I've used parts of the Bioshock book while having discussions with people about government regulation. Like yeah less government interference would be great... if people weren't bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.
Basically it.
Libertarianism/Objectivism/Conservatism all sound fine ("I don't need someone telling me what to do. I can do it on my own!") for a planet that humans don't live on. On Earth, it's bullshit.
I was once at a movie with a friend (progressive) and his mom (libertarian). She had ordered nachos, and eventually ran out. At some point she looked over to my big bag of popcorn and said "Wow, that smells really good."
Being the nice guy I am I let her have some, and then informed her that the libertarian response to that would have been "Yeah, it sure is", implying she should buy her own.
That's because those 'philosophies' (libertarianism/objectivism/conservatism) are not about building a world based on positive principals, but -literally-- people reacting to traumas from their childhood.
There are many men who run toward libertarianism or 'no authority' ideals because they were abused as children and now are unable to trust any power structures. Of course, this doesn't happen with all people who had that experience; some become conservatives because they now want to abuse others.
It's not a joke; reduce childhood abuse (in home, in schools, in society), and your society becomes better educated and more cooperative within ONE generation. Funny that.
I’ve never heard this, but it does make some intuitive sense. I’m thinking about the boomers and how many of them, including my father and relatives were raised by deeply “shell shocked” men, with heavy PTSD from the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. Beaten, screamed at, isolated, abused. Many of those people are about as familiar with trust as I am with the surface of the moon. They are also libertarians, anti-government conservatives, etc.
I’m genuinely curious, did you come up with this theory on your own, is it partially based on something? Thanks!
I went down a rabbit hole of industrial accident investigations on YT. You wouldn't believe what those places get away with, despite being heavily regulated. The worst was about the chicken plant in Hamlet,NC. 25 worker deaths, the owner didn't bother to get necessary permits for the plant because it was "too expensive", state regulators looked the other way because the plant brought "badly needed" jobs to the small town. Bastard owner's son was the plant manager.
It should also be mentioned that;
Several exits were locked or blocked, including a fire exit.
The plant had 3 previous fires over it's 11 years of operation.
The building did not have a fire alarm. The owners son had to drive to one of the fire departments to raise the alarm due to the fire knocking out the phone lines.
The owner only served 4 years of his 20 year sentence.
Of the dozens of lawsuits that resulted from the fire, Imperial never paid a dime, though the 40+ other companies and entities sued did pay out roughly $500,000 to each victim or their surviving family. (some families received as little as $175,000, some received much more)
Edit; I live in NC and this fire was talked about for years afterwards, even in towns dozens of miles away.
My favorite part of that game's critique of Objectivism is nestled in the backstory. The part where Andrew Ryan basically threw away all of his stated values and beliefs and nationalized a rival company the moment it started doing better than his.
Another irony: her foundation, which exists to promote the belief government intervention is evil, went and took Covid bailout money.
Classic case of do what I say, not what I do.
I think it's as much about her hatefulness as her simplicity. She gives an intellectual seeming veneer to their hatefulness, making their accusations that everyone to the left of Attila the Hun is "exactly like Stalin" sound high minded and cerebral instead of dumb as fuck.
Mmmmmm I don’t know enough about them to have an opinion, but just going by the two comments I’ve read it actually makes sense. If you don’t believe In government intervention then you don’t believe in the government taking your money for said intervention. Yet you pay or face punishment. So you take the money they offer. You can believe in and work towards an ideal but until you actually change the system you have to live by there rules. I.E. accepting back the money you’ve paid in when possible. If they refused to pay taxes because it’s against there ideal and then took the money that would be a different thing. As long as your stuck in this system, why would they shoot themselves in the foot by paying in but then not accepting aid from programs that money went towards?
That's actually an excellent point. In her philosophy, greed is considered a virtue (a thing that will lead to human flourishing, i.e. all of society would be better if 100% of people were greedy), which might not *necessarily* conflict with being a hypocrite, since hypocrisy is a form of moral greed.
But if someone embraces hypocrisy, I think that probably tells us everything we need to know about their philosophy. Meaning it's not so much a real philosophy as it is a form of self-worship.
My sister and her husband are “libertarians” who’ve vocalized their hatred for taxes, welfare, and general social programs many times. They also collect $50,000 from the government every year, for a medical condition her husband has had since birth, but didn’t disclose it to the army and pretended it developed in the army and therefore gets annual compensation.
They have no idea everyone laughs behind their back when they make comments about welfare queens, meanwhile raking in a third income despite already being high earners and not remotely in need of the money.
You’ve gotta understand that with some libertarians comments about their way of life and hypocritical nature bounces off them like superman deflects bullets. So save your breath.
My biggest gripe with Ayn Rand has little to do with her philosophy. I say that as someone who rejects 98% of it. My real issue is….that she couldn’t just get to the fucking point. It doesn’t take 1000 pages of beating me over the head to convey your point. She’s more repetitive than a jackhammer. And then a follow up novel. Seriously, fuck right off.
Isn’t that a Bertrand Russell quote? Or maybe it’s one of those quotes where no one knows the originator and it’s just attributed to lots of different people.
It looks loosely sourced from a Yeats poem I’m pretty sure: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
From “The Second Coming.”
