Someone should figure out what makes these people fetishize markets. What on earth makes them think that a mechanism for exchanging things should be the only organizing principle for society?

well the main organizing principle before markets was the hereditary bloodlines of monarchs so…. markets aren’t inherently bad, but they are very limited in what they can accomplish.

Yeah I'd really like to think we can do better. Seems like a poverty of imagination.

Some people read Ayn Rand and their brains break. Others read Ayn Rand and say "What the fuck is this boring ass shit?"

i read Atlas Shrugged & got upset because i realized the woman who gifted it to me was apparently a fascistic libertarian vs the hot leftist anarchist kind

Atlas Shrugged was an awful book. made me hate the concept of literature for like at least 6 months.

I tried to read it in college when everyone else kept saying how it changed their lives. I couldn't finish it, it was so boring, and my only regret is I didn't write a blog (as was the custom at the time) about it called Fresnel Shrugged.

I never made it through the entire book. I couldn't. It was like reading an 8 year old child's understanding of socialism, but not an average 8 year old child. An 8 year old child from an old money oil baron family.

"These words in this order should be illegal"

I've always found the most offensive thing about Rand's writing to be the writing. Even her sex scenes are boring.

She did have the decency to include a summary of the entire book -inside the book- so you didn't even have to go looking for a Cliff's Notes version.

Some queer trans woman needs to rewrite one of her novels because the BDSM opportunities are almost limitless and instead they fuck like dead fish Also to subdue and break The Man Hero and destroy capitalism

Leaden prose, characters so flat they should envy the paper they're printed on, utterly repellent philosophy underlying the whole thing. It's the tedious and repugnant outpouring of a tedious and repugnant mind.

godawful to get through - Ayn loved her long speeches. And she was self-absorbed and callous. But I do remember how those in charge were baffled and desperate when the capable people stopped their contributions. That might be a possibility.

i strongly believe that the people who celebrate this piece of shit book like cultic scripture are the book club analogue of these "i don't deserve flavor" kitchen incels.

Wait I thought that the kitchen incels thing was a parody of incel culture

you wish

😭

it's like rule 34; if you can think of it, there's some weird hate group going full incel about it.

😭

i was devastated. beautiful women gifting me books is one of my kryptonites

a tragic tale many such cases?

Ayn Rand has terrible ideology and politics but holy shit is she a bad writer. If you're trying to get a point across in writing it has to come up through the narrative you can't just have some jerk give a speech for 20 pages. She's technically a Russian writer but unlike any other Russian writer

People claiming her writing is good is lile when people claim mein kampf is an interesting read. No the fuck it isn’t, it’s so arduous and boring lmao.

in high school i was offered (and read) the fountainhead without knowing anything about her politics or whatever else, just some random book someone threw at me, and i thought it was some of the worst writing imaginable in ways that i couldn't really comprehend at the time

I got one third through the first page of Atlas Shrugged before I put the book down and never picked it or any of her books up again. It was the beginning of my shift from small-town libertarian to... Whatever flavor of leftist I am now. I'm not big on labels. They're confusing.

Reminds me of when someone earnestly tried to get me to listen to Jordan Peterson. I mean it worked because I’m a fan. But for literally all of the wrong reasons. Don’t think they expected me to be unable to breath from laughing so hard after watching his stuff

I absolutely cannot take him even remotely serious after seeing a tweet about how Peterson sounds like Kermit the frog got radicalized by divorce court.

My favorite unserious Jordan Peterson bit, is actually from a clip with Joe Rogan, where he essentially argues for sexual equality of outcome so that "Alpha males" don't horde all the women and incels can have sex, after having just railed against equality of outcome for like 10 minutes straight.

If it were to come out years from now that Peterson's entire career had been an Andy Kaufman style bit, it would be the funniest thing in the history of comedy.

I mean the signs were there the whole time. The two color suit that looks like if the joker had to emergency fill in at a drag revue

“Well, what do you mean by ‘joker’? Because I’m talking about the archetypal jester. All throughout human history…”

So you want to know how I got these scars? Theologians and academics demand an answer. These are a cuneiform of the suffering, a negotiation, a plea for sympathy, each scar a line on a map of the catastrophic price of meaning In the search for meaning one may ask why why? Why so serious?

"Ayn Rand helped open my mind, even though I've become progressive now" someone in my local Occupy said to me back in the day. Surprising no one this person is MAHA now.

*like

I couldn't get through Mein Kampf a second time if you offered me a grand to do it in a month. It's such a turgid read that many out-and-out Nazis admitted they just bought it to display.

I tried to read it once for a book report on Holocaust/WWII literature. I was literally recovering from surgery, aka had nothing else to do, and could barely make it two chapters in because of how fucking tedious it was lmao

I don’t know why I didn’t expect a book literally called “my struggle” to not just be whiny nonsense but jeez (my phone tried to autocorrect jeez to Jews and I’m just like… excuse me???)

Sam: Phone is haunted. Jazz: Huh? Sam: *picks up shotgun* Phone is haunted!

Almost like Hitler's ideas were an incoherent list of grievances and Rudolf Hess was a dogshit writer.

Mein Kampf fucking sucked. In every way.

The German American Jew Dorothy Thompson at the time reviewed mein Kampf and said that Hitler's first battle was with the German language and this battle he has never won. She went on to say that Hitler had to conquer Germany to get even Nazis to read the book

wtf is an agorist

just looked it up & agorist is a type of pedophile. gross.

Yeah, agorist is literally just another word for Libertarian.

The only reason I even knew what an agorist was prior to today btw, is because I take absolute delight in bullying libertarians

We already have “ancap” for that!

ancap, libertarian, agorist, pedophile, all the same shit

Of course this would be the guy who came up with it