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A real life Ayn Rand story.
by thebmax 11y ago
A real life Ayn Rand story.
- pjkundert 11y agoYa, I'm a libertarian, and I find myself flinching a bit while reading Atlas Shrugged. What's even funnier, though, is seeing real life unfold in front of my eyes that matches it, almost so perfectly that you'd think the politicians were following it as a script!
- ctdonath 11y agoI just finished it. While a little over-the-top at times to get points across, it addresses well the much-maligned "hyperproductive" of society. It was staggering how perfectly the first third matches our current socioeconomic conditions, with the only difference in trajectory being the story having the productive rich bail out of society specifically to crash the "looters"' plans.
- nickik 11y agoIm a libertarian as well and I dislike Rand quite a bit. I think its horrible that Objectivism is seen as the only philosopical backbone of libertarian society. While in reality I base everythng on Burke, Hume, Smith, Hayek and many others. These are complete different and hole incompadible with Objectivism. Not to say that she did not have some good observations on some of the things she was against. Her modern followers by and inlarge horrible idiots that I don't want to be associated with.
- lucaspottersky 11y agoyeah... For a moment I thought I was reading an excerpt of "Atlas Shrugged"
- davidw 11y agoExcept that it was Hugo Chavez that gave the speeches lasting hours.
- kelvin0 11y agoI read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover (and suffered). How did they deal with that speech in the movie that came out for it? I sure hope they cut it short ...
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoThe movie was only the first half of the book. They didn't do the speech at all.
- davidw 11y agoThat's slated for the third 2 hour movie.
- B1FF_PSUVM 11y agoIf they hurry, they can get Fidel Castro to do the John Galton speech. He has the chops.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoI doubt they'll make another one since the first was universally panned and made almost no money. How's that for irony?
- amorphid 11y agoThey have already made parts 2 and 3. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1985017/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1985017/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2800038/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2800038/
- kafkaesq 11y agoHere's another: https://www.vice.com/read/atlas-mugged-922-v21n10 https://www.vice.com/read/atlas-mugged-922-v21n10 The eagerness of a different (but overlapping) libertarian cabal to court favor with the notoriously corrupt (and murderous) regime in Honduras to build their own version of paradise on the northern coast of that country (at the expense of the local Garífuna community) is also quite telling. Her legacy would seem to cut both ways, we might say.
- 13thLetter 11y agoExcept for the small detail that these guys' project swiftly disintegrated due to personality conflicts, zoning issues, and possible fraud before it ever started, and the most damage it did was that a couple of contractors didn't get paid. Meanwhile, Chavismo has immiserated millions of people and imposed a corrupt authoritarian government on a whole nation. So the parallels aren't really very close at all.
- kafkaesq 11y agoIf you want a larger-scale example, the wholesale transformation of life in the U.S., Britain and much of the rest of the world since the early 1980s -- not strictly Randian, but definitely Rand-inspired -- hasn't exactly gone swimmingly well, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism Of course radical libertarianism and authoritarian socialism, while both pipe dreams, are basically apples and oranges to one another, and can't be compared side by side. But the point about the smaller-scale fiascos in Chile and Honduras is that it shows how farcical (and corrupt) that ideology can be whenever people do try to incarnate it in its purest form, out there in the real, actual world. This coming from people who claim to know vastly better about reinventing the world from the ground up. "Glass houses, throwing stones", and all that.
- 13thLetter 11y agoIf you really want to count up the number of corpses created by "radical libertarianism" and authoritarian socialism, we can just go right ahead and do that. I don't think you'll like the result, though.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dang 11y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11306608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11306608 and marked it off-topic.