/lit/ - Literature

Who gives a fuck?

stoplikingwhatidontlike.png

Don't mind me...

I never understood /lit/s undying hatred of Ayn Rand. I know this board is full of Lefties, but you guys treat her like the anti-christ.

The fountainhead is her best work in my opinion. Atlas Shrugged was to long for what it was, it could of been half the length and the message still would've got across.

>>1636857
Don't bring it up around them. If they start discussing it, just say you aren't a fan and excuse yourself from the conversation.

>>1636877
Personally I don't like her for raping and torturing the english language, and for beating her reader's into submission.

>>1636894
>literary criticism
>reader's
>mfw

>>1636857
I used his technique at work all the time to keep the work-dodging socializing asshats from bothering me when I was trying to actually get some work done.

examples
"Hey, do you read Ann Rand?"
"Nah, I'm not into Harry Potter"

"Did you happen to catch the score of the Yankees game?"
"I'm not into football"

"Have you seen Survivor?"
"I can't get into video games"

It worked to shut them down from pushing their opinions my way. This rarely backfired into people over explaining what it actually was and it did not change their relationship with me, they just stopped trying to chat.

Pic related. I was happy to find I was not alone in this.

I'm beginning to believe she is in fact a Communist troll. I have never sympathized more with Marxist ideals than when I found out about this awful, hate-mongering, rape-fetishist, egomaniacal, sociopathic, spiteful whore.

Why are the clueless teenagers of 4chan so liberal?

Oh right, all teenagers are clueless liberals. Carry on.

>>1636857
My best friend reads Nightwatch, Eragon and other garbage. I still like this thread.
Stop being pretentious, even beatniks need friends with crap tastes to say "hey, I know someone who has crap tastes" and to make themselves feel better.

>1637000

Beautiful trips.

Also, you are quite right. We have too many teenage posters who don't understand the value of money and productivity since the government isn't trying to rape their income to benefit the lazy yet.

>So I just found out two good friends of mine like Ayn Rand. What do I do?

Get ready to hear some of the most inane stupid conversations you have ever heard about "philosophy" and "good writing."

My guess is your friends don't read any thing else.

pic related: how Jesus feels about Ann Rand

So can you guys give a real reason to why you hate Rand's philosophy?

Is there an actual argument against it that isn't "durr, rape fetishist corporations!"?

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>>1637013

Rand's philosophy is too concerned with individual freedom for intel/lit/uals to HATE it, however its absurd popularity and politicisation amongst brain dead republicans.

Also, Rand is generally disregarded by serious intellectuals because of her the gross simplifications and generalisations she makes in the construction of her theories.

>>1637013
Because almost everyone on /lit/ is a communist or communist wanna-be and Ayn Rand is violently anti-communist.

>>1637035
>>1637035

>>1637004
Not even that, most teenagers don't bother to think for themselves.

They just mindlessly ape whatever they hear on the Daily Show.

>>1637004
Obviously.

Why else would half the threads on /lit/ be about things I read back in middle school or high school?

"The Fountainhead" is SOOO much better than "Atlas Shrugged."

>>1637076
Ok.

Why is that? Better characters? better story? better concept?

commend them on their good taste, get off the internet and go and achieve something-
Yours Faithfully,
Ayn Rand

>>1636870
I say that's not Socrates.

>>1637031

Rand represents one of the extremes of political philosophy. I find it hard to believe, in this day an age of some of the worst white collar crime since just before the depression, that people can still get behind her philosophy.

Of course, if you don't agree, you just get lumped in with other extreme and called a leftist commie cunt. That polarization of extremes seems extremely foolish to me, something debilitating to society as a whole.

Thats the lobster pot we're in though, no compromise, and no understanding of opposing points of view. Its easy to see where too much regulation and government involvement in economics, but its also terribly apparent in recent history how allowing the free market to be completely unchecked can lead to some pretty ludicrous practices. The recent sub-prime debacle should be evidence of this.

IMO, her "philosophy" is trash, a means to an end. She placed plutocracy on a pedestal, and even now that the plutocrats have once again injured us grievously, we still see her despicable sycophants sing her praise.

Not to mention the whole medicare thing. She was a hypocrite, plain and simple. I guess she justified it by taking back from the system that stole from her (by means of taxes), but none the less she chose to reap the benefits of that systems, but throughout history philosophers with real integrity chose to die rather than compromise their beliefs. She took the easy path.

>>1637004
I take it you're not very well versed in modern economic/political theory

Sage the cancer afflicting /lit/

>>1637013
She sneaks in all sorts of bullshit into supposedly "objective" philosophy.
"Therefore all beings strive to survive, so morality is based around promoting survival"
"Okay, that sounds reasonable..."
"And if you do anything I dislike, such as not smoking, listening to the wrong music, or liking motorcars, then you're destroying yourself as man qua man and so are effectively dead. Thus, everything I dislike is evil."
"Stop right fucking there."

>Philosopher with no real world or capitalistic experience writes book about how capitalism works.

If Ayn Rand had it her way, a lot of the shit Enron did would've been legal.

fuck you

My opinion on Ayn Rand is thus: I do not take her as a philosophy because her argument is not cogent: Objectivist philosophers have arguments that are in some way derivative or similar in nature, and if I am going to argue philosophy with someone anytime they bring up Rand I pretend they brought up one of the people who had an identical but complete argument.

