https://twitter.com/cushbomb/status/1357872430006472710?s=19

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      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.

      • LeninsRage [he/him]
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        edit-2
        4 years ago

        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.

      • LeninsRage [he/him]
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        edit-2
        4 years ago

        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.