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What's up with this "Ayn Rand fanboys" meme? I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.

by qb45 9y ago

quakeguy 9y ago
IDK really, but i found this article lately: https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad-ideas-ayn-rands-fanboys-take-the-reins-of-power/ https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad-ideas-a... Make your own conclusions.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rbg246 9y ago
  I'm not sure one one can make their 'own' conclusions from reading that article it was clearly biased towards reaching the conclusion that Ayn Rand was a writer for 'juveniles' which I don't think is a fair appraisal. I mean I don't agree with her conclusions on the world but I would say the world she has created in her novels are at a higher level than juvenile reading.
  - qb45 9y ago
    Why, I enjoyed this article, particularly the part about rape and the end: I seriously doubt that Donald Trump is really a fan of Ayn Rand. Her books may be juvenile and shallow, but they’re way too deep for him. Make your own conclusions, indeed. Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. Um, I only hope they don't give awards for that.
    - problems 9y ago
      Salon is a very left-wing site, heavily opinion-based. You get about the same kind of thing when looking at opinion sites from any part of the political spectrum. It's glorified trash talking really.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- qb45 9y ago
  Hey, thanks for this link and sorry it got you downvoted by losers who can't take a rant like a man :p This was probably the best response of all because it provides a plausible explanation why this started only recently. I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until lots of people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    > I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago. No, a group of people have been posting about Rand for years. Here's a thread from 8 years ago people on both sides of the like/dislike divide. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292 Here's a post with over 40 points that's just a quote from Atlas Shrugged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250#5860696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250#5860696
    - qb45 9y ago
      But I haven't seen these posts before so your argument is obviously invalid :p I'm not saying that it never happened but that it wasn't the case that she was mentioned in every other flamewar about politics. From hn.algolia.com, excerpts from all "Ayn Rand" posts in the last 10 days, except replies to these posts: Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work? Yeah, that would be great in the Ayn Rand's fantasy land I had a coworker who was a hardcore Ayn Rand type who had a real harsh point of view like this, until his infant was born with a congenital heart defect that resulted in hospitalization for 3-4 months. [this one actually isn't dumb] HN is nothing but startup bros, armchair economists, and card-carrying Ayn Rand fan club members. For an entire generation community-oriented principles, egalitarianism, collectivist ideas, and far-left leaders were demonized as Soviet sympathizers, replaced with rah rah unregulated capitalism, Ayn Rand-ian individualist, and military might. [tl;dr, might be reasonable] Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.
      - 9y ago
self-diversity 9y ago
In the current Internet culture, it's very important to constantly signal to the world that you have the correct political stance. You will often find such people espousing the notion that "everything is political" which is fairly silly, all things considered, but here we are.
Chaebixi 9y ago
> I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant. In this case, it sounds like it's mocking the idea that the market-based voluntary agreements could solve this problem. Lots of people seem to think you can solve any problem by just "letting the market work."
- Omniusaspirer 9y ago
  The market is working very well on advertisements. They grow increasingly obnoxious, and the adblockers keep getting better and more prevalent in response. The end result is either reasonable ads (probably too late for this) or the death of this particular flavor of the ad-driven revenue model. I fully expect we'll look back on Internet advertising as a bootstrapper for the early Internet economy as opposed to a lasting model.
  - thesuitonym 9y ago
    I'd love to believe that, but I felt much the same way in the double-dickities, when popups and popunders were rampant, and popup blockers started becoming common place. Eventually, only the oldest and least tech literate of people still had browsers that allowed popups, and they started to go away. It seemed like advertising like that was going away, but it didn't, it just changed, and instead of opening in a new window, it just opens as a DIV in the same one. Only this time it's controlled by the same javascript that is required to make the site even work, so it probably won't ever go away.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    I think that's optimistic. As thesuitonym says, when bad internet advertising is blocked, it evolves into even worse (and less blockable) advertising. We're already seeing the rise of "native advertising," i.e. "pay websites to run ads masquerading as their own content."
  - xg15 9y ago
    Cue the rise of ad-blocker-blockers where you're faced with a) allow a possible vector of malware or b) don 't consume the site et all. Of course at some point there might be ad-blocker-blocker-blockers which will postpone the problem to another round. But do we really want an economy based on an arms race?
StevePerkins 9y ago
Pretty much just Reddit leaking into HN. Some people live in a political/cultural "tribe", and see the entire world through a prism where everything they dislike is linked to "the other tribe". They often punctuate every paragraph with some meme jab at the other tribe, even if it's seemingly irrelevant for everyone else who doesn't share the same prism. On Reddit, this results in imaginary Internet points (i.e. upvotes), which reinforces the behavior and the underlying mindset. The HN community is better, but still not immune to this. I'm convinced that the "gamification" of online discussion over the past ten years has pretty deep impacts that future generations will look back on someday.
- _delirium 9y ago
  I don't think this has much to do with Reddit. "Randroid" and similar terms as a derogatory way of describing a certain cluster of ultra-free-market views has been common on every online discussion service I've been on, dating back to Usenet. Although this may be partly because actual, honest-to-god Ayn Rand fans are also surprisingly common on online discussion forums (and were especially common on Usenet).
  - specialist 9y ago
    It predates even usenet, eg FidoNet, BIX, CompuServe. My gamer and geek friends have been spewing libertarian flavored Randian nonsense since middle school, circa 1983. I never imagined that worldview would prevail. It was just so puerile. Not so different than the tortured coming of age fantasies embraced by the other subcultures (stoners, metalheads, preppies). Though maybe the nerds were more aggrieved, seeing themselves as an oppressed minority. Of course, none of us knew about the well funded propaganda machine pushing the whole Austrian/Chicago school of economics. Young Republicans, trickle-down economics, John Birch Society, Hertitage Foundation, disaster capitalism, Grover Norquist, etc. Edit: TL;DR: Mockery is the only appropriate response.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Downvotes for truth, here, I suppose. You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center. And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness. Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Education https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Educ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center See, e.g., Philip Mirowski's The Road From Mont Pelerin: http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-making-of-the-neoliberal-thought-collective-with-a-new-preface/oclc/937723469 http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-mak...