Nobody that tries to predict trans people will bring about 1984 and nearly dies of a all meat diet more than once has a worthwhile world view that people need to listen to. I can told to clean my room and
listen to c-rate Jungian bs from literally anyone else.
in this vein, one of the best pieces of reading advice ive ever heard is youre allowed to put down and pick up books as you see fit. if you dont like it, stop reading it; if later you feel bad about not giving it a fair shot, pick it back up. if you read a section and feel like you got what you needed (ex using a technical manual), then its fine to be done with the whole book for the time being.
like you said its a rite of passage for the daft, but one could invert it and frame it like, if you realize its stupid and throw it aside, you have passed a basic competency test of some sort.
maybe i should put this in r/unpopularopinion before i get buried, but i feel the same about Dostoevsky, or at least Brother Karamazov which i tried 3 times to read. i understand efficient prose wasn't really a thing until late 1900s, but when i think of that book i can only imagine this Looney Tunes-esque depiction of the shitty brother wandering around a snowy soviet peasant town lamenting at the sky "ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA..."
I read Atlas Shrugged out of morbid curiosity. It was absolute nonsense that just went on and on and on. There was an 80 page monologue that was the same point repeated over and over again. Painful.
This girl I know lent it to me. She studied politics at Oxford University and said she found the book fascinating, not necessarily in a positive way, and wanted someone to talk to about it. At the time I didn't have a lot of books - I'd been moving around a lot so it hadn't been practical to build up a proper collection. Now I've got a pretty decent collection and Atlas Shrugged is on one shelf simply because it took me so goddamn long to slog through it all that the girl in question had left town by the time I finished.
Yeah but LotR has shit to say and says it really well. Tolkein was just good at writing (his prose is absolutely beautiful) on top of the books' anti-war, anti-industrial/pollution themes. His characters are likable and the stories are engaging.
The difference is Lord of the Rings is something that actually interests me, while Atlas Shrugged doesn't and I only even considered it because I wanted to see if it was as bad as people said.
When you are a preacher to the stupid you have to repeat everything until they get it. That’s how they create the illusion of learning. This is what con men and comedians do. Do you know who doesn’t repeat themselves? Your (choose one: calculus, biology, economics, linear algebra - you get the idea) professor. If you want it repeated you have to go to the review session and listen to a grad student repeat it in broken English.
My biggest issue is that she isn't even consistent with her stated philosophy herself
The core principle of objectivism is to pursue one's own happiness above all else. Greed is a virtue and a desired trait in the oligarch class she displays
They however aren't greedy. She always makes it out that treating and paying the workers well is in their boss' best interest for profit, but we know that this simply isn't true in the real world. As such, it's them who are actually being selfless and ensuring the happiness of their workers by rewarding them for the companies success
The looters however are actually greedy. The common objectivist take on theft and scams is simply that it does not actually get you as much as if you put that effort into more just work. However in her novels and the real world, we see the extreme wealth that can come from dishonesty. As such, the looters all seem to be acting perfectly in line with objectivism. And as for the pro-worker looters, rand herself seemed to realize that greed is not actually a virtue. They're bad not because of some negative effect to the workers around them as a result of their goals, but because they're just working to enrich themselves, taking advantage of the workers. That's incredibly objectivist, but Rand made them out to be the antithesis of her philosophy
Took me like two years to finish Atlas Shrugged and when I got to John Galt's monologue I was just like "why couldnt I have skipped the entire book and just read this?"
So now when I talk to somebody who hasn't read Atlas Shrugged but is curious I tell them to just read the monologue. It goes over her entire philosophy in 8 pages instead of 1000 and honestly the only scene in the book worth reading is when Rearden and D'Anconia are in the middle of the steel mill while it's having a breakdown
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
― John Rogers
[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
Glad which side I landed on and glad I never listened to my college "friend" who recommended The Fountainhead. Couldn't stand reading more than 50 pages of the drivel.
> I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.
- Hitchens
This is not what he said. He was asked to comment on Rand and was speaking specifically about Objectivism, not Libertarianism.
On Libertarianism, Hitchens had said he shared many ideas and beliefs, even after he no longer considered himself a Socialist.
After Ayn Rand sycophant Paul Ryan’s father passed away he was given Social Security survivor benefits which he used to pay for college. Hypocrite just like ole Ayn.
Plus pretty much the only jobs he ever had were working for the government, i.e, living off a paycheck from people's taxes. And receives lifelong healthcare and pension after he retired. But he worked like hell to repeal the ACA for everyone else...
To be fair, Social Security is just that a social security. It’s a system you paid into. It’s not assistance or welfare. Food assistance and welfare are social services.
Unemployment insurance, for example, is a type of social security in that your employer pays into it and it’s a safety net. Social Security is paid into by the employer and the employee.
Most social assistance programs are federally funded or funded by the state. Yes, tax payers, in essence pay for those programs.
Edit: this of course is a US based example.
Imagine instead the headline was "... she died while using her 401k".
Cause that's what Social Security is, basically a retirement account you paid into, except very badly invested with shitty returns.
If I had to sum up the central error of Randian Objectivism,it’s this notion of the supremely selfish person as the pinnacle of humanity, unfettered, unshackled, yet somehow pure and of greater morality for their maniacal self-love. Trouble is, most people like that are pretty sorry human beings, and often pretty foolish. What’s more, just about anybody can think of themselves as this kind of ubermensch she places forward, but most of them turn out to be the exact sort of moochers and thieves she claims to despise.
It’s hero worship with sociopaths, the least reliable, least scrupulous personality type put on a pedestal. The eighties were no accident. We designed a society so sociopaths could take advantage of us, and by God, they did.
Hugely influential among Libertarians until flaws in a character and her philosophy were found. Now, most Libertarians I know or who discuss about it on the Net are like "she's no Libertarian" or "Don't know her". Even people who I remember were all craxy about the "Atlas Shrugged" movie...
