a few days ago, I went to an mom and pop discount/used bookstore, I haven’t been in years but I thought maybe i’d happen across some decent theory to read.
Nothing, absolutely nothing remotely left of obama/neolib dems and tons of conservative grifter books. and worst of all, probably, i’m not kidding, 28 copies of atlas shrugged and other ayn rand books on the shelf and another box of them near the counter.
Idk if the store was owned by a libertarian or if one just donated a small truckload of ayn rand books but I was just like “jesus christ.”
Is not even a well written or entertaining book…like read Hitchhiker’s or something
Is there anything stopping us from requesting millions of copies of those awful books to make the Ayn Rand Institute lose money?
If you’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, fucking don’t, it’s the worst dogshit
Read this hostile chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis instead. It’s total libshit but still manages to convey just how awful the book is.
Oh man, I thought at first that each chapter was being summed up in a short pithy jab, then I realized that each one of those was actually a hyperlink to a full article on the passage. Night mode making hyperlinks hard to see again.
Edit: read through chapter 2, and it’s pretty good. A bit lib with the Gates praise at one point and some defence of intellectual property law as “promoting innovation”, but at least it takes a big old dump on Rand.
Also, my god. Ayn. Who do you think the trains exist for? Who do you think the steel is poured for? Do you think these industrialists do it because it’s fun? You stupid motherfucker.
Depending on the chapter summary it can get very lib, ie “communism doesn’t work because x” bad, very New Deal fetishism type liberalism
I just remember it quite fondly because me binging it was a pretty significant marker in my political development ~2014-15, it was quite refreshing to revisit Atlas Shrugged with a much more critical eye when I had read it in earnest as a teenage libertarian in 2007. Literally the only way anyone can think it’s a good novel - not even in an ideological sense, but a literary one - is to go into it with a preconceived bias in mind.
Thought for a second you were referring to the Chapter by Chapter youtube channel that is rad as fuck
Thing is Atlas Shrugged is such a piece of garbage I’m unsure even the most clever 11-minute takedown can do it justice
EDIT: And yes, it’s a very good “in a nutshell” takedown of the book. But it’s still really important to comprehend and understand some of the deepest hatreds at the base of Rand’s ideology, those being: that all who do the slightest degree of Wrongthink deserve death (the Midnight Train to Death); that all the ultimate villains are secretly motivated by death drive to bring down the “productive people” (embodied by James Taggart and his fate); and that all non-Ubermenschen don’t deserve salvation no matter how loyal or hardworking they might be (embodied by Eddie Willers and his fate, and how Dagny’s character arc is quite literally to view common people as objects rather than human beings); all with the specific excerpts from the text and excerpts from Ayn Rand’s own (hilarious) life.
wait no, this isn’t true.
im pretty sure she liked trains.
Counterpoint: Trains
A dismissive tweet from a dismissable person. All that is needed to prove it wrong is a little something I threw together years ago
