer than a National Enquirer piece. There must be dozens of them!
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
“slog” absolutely defines my experience. A really tough read.
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.
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.)
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.)
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
He used to advertise that ‘Hi Piers’ newsletter on TV commercials. How weird was that?
Why do authors keep inserting their kinks into books?
Oh… I suggest you don’t read my books when they come out.
Chuck Tingle? You’re on Lemmy?
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.
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 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.
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
Pure poetry!
tbh I thought that was Tilda Swinton
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…
That title tho.
thantik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I like science fiction too!
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I just think it’s fascinating that racists can write. Like, good for them.