What's up with this "Ayn Rand fanboys" meme? I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.

by qb45 9y ago

What's up with this "Ayn Rand fanboys" meme? I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant.

quakeguy 9y ago

IDK really, but i found this article lately: https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad-ideas-ayn-rands-fanboys-take-the-reins-of-power/ https://www.salon.com/2016/12/14/fountainhead-of-bad-ideas-a... Make your own conclusions.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rbg246 9y ago
I'm not sure one one can make their 'own' conclusions from reading that article it was clearly biased towards reaching the conclusion that Ayn Rand was a writer for 'juveniles' which I don't think is a fair appraisal. I mean I don't agree with her conclusions on the world but I would say the world she has created in her novels are at a higher level than juvenile reading.
- qb45 9y ago
  Why, I enjoyed this article, particularly the part about rape and the end: I seriously doubt that Donald Trump is really a fan of Ayn Rand. Her books may be juvenile and shallow, but they’re way too deep for him. Make your own conclusions, indeed. Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism. Um, I only hope they don't give awards for that.
  - problems 9y ago
    Salon is a very left-wing site, heavily opinion-based. You get about the same kind of thing when looking at opinion sites from any part of the political spectrum. It's glorified trash talking really.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
qb45 9y ago
Hey, thanks for this link and sorry it got you downvoted by losers who can't take a rant like a man :p This was probably the best response of all because it provides a plausible explanation why this started only recently. I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until lots of people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago.
- DanBC 9y ago
  > I mean, I swear I have never seen Rand mentioned on HN by anyone in any way until people suddenly started making fun of her few weeks ago. No, a group of people have been posting about Rand for years. Here's a thread from 8 years ago people on both sides of the like/dislike divide. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=427292 Here's a post with over 40 points that's just a quote from Atlas Shrugged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250#5860696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860250#5860696
  - qb45 9y ago
    But I haven't seen these posts before so your argument is obviously invalid :p I'm not saying that it never happened but that it wasn't the case that she was mentioned in every other flamewar about politics. From hn.algolia.com, excerpts from all "Ayn Rand" posts in the last 10 days, except replies to these posts: Was there ever a honest belief by anyone (except the Ayn Rand fanboys) this could work? Yeah, that would be great in the Ayn Rand's fantasy land I had a coworker who was a hardcore Ayn Rand type who had a real harsh point of view like this, until his infant was born with a congenital heart defect that resulted in hospitalization for 3-4 months. [this one actually isn't dumb] HN is nothing but startup bros, armchair economists, and card-carrying Ayn Rand fan club members. For an entire generation community-oriented principles, egalitarianism, collectivist ideas, and far-left leaders were demonized as Soviet sympathizers, replaced with rah rah unregulated capitalism, Ayn Rand-ian individualist, and military might. [tl;dr, might be reasonable] Nobody cares about your Ayn Rand pablum anymore. Argue on morals that have any grounding at all in the real world.
    - 9y ago

self-diversity 9y ago

In the current Internet culture, it's very important to constantly signal to the world that you have the correct political stance. You will often find such people espousing the notion that "everything is political" which is fairly silly, all things considered, but here we are.