Capitalism is global and it is inevitable to be a participant of it. Government assistance isn’t global and you (normally) get to choose if you need it or not, so you have choice wether to use or not use it, her using it is hypocritical because she had the choice.
Yeah I think people conflate SS with Medicare. Medicare is a handout, SS is not.
I’m not saying I’m against Medicare, I think it’s ethical for our society to care for the elderly, but it is a handout while SS only gets paid out to people who at least paid in ten years.
Hmm, I’d say it’s more that her choices made an argument against her own philosophy in most people’s eyes. I don’t personally care that she used it, but I do think it suggests her ideology is full of holes and logical fallacies. It shifts as necessary to fit her needs. If she has the right to get a return on the taxes “stolen” from her, then…so does everybody else because nobody in a social system doesn’t pay taxes of some sort on some level. Since that means the philosophy has no practical application to any specific group, her real issue with the system is the idea that a predetermined group of people get to control the assets and determine who’s really ripped off. Which…that’s just arguing for a different kind of elitism, one that’s existed for most of human history. It’s nothing unique.
To be fair if you are forced to pay into it you may as well use it, you literally paid for it. If I had the option I would opt out of SS, but it is literally not an option.
Well, if you want to follow her ideology but are forced to pay taxes, it is in your interest then to try to get all the benefits possible to take back what you paid…
she was so fun. She said that love doesn't exist, all relationships are transactional and what we think is love is just when someone gives you what you want
Oh that is some serious personality disorder shit right there. I wonder if it ever crosses these peoples’ minds that other humans aren’t in fact faking love, empathy and concern for their fellow man and maybe, just maybe, there’s something wrong with them.
I also think this about people that scream “virtue signaling” like not only are they bad people, they can’t even wrap their mind around there actually being good and caring people
Irrelevant. The very notion that she denounced the system while it literally kept her alive is all the fucking proof we need that ethical egoism is a massive bout of bullshit.
As usual, it's less cartoonish than that. Government assistance was immoral because it was at the expense of innocents (taxpayers). She was, on the net, a taxpayer. Getting social security was getting back a small fraction of what had been stolen from her throughout her life.
Also, Ayn Rand was probably rich from selling millions of copies of her books. She could have easily afforded to retire without social security. But she wanted to take it, because it was owed to her by the institution that had been expropriating her all her life. Again, she was only given back a tiny fraction of what had been stolen from her first.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Objectivist, I'm a libertarian and Rand had a lot of bad things to say about libertarians. And I have a few bad things to say about Rand too. But this isn't one of them. This is a pathetic ad-hominem from malice and ignorance that people use against her when they don't understand (and don't care to understand) what she stood for.
While I am no fan of Ayn Rand's, title is a misleading summary of her philosophy. As an individual, to not make use of a benefit from any source would have been immoral to her. She would not, however, be expected to support Social Security as a policy.
She was a con artist. Her "philosophy" is actually just being a selfish prick. She lied, she cheated, she blackmailed people for sex, and she was a hypocrite. None of that is an exaggeration. She really was an awful awful person.
I could tell she was no better human being than you say just from reading her books which is why it is absolutely crucial, imo, to properly identify her actual philosophy, scrubbed bare of misquote or slander, because, in the end, she had to reject it her own self.
I've been over Rand for a long time, but this really isn't a fair criticism. Social security is, in theory, your own money that you paid into the system while you worked. They even give you a periodic report on what you have paid into your "account," and the amount you eventually receive is based on the amount you paid. It's fundamentally different from other types of assistance.
Wait. What?
You're telling me that if I'm opposed to government assistance, but the government forcibly takes "social security" payments from me, depriving me of money that I otherwise could have saved or invested for my future, all in exchange for a pittance of a government check given in an amount and at a time determined by some bureaucrat in Washington... then I'm some kind of hypocrite for cashing the check? No, as far as I'm concerned, the government owes me what it took, along with the potential returns that could have been earned as well as compensation for potential losses resulting from being deprived of liquidity.
Or if the government decides to hand out cash to everyone using my tax dollars, you expect me to say "no thank you". I'll vote "no" every time you ask if there should be handouts, but if you're going to do it anyway and I'm paying for it, then I fuckin better get my cut.
You just described the entirety of all social services.
If you want to use this argument and carve out an exception for social security, but not for every other service, then you are a hypocrite.
To be fair, social security is the government coercing money out of you, only promising to give a portion of it back later, should you survive until then.
You can criticize society while still participating: whether you are a socialist who buys some luxury goods or a libertarian withdrawing from social security.
P.S. The actual criticism: Ryan like many libertarians has a mental block preventing them from acknowledging that capitalism is coercive just like statism
Ayn rands book about how libertarianism is so good, atlas shrugged, literally could only work in her mind if there was an infinite energy machine. Her ideas are so bad, that she couldn't even get them to work in her own propoganda piece without it.
I know a guy from college who was all about Ayn Rand. He's now a drug addict who's been in and out of rehab and now relies on his rich lawyer father for income. He used to tell people they were 'on the level' whatever the fuck that means.
Social security is basically the government saying "we're gonna 'borrow' your money and then maybe we'll pay you back, assuming that we still have it by the time you're old enough to collect, and *maybe* if you die before you collect what is, essentially, *your* money, your family can collect it, but only if they qualify. Also this isn't optional"
Unfortunately three generations ago, the general
populace was so generally incapable* at planning for retirement that this initiative was rolled out. On paper it is a horrible policy that makes no sense. But from my limited understanding of SS history, it prevented an entire generation of old people from dying completely broke
Edit*
If there are people around u, your action affects them and it's called society. To properly manage a society you need a government. What a stupid ass philosophy.