As a book, I thought it was okay as far as books go. Not particularly great, but not particularly awful. The plot felt a bit contrived, and I don't think society works the way she seemed to think it does, but meh: fiction isn't always realistic.

As far as author tracts go, it was a highly contrived strawman argument meant to appeal to libertarians, free market capitalists, and rebellious teens who think they're outsmarting the establishment by grasping onto a work they view as against the establishment and the masses.

As a fantasy, I find that it appeals to people who imagine themselves to be vastly more intelligent or capable than those around them. Our culture has this motif of a super capable individual who can take on anything or anyone by sheer virtue of his or her own awesomeness. The philosophy of Objectivism as applied within one's own mind is built on the tendency to over attribute success to the self and play off one's responsibility for failure while downplaying the successes of others and inflating their culpability for their own failures. It is meant to appeal to people the same way superhero fiction or some western movies are meant to: by allowing the audience to cast themselves in the role of a superman and providing logical justification for embracing a mechanism well known in psychology.

>>1636894
She's better than Marx.

Forgot pic: it's her intended demographic.

>>1637435
There's a funny version of this pic where the girl has her own thought bubble and all it has in it is "shoes" does anyone have that version?

>>1637430

Wait, we are talking about Atlas Shrugged, right? Doesn't matter though: either way her work is a wee bit on the repetitive side as far as themes go.

>>1637458
I think this is a gereral Rand thread.

I've been meaning to read some of her stuff myself to see why /lit/ seems to despise it so much and dismisses it as Tea Party bullshit.

>>1637126
>Ayn Rand
>supports plutocracy

........do you know how to read

>>1637446

No, seriously. Even popular Marxist academics I've known agree: Ayn Rand is a MUCH better writer than Marx.

Marx writes badly. His style is so wordy it is stultifying. As often as not he writes elliptically. The result is a turgid text which is just about impossible to read. His ideas are just about always correct, but decoding his style makes it terribly difficult to get to the points he is trying to make.

Ayn Rand's writing, in contrast, is clear and cogent. She writes briefly and powerfully. Her meaning is always clear. However, her ideas are often (not always) wrong.

Stalin and Mao write so much more clearly than Marx.

I think the people who agree with all of Rand's ideas are generally stubborn and blind to facts they do not wish to see. Then again, I have met batshit crazy irl Marxists. Neither group has a monopoly on the crazy.

I regard Rand as at least sixty percent correct, i.e. more often than not I think she's right. I think Marx is just about always right but is inaccessible. Rand is the most incisive contemporary capitalist thinker. Smith was more intelligent of course, but people who down Rand instinctively are doing no one any good.

I love how Ayn Rand's existence is absolutely ignored at my uni

I have mixed feelings about her. There are aspects of her that I find compelling, and then there are other aspects that just sour the whole thing for me. I really haven’t delved into her material enough to make a proper or informed commentary. There are a lot of figures who’re like that – where there are aspects of them I find fascinating, and other aspects that blow the whole deal for me. Like Nietzsche for instance, he’s a guy who says: “If you’re going to the bedchamber, bring along a whip.” – and the guy probably died a virgin. So I can agree with a lot of the things he says, but they would be more credible if somebody else – anybody else – were saying it.

Litfag here. I've read all my life from a pretty decent catalogue of geners. Shit from Clive Barker and Stephen King to Marqui de Sade, Lovecraft, Neil Gaiaman. Personally really dug The Fountainhead for what it was. I'm not a hipster either, but would call The Fountainhead one of the better books I've had the experience of reading. Much look forward to Atlas Shrugged.

Anybody care to explain why most people tend to say Fountainhead is better than Atlas?

I've only read Atlas Shrugged and Anthem. Anthem sucked, but I really enjoyed the epic scope and the beautiful prose of Atlas Shrugged. Her philosophy? What little of it that wasn't pilfered from Nietzsche was rather foolish, but so it goes.

>>1638805

I don't think it was pilfered from Nietzche really: Objectivism is sloppy, and really posits more of a meta argument than a real one: people often want to be moral, and want to define morals in a different way than Objectivism would for a variety of reasons. You could overlay it on top of just about anything and it wouldn't matter in terms of how morality on the ground works.

a definite LOL on the art, OP.

>>1638773
It's generally because Atlas Shrugged is too long. It could have been shortened a lot and still gotten the point across. Actually, you technically only needed the speech at the end, that's the whole point of the book, the plot wasn't nearly as good as Th Fountainhead.

>>1638773
Fountainhead is shorter and doesn't feature ridiculous speeches. It has much more realistic characters and is much less didactic. As a work of fiction, it is merely mediocre where Atlas is atrocious.

>>1638939
It's mostly this.
The Fountainhead plot was actually decent. You had manipulation, love/hate sex combined with hints of rape, architecture and a decent ending. The biggest issue is that everyone on here reads because they feel like they need to gain some sort of intellectual superiority over someone by the end of every book. If the story doesn't make a valid social/political/etc point, then it's useless and shit-tier.

I hate her because I hate her philosophy and that it leads people to think living like her characters is good, i.e., whatever I can do is morally right therefore I am justified in being an asshole, killing, raping, stealing, etc.

>>1639043
Jesus Christ, it's like you read a paragraph on wikipedia and judged her book completely on that.
>killing, raping, stealing
She argued that these were an invasion of individual rights. I'm not an objectivist but let's try to raise the level of discussion on this board.