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Atlas Shrugged: Why is this so bad?
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Traditionally, I prefer latina women with impressive hindquarters, but hating Ayn Rand is a close second.
These left me underwhelmed.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
"The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. "To be" means "to be in competition" (SL 81)."
That seems like exactly something Ayn Rand would agree with.
Can't be any more harmful than the family that is raising their kid without gender.
You'd be similarly surprised that Jews were disproportionately involved in socialist movements in the countries they were in. Hell, Israel still views it's communes the same way Palin views villages in Bumfuck, Alabama.
I have heard that modern-day kibbutzim are basically capitalist businesses, though.
Miguel de Unamuno, a spanish author and philosopher, said:
"The least you read, the more harm is done by what is read."
Beware those who have only read one book.
McSweeney's did an ironic article about a family raising their kid without gender, based on their love of a really popular but badly-written polemic?
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It turns out Hunt For Red October isn't that easy to follow.
You're muckin' with a G!
No, that was is real. There was another thread on it around here somewhere.
I've read both Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead.
Basically, they read to me like romance novels with an idealized version of herself as the Female Protagonist who is wooed by Handsome Geniuses instead of Fabio-esque Adonis Dudes.
That's what I'm talking about. The group with the scripture appointing an aristocracy is historically socialist, while the group founded by a guy who supposedly hated aristocracies seems to always set up an aristocracy of one sort or another.
Kibbutzim always acted like businesses because businesses are the only thing on that scale in a trade economy, with the marked difference that everyone own and works for the company. They've been making changes over the past decade, though, as they're currently not much more viable that Palin's villages.
In the land of truth my friend the man with one fact is king.
Or he gets a show on fox.
What.
You're muckin' with a G!
I read it not too long ago fully expecting to hate it. It was long, not amazingly written, but I liked it quite a bit. It had some great ideas, a cool mystery and sci-fi theme going on, and the events work precisely because of the world much of the book paints - it's certainly not our own nor would all those ideals stand up in current society. But they work in the world she paints, which is why this is a work of fiction. I think it could do for a remake and have it chopped to 1/2 or even 1/3 of it's size, but it's worth reading, especially if you're on the "I hate it" side and you've never actually read it - which it sounds like a lot of you haven't.
Again, some of the responses are from the first 5 pages of the thread, and I figure since we're on page 85 now that these have probably been covered - or maybe not, considering how few folks here A) liked it and B) remembered what actually happened.
1) Galt did not steal the motor. He was part of R&D, and worked on it, building a prototype. At the same time new owners took over, and instituted their policy of compensation going to need and not ability. Some people here said that's not bad, but the book precisely explains what happens under this plan - people not working, lying about their needs to get more pay (having more children to get more cash), while the honest suffer. Galt saw this would happen, and quit. He never took the motor with him, which is why Dagny could find it at the abandoned factory. He left it there as it was their property, it's just no one had realized what exactly they were sitting on. What he took was his own invention, and idea - he never stole anything physical.
2) The tunnel incident was not in any way caused by Galt or his group. It was caused by poor maintenance and people afraid of losing their job or being punished by going against their superiors - hence why they tried to contact who was in charge. No one wanted to take responsibility or make an action. It's that apathy that the book is against.
2a) Galt himself was non-violent, the only thing that could be considered terrorism was the Swedish dude sinking ships and blowing up buildings. It was specifically mentioned in the book that Galt did not approve of these tactics. Furthermore, he rescued the people from the ships before they were sunk, and made sure the factories that would produce the Rearden medal from the stolen formula were emptied before he leveled them.
3) The rich and elite were certainly not above everyone else. In fact the bulk of the book is decrying the corrupt rich, the people in Washington screwing everyone else over to maintain their stature of being elite. Galt, Rearden, and Dagny never even liked being associated with those people - again what was stressed in the book was the importance of their minds, never their money, the latter was just a product of the former. The real villains in the book (corrupt bureaucrats) all had money, that wasn't the point. Hell, the working class, the poorer laborers were all held to higher esteem.
I don't like the people on the far right who use this book as a basis for life, but I find equally repugnant the people who claim this book is pure trash, and use examples that are flat out wrong to do so. There is a middle ground (ironically there isn't much of one in the book) with regards to how to view the book. For those who have read it, you can certainly not like it, and express that, just don't use lies to do so. For those who take the stance against it, and haven't read it, there's so much misinformation of what actually happens in the book out there you can't form a valid opinion about it.
I guess what I'm saying is, read it for yourself, and then decide where you stand. Most of the people in the media, or republicans, or teabaggers, should absolutely not be taken as evidence of the ideals the book promotes, because many break it everyday by being religious and/or corrupt/dishonest.
You're muckin' with a G!
It's a reference to a character in a political comedy who abuses the idea that Archsorcerer describes.
All of them, really.
In the land of truth, the man with one fact is no better than anybody else.
You're muckin' with a G!
The theft of intellectual property (in this case, the motor that he created for his employers) is still theft, even if no physical example of the IP was stolen in the process. If you want to argue that theft only applies to physical artifacts, that's the topic of an entirely separate thread.
Who?
I've seen people claiming that this is a silly strawman of a corporation, along the same lines as global warming deniers who insist that global warming is a hoax that is promoted by the all powerful multi-billion dollar global warming industry. But I haven't actually heard anyone insist that this would be a good plan to implement.
So Galt's Gulch is basically an early version of the A-Team, where you can fire thousands of rounds and have cars flip over in the air but no one ever actually dies.
Because if there's one valid criticism of the commies, it's the fact that the commies control all of the money.