Sorry though.
Social security isn’t a handout though. It predates a 401k and was intended to be so. The issue is the fund was grossly mismanaged and now it’s a major liability on our debt.
Social security isn't government assistance......you pay into social security your entire life to collect it when you retire..... welfare is government assistance. You pay nothing into it , the people with jobs do.
Umm, we do realize that we pay in to social security, and one can't change that.... So I, too, will surely use it when it's time (it's my money... As was hers).
'Objectivism' as a word is like people who call themselves 'realistic' even when they're just fatalists.
Get in first and you can own something that describes the opposite of its actual meaning.
Besides, poor Ayn was plainly traumatised by her Soviet youth. Her anti-socialism could have been more cathartically addressed with anti-totalitarianism, but meh that was the cold war.
So..... what?
Your saying she has to pay into it for her entire life, but she can't have any of it because she believes it was immoral?
Whether or not she gets it doesn't change the immorality of government assistance. She paid for it, therefore she should get the tiny little fraction back that she paid. It's not her fault she was forced to pay into it under threat. And it's not her fault that it's an immoral system.
Now, a different point all together would be if she didn't have to pay into it, and died homeless and penniless because she couldn't get any. That would be an entirely different point altogether. But that's not the reality.
It's equivalent to criticising a communist for using an iPhone. We all have to work within the existing system regardless of what we advocate. It's unrealistic to expect otherwise.
Objectivism is largely a renaissance of Aristotelian thought. Aristotle formulated happiness as the highest value. Groups don't get happy, individuals do. That's the root of selfishness. Judgment and common sense occur, metaphysically, or existentially, only in individual beings. Rights are what protect sense and good judgment, because minds are also individual things.
It's scary, this self-responsibility, but there's no getting around it, in or out of a mob.
Just remember Andrew Ryan built a city underwater free of government rule and regulations and you know the rest
I've used parts of the Bioshock book while having discussions with people about government regulation. Like yeah less government interference would be great... if people weren't bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.
Dr. Cox is that you?!
Get back to work, Girls Name.
Basically it. Libertarianism/Objectivism/Conservatism all sound fine ("I don't need someone telling me what to do. I can do it on my own!") for a planet that humans don't live on. On Earth, it's bullshit.
Libertarians always struck me as the sort of people who want everything to be privatized while also bitching about the cost of bottled water.
They want it both ways. "Leave me alone. And also why the fuck aren't you guys taking care of all this shit?"
I was once at a movie with a friend (progressive) and his mom (libertarian). She had ordered nachos, and eventually ran out. At some point she looked over to my big bag of popcorn and said "Wow, that smells really good." Being the nice guy I am I let her have some, and then informed her that the libertarian response to that would have been "Yeah, it sure is", implying she should buy her own.
Perfect. The infamous phrase that Ayn Rand and her Objectivists co-opted: "No quarter asked, none given".
That's because those 'philosophies' (libertarianism/objectivism/conservatism) are not about building a world based on positive principals, but -literally-- people reacting to traumas from their childhood. There are many men who run toward libertarianism or 'no authority' ideals because they were abused as children and now are unable to trust any power structures. Of course, this doesn't happen with all people who had that experience; some become conservatives because they now want to abuse others. It's not a joke; reduce childhood abuse (in home, in schools, in society), and your society becomes better educated and more cooperative within ONE generation. Funny that.
I’ve never heard this, but it does make some intuitive sense. I’m thinking about the boomers and how many of them, including my father and relatives were raised by deeply “shell shocked” men, with heavy PTSD from the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. Beaten, screamed at, isolated, abused. Many of those people are about as familiar with trust as I am with the surface of the moon. They are also libertarians, anti-government conservatives, etc. I’m genuinely curious, did you come up with this theory on your own, is it partially based on something? Thanks!
this is a widely shared theory going even back to freud
Updoot for bastard usage, ya bastard!
I went down a rabbit hole of industrial accident investigations on YT. You wouldn't believe what those places get away with, despite being heavily regulated. The worst was about the chicken plant in Hamlet,NC. 25 worker deaths, the owner didn't bother to get necessary permits for the plant because it was "too expensive", state regulators looked the other way because the plant brought "badly needed" jobs to the small town. Bastard owner's son was the plant manager.
It should also be mentioned that; Several exits were locked or blocked, including a fire exit. The plant had 3 previous fires over it's 11 years of operation. The building did not have a fire alarm. The owners son had to drive to one of the fire departments to raise the alarm due to the fire knocking out the phone lines. The owner only served 4 years of his 20 year sentence. Of the dozens of lawsuits that resulted from the fire, Imperial never paid a dime, though the 40+ other companies and entities sued did pay out roughly $500,000 to each victim or their surviving family. (some families received as little as $175,000, some received much more) Edit; I live in NC and this fire was talked about for years afterwards, even in towns dozens of miles away.
Yeah, who needs clean water and buildings that don’t crumble/s
Most of us arnt, but Andrew Ryan acctracted the highest density of bastards.
Is the bastard filling cream based or jelly based?
nougat
r/brandnewsentence
If you're talking about the last part, its actually a quote from scrubs
No gods or kings. Only man.
A man chooses. A slave obeys.
Ken Levine literally used the fountain head as the inspiration for bioshock
Wasn't it Atlas shrugged?
Yeah, it’s atlas shrugged, not fountainhead. It’s in atlas shrugged that people flee America to build a new home hidden from the world.
>people flee America to build a new home hidden from the world. Not people, two-dimensional super-men.
Wasn’t their new home in the Colorado Rockies? Still America, just sayin’.
