A few years back Chris Hedges did a showshow/podcast or something and he was forced to finally read in depth a lot more Rand.

I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".

Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.

▲ mchusma 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think anyone who says there is nothing interesting in Rand either didn’t read it or is acting in bad faith. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead are uniquely fascinating even if you don’t agree with her stance.

Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.

▲ bsenftner a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know how anyone can read her and not feel the overt reader manipulation. Her skill, if any, is to break the 3rd wall without seeming to acknowledge that 3rd wall and constantly tell the reader they are one of these special people that are borne better than others.

Rand is a clear intellectual trap for lazy thinkers. If you like her, you're not thinking.

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jerf a day ago | parent | next [-]

I think reading philosophical arguments masquerading as novels, or any sort of fiction, is an intellectual trap in general. Anything can be made to work in a fictional work simply by saying that it works. It means nothing.

"Genghis Khan the 73rd, who got high on some really weird drugs in the fifth year of his reign, decided that everybody in his empire should be tortured for at least 73 minutes every day. And everybody loved it and completely voluntarily sang his praises and said it was the best thing that ever happened to society and there were just all sorts of benefits and you should totally organize your society this way too because look how well it is working for this one."

	▲	bsenftner 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Very good points.

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lostmsu 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The parent comment has more nuanced opinion than yours. They also substantiate it by raising a point of value in reviewing contrary viewpoint, whereas your comment is devoid of any arguments.

▲ lolc a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I liked reading Rand much as I liked reading Tolkien. Now if I try to read either, the fantasy just doesn't work anymore.

Oh and even back then Atlas Shrugged was too damn preachy.

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slyall a day ago | parent | next [-]

“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

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adastra22 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hey them be fighting words… about Tolkien, not Rand.

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lolc 14 hours ago | parent [-]

We live in a world where surveillance tech is named after Tolkien fantasies. Fight them, not my words.

	▲	adastra22 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What does that have to do with the quality of Tolkien's fiction?

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throwaway422432 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I would also put it in the category of too long. Bit of a commitment to pick it up and read cover to cover.

▲ anthem2025 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Literally every person I have any respect for as an intellectual has described Ayn Rand as slop.

I have yet to hear positive things come from anyone who isn’t a libertarian. The sort of person who identifies with the characters because they could also envision themselves doing a monologue that lasts 45 pages.

	▲	a day ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲ defrost 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Both Rand and William McGonagall are widely regarded as are uniquely fascinating.

In a layered complex world both the above statement and the statement that there's little of interest in Rand's books for socialists, for hedge fund traders, or for the majority of people with a background in political science, can be true.

Stephen Fry, well known for his love of the English language and breadth of eclectic interest, when discussing the Scot said:

  I am too kind to you and to [McGonagall's] memory to reproduce the entire poem'

(The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within [NY: Gotham, 2007], p. 153), and further:

  Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse.

  His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it.

  It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.

(p. 154, as above)

Regardless of anyone's position on the political stance of Rand, her written works deserve little more than to be the subject of atrocious parody of her robber baron sick o' fantasy, the breathless bodice ripping drama of trains repeatedly entering and being reversed out of tunnels against a soundscape of a geared steampunk stock ticker of yore.

	▲	bitwize a day ago \| parent [-]
		I discovered William Topaz McGonagall after learning his surname was given to Harry Potter character Professor Minerva McGonagall. I was... astounded. Here, truly, was the Florence Foster Jenkins of poetry writing, destined to fame for all the wrong reasons.