I haven't seen anyone in this thread arguing that the rich and elite in the book are above everyone else. At least, not all of them.
And that argument would be meaningless as a defense of Ayn Rand, who most certainly did believe that the theft of ideas is a very serious crime indeed.
Does it matter? Namrok is upset that somebody indirectly poked fun at Rand, so his rejoinder is a derailing 'oh yeah? well here's this liberal family in real life that is JUST AS BAD because they raised their kid without gender or something', and we're supposed to divert the whole thread arguing about that instead of making fun of Atlas Shrugged.
And anyway, the McSweeney's isn't really making fun of Rand directly. It's about a fictional parent pretending that their child's bratty behavior is not merely brattiness, but a noble expression of Objectivism.
Lots of people commenting here have already done so, and that's why they're criticizing it. It's kind of a silly-goose move to say that you haven't read more than a single page of comments, but you're sure that everybody is just being ignorant extremists (unlike you: you're the Golden Mean) and if they only read it they'd have a different view.
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It's from the first few pages, I've probably missed a whole bunch of discussion so I apologize if I'm bringing up old arguments.
Again, it's people going off of secondhand knowledge coming from some very biased and possibly misinformed sources.
It was his idea, funded by the company. And he never took anything away from the company. His research, the motor, everything he developed he left when he quit. That's how Dagny found the stuff. No one at the company acted on it, and since he thought it up, of course he can take that knowledge and make something for private use out of it. I'm a graphic designer, if I come up with a swank and easy new way to make buttons for the web, and I quit, you're telling me I can never use the same methods? That's wrong, my company would have my files, notes and assets, but I'd still know the process and can use it on my personal website. Same thing here, besides the company never patented the motor he built while employed, and even if they did, again, that company never defended patents which they are required to do, or lose the rights to it. The company went under so it's moot.
Well, it certainly is the type of thing that regardless of opinion towards political philosophy would have fit better in a coherent collection of essays, not a smattering of several rambling and questionably-writ tomes.
In many ways, Rand's stuff is like the Bible: too long, often contradictory, and nebulous in its directive. So that just means, like the Bible, douchebags try to monopolize interpretation and ignore/emphasize as they see fit.
No, you can't. At least not usually. What you make belongs to the company in 95% of employment contracts. You could make buttons that resembled the ones you made for the company, but if it were in a commercial sense, like a logo, I suppose you could be sued for infringement if they copyright it.
You're right, it's a silly-goose move to when I haven't read the entire thread, I pointed that out. I also said I was talking about the first 5 pages of the thread, and apologized if things were being brought up again when they'd already been settled.
And nice job throwing that insult in there, insinuating I'm perfect and I view everyone else as below me because I took a different view on a book than you did. Where did I say everyone is ignorant extremists? Where did I say everyone who was hating on it hadn't read it? Where did I say anyone who had read it would have a different view? Oh, right, I never said any of those things. I said people are welcome to dislike it, to think it's a terrible book, but after they have read it, or at least got a synopsis from a non-biased source that doesn't need to flat out lie about the contents.
It looks to me like he's criticizing this more as a motivation for Galt's behavior and less as an actual policy endorsement.
That's why I didn't say logo. I'd know the process of making the buttons, and could make a set for myself, sure, different colors, maybe a different opacity here and there, but same method. Nothing is actually stolen, and again, by the time Galt used that motor for more than himself (still hardly public, but among friends), the company that would have the rights was long gone, statute of limitations and all.
Then why not read back for the last five pages or so? The intellectual property argument has already been beaten to death recently.
Okay, I take it back. You don't need to read the last five pages; you should start off with reading comments you are actually responding to.
Please re-read the second-to-last paragraph. The argument you are making (and I'm certainly willing to believe you didn't do this intentionally) is the Golden Mean: My viewpoint is the moderate, center, reasonable view, and everybody else is off in the extremes.
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Those buttons could be copyrighted too if they want in all likelihood, though they probably aren't unique enough. The process is not yours unless you're programming a whole new function into Illustrator, no more than the first guy to draw a circle in the program created that process.
You're essentially arguing that IP rights don't apply because.....I'm not sure why.
He's criticizing it without knowing that the book explained why it was such a bad thing. Galt was perfectly justified in quitting over that. The whole stealing all the best minds so corrupt and broken society collapses? That happened well after this. It's just the case of quite a few people taking such a harsh stance based on secondhand information they don't understand, or where it's been filtered through someone else's viewpoint. It's the same reason I decided to read it after hearing how bad it was, and alot of the same complaints echoed not just here but by most detractors, and found out a lot of the information out there was inaccurate, or was taken out of context.
My viewpoint isn't the center view, simply because this is discourse and there are people on both sides. Many of the people arguing against the book are reasonable, and that's actually all I've asked for, is to talk about things as presented in the book. In the early pages there are people talking how Galt blew up a train in a tunnel and other terrorist acts. Not true. As I said, the book is flawed, there's plenty to talk about without having to make anything up.
And I just read the last 5 pages, and you are right, the discussion of the motor, theft, and IP has already been done, and Druk did a better job with it, so I can leave it at that.
While I won't question the quote, I think what Eddy was probably more referring to the idea that the rich and powerful within the book (those named) are in fact peeps who came into that position by sheer force of awesomeness. That guy who inherited a mining-empire was one of the best blokes around, and that Rearden fellow too.
Though Rand mentions that the elite in Washington and such unquestionably are weak, she has no problem with making characters which are rich and part of the elite and deserve every single thing they get. It's the captains of industry and the total righteous bastards who join the strike.
I mean, sure not all rich and elite are awesome, but those who are awesome are all part of the rich and elite barring a few exceptions.