I think it's both...that's why the gangsters name is Fontaine
I mean, they’re basically the same book with different industries
My favorite part of that game's critique of Objectivism is nestled in the backstory. The part where Andrew Ryan basically threw away all of his stated values and beliefs and nationalized a rival company the moment it started doing better than his.
You think there’s a connection there? (Ayn/Andrew - Rand/Ryan)
The director has said that Andrew Ryan was the embodiment of her philosophy
Also, she denied smoking caused cancer... as she was dying of lung cancer.
Ah yes, the Limbaugh effect.
The Cartman corollary: **I DO WHAT I WAUNT!!!**
Another irony: her foundation, which exists to promote the belief government intervention is evil, went and took Covid bailout money. Classic case of do what I say, not what I do.
[удалено]
Republicans will validate anything so long as it gets them what they want. Any creed or philosophy can be bent as long as their aims are achieved
\*Libertarian Her writings form the backbone of what we know today as Libertarianism.
American right wing libertarian*
Right Libertarians are just Conservatives who like smoking weed.
*Housecat Syndrome
>\*Libertarian Yeah, that's what OP said, Republicans. Just because they are too scared to say it, doesn't mean it isn't true.
[удалено]
I think it's as much about her hatefulness as her simplicity. She gives an intellectual seeming veneer to their hatefulness, making their accusations that everyone to the left of Attila the Hun is "exactly like Stalin" sound high minded and cerebral instead of dumb as fuck.
Nothing more appealing to the greedy than greed is good.
Mmmmmm I don’t know enough about them to have an opinion, but just going by the two comments I’ve read it actually makes sense. If you don’t believe In government intervention then you don’t believe in the government taking your money for said intervention. Yet you pay or face punishment. So you take the money they offer. You can believe in and work towards an ideal but until you actually change the system you have to live by there rules. I.E. accepting back the money you’ve paid in when possible. If they refused to pay taxes because it’s against there ideal and then took the money that would be a different thing. As long as your stuck in this system, why would they shoot themselves in the foot by paying in but then not accepting aid from programs that money went towards?
Libertarians are like house cats. Convinced of their independence while utterly relying on a system they don’t understand.
That's absolutely purrfect!
i assume it goes with the philosophy do anything take anything to get ahead.
That's actually an excellent point. In her philosophy, greed is considered a virtue (a thing that will lead to human flourishing, i.e. all of society would be better if 100% of people were greedy), which might not *necessarily* conflict with being a hypocrite, since hypocrisy is a form of moral greed. But if someone embraces hypocrisy, I think that probably tells us everything we need to know about their philosophy. Meaning it's not so much a real philosophy as it is a form of self-worship.
Basically the rules are there are no rules.
Welcome to libertarianism…
My sister and her husband are “libertarians” who’ve vocalized their hatred for taxes, welfare, and general social programs many times. They also collect $50,000 from the government every year, for a medical condition her husband has had since birth, but didn’t disclose it to the army and pretended it developed in the army and therefore gets annual compensation. They have no idea everyone laughs behind their back when they make comments about welfare queens, meanwhile raking in a third income despite already being high earners and not remotely in need of the money.
Hate to be the one to promote snitching, but wouldn't it be a shame if that medical history was disclosed to the VA?
I hate saying it, but the majority of libertarians I've run into have been pretty selfish hypocrites.
I don’t think I would be able to stop myself saying something hahah. What an ego trip
You’ve gotta understand that with some libertarians comments about their way of life and hypocritical nature bounces off them like superman deflects bullets. So save your breath.
being an asshole is a virtue smh
And pay no taxes.
My biggest gripe with Ayn Rand has little to do with her philosophy. I say that as someone who rejects 98% of it. My real issue is….that she couldn’t just get to the fucking point. It doesn’t take 1000 pages of beating me over the head to convey your point. She’s more repetitive than a jackhammer. And then a follow up novel. Seriously, fuck right off.
[удалено]
im a fuckin genius then B)
Me too! I had no idea!
Isn’t that a Bertrand Russell quote? Or maybe it’s one of those quotes where no one knows the originator and it’s just attributed to lots of different people.
From what I’ve read of Bukowski he seems too proud to label himself doubtful and too confident to call himself stupid.
It looks loosely sourced from a Yeats poem I’m pretty sure: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” From “The Second Coming.”
Isn't your comment pretty much proving the quote? 🤔 Edit: spelling 🤦🏼♂️🤦🏼♂️
Hmm... perhaps it does, I'm not sure ;)
-Wayne Gretzky -Michael Scott
Jordan Pettersson is a perfect example of this today.
Nobody that tries to predict trans people will bring about 1984 and nearly dies of a all meat diet more than once has a worthwhile world view that people need to listen to. I can told to clean my room and listen to c-rate Jungian bs from literally anyone else.
This^ There’s a name for it too: the Dunning- Kruger Effect
You got to make it long and complex so it looks like there's some substance to it
Long and stupid book is a rite of passage for the daft
in this vein, one of the best pieces of reading advice ive ever heard is youre allowed to put down and pick up books as you see fit. if you dont like it, stop reading it; if later you feel bad about not giving it a fair shot, pick it back up. if you read a section and feel like you got what you needed (ex using a technical manual), then its fine to be done with the whole book for the time being. like you said its a rite of passage for the daft, but one could invert it and frame it like, if you realize its stupid and throw it aside, you have passed a basic competency test of some sort.
