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Thread: Does Ayn Rand piss you off?

  1. #16
    Registered User WyattGwyon's Avatar
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    Some people get pissed with Rand because of the writing: Atlas Shrugged is full of cardboard characters who all believe exactly the same thing and express it in the same way, all echoes of the same boring voice. And they all give long speeches. Droning on and on. The heroine of the tale goes through a series of these men, dumping each as a more philosophically perfect male emerges. Finally she finds the ultimate alpha male hero, who throws her on a sack in a railroad tunnel and gives her the best 20 seconds of sex she has ever had. (Most of Rand's sex scenes are rape fantasies.) And the cliches … geeezuss, the cliches.

    Yes/No says:
    "I have seen Rand's books in a left-wing bookstore under the heading "Know Thy Enemy" which I thought was ridiculous, but the bookstore probably needed to make some sales besides selling coffee."

    One bookstore in Seattle (at least) got it right: They put Atlas Shrugged under science fiction.

  2. #17
    Maybe YesNo's Avatar
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    I agree about the cardboard characters. The movie did seem like science fiction with that plane that went into some hidden territory screened by something so the government couldn't find it. I don't remember much of the plot.

    She may be a "selfishness guru" and she may have thought of herself like that for all I know. Again, just based on the movies, the message seems to be one of individualism as opposed to a Big Brother collective of individuals. So it would be a capitalism/communism dichotomy. Both capitalism and communism believe in selfish individuals. One side wants to let them do what they want and the other side wants to institutionalize them as consumers and producers.

  3. #18
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    What a lot of apologistic testes. Too far gone for help there or for discussion. Reminds me why I bggrd off.

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    Not a great writer, but she does seem to be always writing from an organized stance. She knows who she is and what she believes. Superior talent will always out, and eventually she must be forgotten as a minor writer of the era. She sure made some waves until then, for someone without the high talent, that is.

  5. #20
    Registered User hellsapoppin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by duke-one View Post
    Even without outside interference, many dead, and not to ever be forgotten quite a few dead under Stalin (as in millions). Too bad the Bolsheviks won. Rand grew up under the reds and of course that greatly affected her.



    It should come as no surprise that the Bolsheviks won since their efforts were financed by Republican Wall Street:


    https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/...volution-5.pdf



    Author Antony Sutton was a conservative.
    When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent

    ~ Isaac Asimov

  6. #21
    Registered User hellsapoppin's Avatar
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    Quote: "The heroine of the tale goes through a series of these men, dumping each as a more philosophically perfect male emerges."



    Rand was a fornicator who engaged in perverse sex with multiple young men. This drove her husband (a Catholic who would not or could not divorce) to drinking and ultimately took his life. Rand was also a political hypocrite in that while she condemned all forms of welfare, she was a welfare recipient who took government money under her married name so as to hide her political hypocrisy.
    When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent

    ~ Isaac Asimov

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    The quick answer is that people do not like because her insistence that if you do not strive to be your absolute best for yourself then you're just taking up space. This really rustles the collectivists jimmies.

    Personally I really enjoyed 'Atlas Shrugged' and consider it one of the best fictions written on self-determination and metapolitics. I can't think of any other contemporary authors that had a voice quite like hers. She may have in someway inspired a lot of the economic growth of the 1950s. The more her communist critics slander her the more I like her to be honest.

  8. #23
    Ecurb Ecurb's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by McBickle View Post
    The quick answer is that people do not like because her insistence that if you do not strive to be your absolute best for yourself then you're just taking up space. This really rustles the collectivists jimmies.

    Personally I really enjoyed 'Atlas Shrugged' and consider it one of the best fictions written on self-determination and metapolitics. I can't think of any other contemporary authors that had a voice quite like hers. She may have in someway inspired a lot of the economic growth of the 1950s. The more her communist critics slander her the more I like her to be honest.
    Hmm. Perhaps the simplistic, ill-mannered, jingoistic, ungrammatical and insulting opinions of Ayn's acolytes are even more annoying than Ayn is. I'm glad McBickle is confident that he knows why LitNetters don't like Rand. That absolves him from reading this thread and allows him to ignore the reasons stated here.

  9. #24
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    Yes. Yes she does.

    I first read The Fountainhead at an age when I was uncritical of texts and unknowledgeable of the ideological segregations within politics.

    What my young mind took away from it was a man creating things both beautiful and practical under adverse conditions. The circumstances of my upbringing enabled me to gloss over the emotionally perverse personal events which trouble me now, and I was just confused by the sabotage and hatred of the critic character (Lester?) for Howard Ruark.

    Second reading, somewhat older, though still confused and annoyed by rhetoric which seemed to suggest a respect for the greatness and engenuity of Man but also seemed to be happy to let people fall by the wayside in adversity and for all that potential to go to waste. This differs from my own perspective, likely due to living in Australia, where such an attitude wasn't popular even amongst the right wing, when I was growing up. The same seems not to be true in the US.

    I've loaned my copy to a friend, which means I'll never see it again, but perhaps it's time to reread it on the basis of another 45 years experience and education.

  10. #25
    Registered User hellsapoppin's Avatar
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    an extract from wiki which addresses Rand's criticism of Jesus:


    ''Ayn Rand
    Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand denounced the altruist recipe that Jesus passed down to his pupils, and with it the idea of vicarious redemption. She thought that not even Christians, who think of Jesus in the highest possible terms, shouldn't feel outraged by the notion of sacrificing virtue to vice.[24] Not surprisingly, her understanding of love as a consequence of the rational mind looking after embodied values attributes evil to the ideas Jesus is most famous for. Consider the following excerpt from a 1959 interview conducted by Mike Wallace:

    Wallace: Christ, every important moral leader in man's history, has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love in your mind immoral?
    Rand: It is immoral if it is a love placed above oneself. It is more than immoral, it's impossible. Because when you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately. That is to love people without any standard. To love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.[25]

    Notwithstanding disagreements over the value of faith and the existence of an afterlife, Rand saw Jesus' insistence on procuring the eternal happiness of individuals as confirmation of the moral confusion and inconsistency in which much of religious ethics operates, including Christian altruism.[26]

    In For the New Intellectual, Rand further accuses Judeo-Christian tenets such as the doctrine of original sin for their conspicuous immorality. "The evils for which they damn him [man] are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn. They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man." And proceeds to charge religious leaders with fostering a death cult: "No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body."[27]''



    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic...Jesus#Ayn_Rand




    There is a great irony to all this as right wingers proclaim themselves to be "moral Christians" who adhere to and promote Christian {sic} values of the highest morality. As everyone knows, Rand was a materialist, pervert, serial adulterer, welfare receiving spendthrift, and antichrist.
    When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent

    ~ Isaac Asimov

  11. #26
    Registered User WyattGwyon's Avatar
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    I heard summaries of the Black Panther movie on NPR a couple days ago. It amused me to find that its setting in a hidden utopia powered by an inexhaustible energy source mirrors the capitalist utopia of Rand's Atlas Shrugged, except hers was in Colorado, not Africa.

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