Chaebixi 9y ago

> I keep seeing this recently and this time I can't even imagine how it could be relevant. In this case, it sounds like it's mocking the idea that the market-based voluntary agreements could solve this problem. Lots of people seem to think you can solve any problem by just "letting the market work."

Omniusaspirer 9y ago
The market is working very well on advertisements. They grow increasingly obnoxious, and the adblockers keep getting better and more prevalent in response. The end result is either reasonable ads (probably too late for this) or the death of this particular flavor of the ad-driven revenue model. I fully expect we'll look back on Internet advertising as a bootstrapper for the early Internet economy as opposed to a lasting model.
- thesuitonym 9y ago
  I'd love to believe that, but I felt much the same way in the double-dickities, when popups and popunders were rampant, and popup blockers started becoming common place. Eventually, only the oldest and least tech literate of people still had browsers that allowed popups, and they started to go away. It seemed like advertising like that was going away, but it didn't, it just changed, and instead of opening in a new window, it just opens as a DIV in the same one. Only this time it's controlled by the same javascript that is required to make the site even work, so it probably won't ever go away.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  I think that's optimistic. As thesuitonym says, when bad internet advertising is blocked, it evolves into even worse (and less blockable) advertising. We're already seeing the rise of "native advertising," i.e. "pay websites to run ads masquerading as their own content."
- xg15 9y ago
  Cue the rise of ad-blocker-blockers where you're faced with a) allow a possible vector of malware or b) don 't consume the site et all. Of course at some point there might be ad-blocker-blocker-blockers which will postpone the problem to another round. But do we really want an economy based on an arms race?

StevePerkins 9y ago

Pretty much just Reddit leaking into HN. Some people live in a political/cultural "tribe", and see the entire world through a prism where everything they dislike is linked to "the other tribe". They often punctuate every paragraph with some meme jab at the other tribe, even if it's seemingly irrelevant for everyone else who doesn't share the same prism. On Reddit, this results in imaginary Internet points (i.e. upvotes), which reinforces the behavior and the underlying mindset. The HN community is better, but still not immune to this. I'm convinced that the "gamification" of online discussion over the past ten years has pretty deep impacts that future generations will look back on someday.

_delirium 9y ago
I don't think this has much to do with Reddit. "Randroid" and similar terms as a derogatory way of describing a certain cluster of ultra-free-market views has been common on every online discussion service I've been on, dating back to Usenet. Although this may be partly because actual, honest-to-god Ayn Rand fans are also surprisingly common on online discussion forums (and were especially common on Usenet).
- specialist 9y ago
  It predates even usenet, eg FidoNet, BIX, CompuServe. My gamer and geek friends have been spewing libertarian flavored Randian nonsense since middle school, circa 1983. I never imagined that worldview would prevail. It was just so puerile. Not so different than the tortured coming of age fantasies embraced by the other subcultures (stoners, metalheads, preppies). Though maybe the nerds were more aggrieved, seeing themselves as an oppressed minority. Of course, none of us knew about the well funded propaganda machine pushing the whole Austrian/Chicago school of economics. Young Republicans, trickle-down economics, John Birch Society, Hertitage Foundation, disaster capitalism, Grover Norquist, etc. Edit: TL;DR: Mockery is the only appropriate response.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Downvotes for truth, here, I suppose. You could add in the Mont Pelerin Society,Foundation for Economic Freedom, Atlas Network, and Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Adam Smith Institute, Mercatus Center. And personnel: Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, the Kochs (Fred, Charles, David), for completeness. Mark Ames has an excellent general summary: http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Network https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/global-directory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Education https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Economic_Educ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercatus_Center See, e.g., Philip Mirowski's The Road From Mont Pelerin: http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-making-of-the-neoliberal-thought-collective-with-a-new-preface/oclc/937723469 http://www.worldcat.org/title/road-from-mont-pelerin-the-mak...