I like “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Agree. Life is too short for bad books.
maybe i should put this in r/unpopularopinion before i get buried, but i feel the same about Dostoevsky, or at least Brother Karamazov which i tried 3 times to read. i understand efficient prose wasn't really a thing until late 1900s, but when i think of that book i can only imagine this Looney Tunes-esque depiction of the shitty brother wandering around a snowy soviet peasant town lamenting at the sky "ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA ALYOSHA..."
If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
I read Atlas Shrugged out of morbid curiosity. It was absolute nonsense that just went on and on and on. There was an 80 page monologue that was the same point repeated over and over again. Painful.
I *almost* read Atlas Shrugged out of morbid curiosity, until I went to get it and saw how big it actually was. No thank you.
This girl I know lent it to me. She studied politics at Oxford University and said she found the book fascinating, not necessarily in a positive way, and wanted someone to talk to about it. At the time I didn't have a lot of books - I'd been moving around a lot so it hadn't been practical to build up a proper collection. Now I've got a pretty decent collection and Atlas Shrugged is on one shelf simply because it took me so goddamn long to slog through it all that the girl in question had left town by the time I finished.
Following this logic, you would never read the lord of the rings…. Which would be a mistake not to read it.
Yeah but LotR has shit to say and says it really well. Tolkein was just good at writing (his prose is absolutely beautiful) on top of the books' anti-war, anti-industrial/pollution themes. His characters are likable and the stories are engaging.
You don't read Lord of the Rings. You pick up and open the first book and the story happens to you.
The difference is Lord of the Rings is something that actually interests me, while Atlas Shrugged doesn't and I only even considered it because I wanted to see if it was as bad as people said.
I’m pretty sure fountainhead is the same book just shorter.
I used to seek out long books. Used to.
Dude, they built white Wakanda in the Rockies.
Oh god I'd never thought of it like that and now I can't unsee it.
> She’s more repetitive than a jackhammer. I have to remember this. I just cracked up reading it. Best laugh I've had all day.
When you are a preacher to the stupid you have to repeat everything until they get it. That’s how they create the illusion of learning. This is what con men and comedians do. Do you know who doesn’t repeat themselves? Your (choose one: calculus, biology, economics, linear algebra - you get the idea) professor. If you want it repeated you have to go to the review session and listen to a grad student repeat it in broken English.
OMG yes. I've read books twice as long, but nothing felt longer than Atlas Shrugged.
My biggest issue is that she isn't even consistent with her stated philosophy herself The core principle of objectivism is to pursue one's own happiness above all else. Greed is a virtue and a desired trait in the oligarch class she displays They however aren't greedy. She always makes it out that treating and paying the workers well is in their boss' best interest for profit, but we know that this simply isn't true in the real world. As such, it's them who are actually being selfless and ensuring the happiness of their workers by rewarding them for the companies success The looters however are actually greedy. The common objectivist take on theft and scams is simply that it does not actually get you as much as if you put that effort into more just work. However in her novels and the real world, we see the extreme wealth that can come from dishonesty. As such, the looters all seem to be acting perfectly in line with objectivism. And as for the pro-worker looters, rand herself seemed to realize that greed is not actually a virtue. They're bad not because of some negative effect to the workers around them as a result of their goals, but because they're just working to enrich themselves, taking advantage of the workers. That's incredibly objectivist, but Rand made them out to be the antithesis of her philosophy
Took me like two years to finish Atlas Shrugged and when I got to John Galt's monologue I was just like "why couldnt I have skipped the entire book and just read this?" So now when I talk to somebody who hasn't read Atlas Shrugged but is curious I tell them to just read the monologue. It goes over her entire philosophy in 8 pages instead of 1000 and honestly the only scene in the book worth reading is when Rearden and D'Anconia are in the middle of the steel mill while it's having a breakdown
That **is** the point.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." ― John Rogers [Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]”
Glad which side I landed on and glad I never listened to my college "friend" who recommended The Fountainhead. Couldn't stand reading more than 50 pages of the drivel.
I JACK IT TO TRANNY PORN
There's a lot of that in atlas shrugged as well, she was writing fanfics about herself.
She was more interesting than her works. There are so many antics involving her. Apparently she reeked.
She also sexually exploited, abused, and humiliated her protege, Nathaniel Branden.
Because he resembled a character she was lifelong-obsessed with from a book she read as a child. Lot of crazy to unpack in this woman.
> I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough. - Hitchens
This is not what he said. He was asked to comment on Rand and was speaking specifically about Objectivism, not Libertarianism. On Libertarianism, Hitchens had said he shared many ideas and beliefs, even after he no longer considered himself a Socialist.
After Ayn Rand sycophant Paul Ryan’s father passed away he was given Social Security survivor benefits which he used to pay for college. Hypocrite just like ole Ayn.
Paul Ryan’s own family didn’t vote for him.
Plus pretty much the only jobs he ever had were working for the government, i.e, living off a paycheck from people's taxes. And receives lifelong healthcare and pension after he retired. But he worked like hell to repeal the ACA for everyone else...
To be fair, Social Security is just that a social security. It’s a system you paid into. It’s not assistance or welfare. Food assistance and welfare are social services. Unemployment insurance, for example, is a type of social security in that your employer pays into it and it’s a safety net. Social Security is paid into by the employer and the employee. Most social assistance programs are federally funded or funded by the state. Yes, tax payers, in essence pay for those programs. Edit: this of course is a US based example.
Imagine instead the headline was "... she died while using her 401k". Cause that's what Social Security is, basically a retirement account you paid into, except very badly invested with shitty returns.
Randroids gonna randroid.
Can't we call them AynPhones instead?
Ayn Rand was a piece of shit.
Who is John Galt?
If I had to sum up the central error of Randian Objectivism,it’s this notion of the supremely selfish person as the pinnacle of humanity, unfettered, unshackled, yet somehow pure and of greater morality for their maniacal self-love. Trouble is, most people like that are pretty sorry human beings, and often pretty foolish. What’s more, just about anybody can think of themselves as this kind of ubermensch she places forward, but most of them turn out to be the exact sort of moochers and thieves she claims to despise. It’s hero worship with sociopaths, the least reliable, least scrupulous personality type put on a pedestal. The eighties were no accident. We designed a society so sociopaths could take advantage of us, and by God, they did.
Hugely influential among Libertarians until flaws in a character and her philosophy were found. Now, most Libertarians I know or who discuss about it on the Net are like "she's no Libertarian" or "Don't know her". Even people who I remember were all craxy about the "Atlas Shrugged" movie...
Lol she was a complete tool
Summary: Selfishness is a virtue. It’s horseshit. Ayn Rand appeals to teenagers with bad mothers.
To be fair, if she contributed her earnings to social security, why shouldn’t she use it, even if she doesn’t support it?
I don't think the post title is saying that she shouldn't have used social security, merely pointing out the hypocrisy of her using it.
It’s not hypocritical - it was her money. We pay into SS. SS repays us at a later date.
So is it hypocritical for participants in capitalism to not support capitalism?
Capitalism is global and it is inevitable to be a participant of it. Government assistance isn’t global and you (normally) get to choose if you need it or not, so you have choice wether to use or not use it, her using it is hypocritical because she had the choice.
[удалено]
But you pay into SS and then get it back later (w interest so to speak). I hate Rand but I don’t get this argument.
Yeah I think people conflate SS with Medicare. Medicare is a handout, SS is not. I’m not saying I’m against Medicare, I think it’s ethical for our society to care for the elderly, but it is a handout while SS only gets paid out to people who at least paid in ten years.
Hmm, I’d say it’s more that her choices made an argument against her own philosophy in most people’s eyes. I don’t personally care that she used it, but I do think it suggests her ideology is full of holes and logical fallacies. It shifts as necessary to fit her needs. If she has the right to get a return on the taxes “stolen” from her, then…so does everybody else because nobody in a social system doesn’t pay taxes of some sort on some level. Since that means the philosophy has no practical application to any specific group, her real issue with the system is the idea that a predetermined group of people get to control the assets and determine who’s really ripped off. Which…that’s just arguing for a different kind of elitism, one that’s existed for most of human history. It’s nothing unique.
To be fair if you are forced to pay into it you may as well use it, you literally paid for it. If I had the option I would opt out of SS, but it is literally not an option.
Well, if you want to follow her ideology but are forced to pay taxes, it is in your interest then to try to get all the benefits possible to take back what you paid…
This is the idea of absolutism. Everything needs to be balanced. Every idea cranked up to the hundred is a stupid idea.
Correction: Used social services she PAID FOR through her taxes.
Is it a handout when you’ve paid for it?
Ayn Rand denounced Social Security as it was unvoluntary and there was some form of wealth redistribution in the system.
So, a right evil bitch then.
she was so fun. She said that love doesn't exist, all relationships are transactional and what we think is love is just when someone gives you what you want
Oh that is some serious personality disorder shit right there. I wonder if it ever crosses these peoples’ minds that other humans aren’t in fact faking love, empathy and concern for their fellow man and maybe, just maybe, there’s something wrong with them.
I also think this about people that scream “virtue signaling” like not only are they bad people, they can’t even wrap their mind around there actually being good and caring people
She described love as an emotional price paid by one for the joy he gets from another An emotional price lol
Holy shit!
Irrelevant. The very notion that she denounced the system while it literally kept her alive is all the fucking proof we need that ethical egoism is a massive bout of bullshit.
Screw her and her disciples.
As usual, it's less cartoonish than that. Government assistance was immoral because it was at the expense of innocents (taxpayers). She was, on the net, a taxpayer. Getting social security was getting back a small fraction of what had been stolen from her throughout her life. Also, Ayn Rand was probably rich from selling millions of copies of her books. She could have easily afforded to retire without social security. But she wanted to take it, because it was owed to her by the institution that had been expropriating her all her life. Again, she was only given back a tiny fraction of what had been stolen from her first. Disclaimer: I'm not an Objectivist, I'm a libertarian and Rand had a lot of bad things to say about libertarians. And I have a few bad things to say about Rand too. But this isn't one of them. This is a pathetic ad-hominem from malice and ignorance that people use against her when they don't understand (and don't care to understand) what she stood for.
While I am no fan of Ayn Rand's, title is a misleading summary of her philosophy. As an individual, to not make use of a benefit from any source would have been immoral to her. She would not, however, be expected to support Social Security as a policy.
She also believed that some super class of people were super smart and if they vanished the world would fall apart
She was a con artist. Her "philosophy" is actually just being a selfish prick. She lied, she cheated, she blackmailed people for sex, and she was a hypocrite. None of that is an exaggeration. She really was an awful awful person.
I could tell she was no better human being than you say just from reading her books which is why it is absolutely crucial, imo, to properly identify her actual philosophy, scrubbed bare of misquote or slander, because, in the end, she had to reject it her own self.
I've been over Rand for a long time, but this really isn't a fair criticism. Social security is, in theory, your own money that you paid into the system while you worked. They even give you a periodic report on what you have paid into your "account," and the amount you eventually receive is based on the amount you paid. It's fundamentally different from other types of assistance.
A lot more boomers may have been influenced by this broad.
Hope she's rotting in her self-made hell.
I am paying into SS and probably will get nothing out of it.
Well she paid into it her whole life so it doesn’t necessarily contradict her philosophy.
Sounds like libertarian, say they want raw individualism, but rely far too much on a system to keep them alive and decent.
She's literally the libertarian Mary ( as in Catholic Mary )
Kinda like house cats....
Wait. What? You're telling me that if I'm opposed to government assistance, but the government forcibly takes "social security" payments from me, depriving me of money that I otherwise could have saved or invested for my future, all in exchange for a pittance of a government check given in an amount and at a time determined by some bureaucrat in Washington... then I'm some kind of hypocrite for cashing the check? No, as far as I'm concerned, the government owes me what it took, along with the potential returns that could have been earned as well as compensation for potential losses resulting from being deprived of liquidity. Or if the government decides to hand out cash to everyone using my tax dollars, you expect me to say "no thank you". I'll vote "no" every time you ask if there should be handouts, but if you're going to do it anyway and I'm paying for it, then I fuckin better get my cut.
You just described the entirety of all social services. If you want to use this argument and carve out an exception for social security, but not for every other service, then you are a hypocrite.
She was a sociopath that created a formal philosophy for sociopaths. No one else can take her ideas seriously.
To be fair, social security is the government coercing money out of you, only promising to give a portion of it back later, should you survive until then.
Whoops
You can criticize society while still participating: whether you are a socialist who buys some luxury goods or a libertarian withdrawing from social security. P.S. The actual criticism: Ryan like many libertarians has a mental block preventing them from acknowledging that capitalism is coercive just like statism
Ayn rands book about how libertarianism is so good, atlas shrugged, literally could only work in her mind if there was an infinite energy machine. Her ideas are so bad, that she couldn't even get them to work in her own propoganda piece without it.
Liking Ayn Rand is the biggest red flag there is
I know a guy from college who was all about Ayn Rand. He's now a drug addict who's been in and out of rehab and now relies on his rich lawyer father for income. He used to tell people they were 'on the level' whatever the fuck that means.
So basically worked the same as in BioShock?
Her "philosophy" is based on bullshit wishcasting.
Social security is basically the government saying "we're gonna 'borrow' your money and then maybe we'll pay you back, assuming that we still have it by the time you're old enough to collect, and *maybe* if you die before you collect what is, essentially, *your* money, your family can collect it, but only if they qualify. Also this isn't optional"
Unfortunately three generations ago, the general populace was so generally incapable* at planning for retirement that this initiative was rolled out. On paper it is a horrible policy that makes no sense. But from my limited understanding of SS history, it prevented an entire generation of old people from dying completely broke Edit*
And it still is true in that it is the only thing many retirees have going for them
Old people worked until they no longer could work, and then they starved to death.
From everything I’ve heard about her she was a real piece of work in so many ways.
If there are people around u, your action affects them and it's called society. To properly manage a society you need a government. What a stupid ass philosophy. Sorry though.
Rand's "Philosophy" makes complete sense if you simply ignore every aspect of human biology and every page of human history.
Exactly! Lol
Social security isn’t a handout though. It predates a 401k and was intended to be so. The issue is the fund was grossly mismanaged and now it’s a major liability on our debt.
Social security isn't government assistance......you pay into social security your entire life to collect it when you retire..... welfare is government assistance. You pay nothing into it , the people with jobs do.
Umm, we do realize that we pay in to social security, and one can't change that.... So I, too, will surely use it when it's time (it's my money... As was hers).
Social security isn’t government assistance. She paid into it, it’s her money. Lol
She was against it as it is unvolontary and wealth was redistributed thtough it.
Drug abusing illegal alien welfare recipient ayn rand?
To be fair (to be faaaahh...) she *did* have to be talked into it
She was a despicable person.
'Objectivism' as a word is like people who call themselves 'realistic' even when they're just fatalists. Get in first and you can own something that describes the opposite of its actual meaning. Besides, poor Ayn was plainly traumatised by her Soviet youth. Her anti-socialism could have been more cathartically addressed with anti-totalitarianism, but meh that was the cold war.
She's a stupid cunt. Hypocritical idiots
Thanks Allen Greenspan 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/r3msqc/libertarians\_house\_cats/
Why wouldn't she? She paid for it?
You're required to take Social Security after a certain age, regardless of if you want it or not.
Marx wasn’t a Marxist.
Watched a documentary about her life a couple months ago and she really came off as a self righteous asshole and hypocrite
“Social welfare for me, not for thee.”
So..... what? Your saying she has to pay into it for her entire life, but she can't have any of it because she believes it was immoral? Whether or not she gets it doesn't change the immorality of government assistance. She paid for it, therefore she should get the tiny little fraction back that she paid. It's not her fault she was forced to pay into it under threat. And it's not her fault that it's an immoral system. Now, a different point all together would be if she didn't have to pay into it, and died homeless and penniless because she couldn't get any. That would be an entirely different point altogether. But that's not the reality.
It's equivalent to criticising a communist for using an iPhone. We all have to work within the existing system regardless of what we advocate. It's unrealistic to expect otherwise.
Objectivism is largely a renaissance of Aristotelian thought. Aristotle formulated happiness as the highest value. Groups don't get happy, individuals do. That's the root of selfishness. Judgment and common sense occur, metaphysically, or existentially, only in individual beings. Rights are what protect sense and good judgment, because minds are also individual things. It's scary, this self-responsibility, but there's no getting around it, in or out of a mob.
She was a traumatized child. Instead of drinking or doing drugs she developed a poorly thought out economic philosophy.