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Our Daughter Isn't a Selfish Brat, Your Son Just Hasn't Read Atlas Shrugged (2010)
- redbar0n 4y agoSeems like the author satirically argues against Objectivism by putting up lack of charity and generosity as a straw man characterization to attack. He completely ignores the fact that taxation is collected irrespective of goodwill attitude, and under the threat of force (violence/jail). I frankly would have hoped the argument was not a straw man and that he argued against the actual essence of the philosophy of Objectivism. Instead of taking the cheap way out to argue against a mere peripheral unfortunate potential consequence of it (when taken to an extreme).
- bennysonething 4y agoCame here to say the same thing, gave up reading article after half way through when it became apparent it was a straw man.
- undoware 4y agoA "straw man" is a variety of argument. This makes no argument; it is satire -- a caricature -- as has been repeatedly pointed out; hence, it cannot be a straw man. Now, this is not to say that it might not blamelessly strike you as unfunny; in this case, though, you may want to reword your comment as "not funny IMO". Shrugs I liked it
- bennysonething 4y ago
- bananarchist 4y agoThis isn't an argument it's a comical story, but no one has ever mistaken an objectivist for having a sense of humor, so I don't know why I'm surprised by this response.
- bennysonething 4y agoIt's a self righteous rant trying to disguise itself as a comical story. Fails due to lack of laughs.
- bananarchist 4y agoYou shoulda been in the room where I was reading it. Uncharted chortles. I guess humor is _sub_jective tho...
- benj111 4y agoHow many Objectivists does it take to change a lightbulb?
- redbar0n 4y agoBut it seems you have mistaken me for an Objectivist. I was hoping for a good satire of Objectivism, one that really hit the nail on the head.
- bananarchist 4y agoMy mistake. Personally I always smash my thumb whenever I swing a hammer.
- jhbadger 4y agoThen play Bioshock.
- redbar0n 4y agoOh my, it’s on my to-play list, so this might just inspire me to buy it!
- thedrexster 4y agoHere's another strong, strong recommendation you do so :D
- benj111 4y agoThe tag line is "daily humour every day since 1998" It is, as you point out, satire. It is a quite common device in satire to set up a less than accurate scenario, in order to highlight a single failing. It isn't aiming to be a well balanced essay on the pros and cons of anything.
- redbar0n 4y agoYeah, but there is good satire (which hits the mark, even remotely), and there’s bad satire.
- gota 4y agoMy dear comrade; you are publicly and repeatedly complaining about something not being funny. That is never a good sign of dettachment. No one will ever believe you are not offended by the article because everyone knows that, if it were the case, you'd simply not have posted (much less replied several times) Let us chill and drink some delicious juice made out of these misterious fruits of our labor
- redbar0n 4y agoI’m not complaining that it wasn’t funny. I’m belaboring that it was vacuous and disappointing. I want good satire that hits something and has a punch!
- skinnymuch 4y agoI don’t think the specifics of why you’re complaining is the point of the commenter you responded to. It’s that you’re complaining so much. Note the parent comment brought up you not being offended or deattached.
- redbar0n 4y agoI made a single legitimate criticism of the article. I’m no objectivist, as mentioned in another reply thread. The parent comment did actually assume I took offense from the article or is particularly attached to it, both of which is false. My only attachment here is to clearing up false speculation about my motive.
- Yaa101 4y agoNah, the author is just really sad that poor Johanna will never have any real friends...
- moomin 4y agoYou're getting heavily dunked on here, but personally I think your parody of an Ayn Rand fan is even more on point than the author's.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jleyank 4y agoI don’t know whose or what philosophy it is but I try to live by “don’t be an asshole”. By extension, “don’t associate with assholes whenever possible” guides my daily life. Sometimes, I can’t, so “work allows me to do what I like” helps lessen the sting. I’m also far too lazy and unskilled to write satire and admittedly not really patient enough to read it.
- ttfkam 4y ago"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
- tryptophan 4y agoI've never understood why Atlas Shrugged gets so much more hate than any other book that ever gets mentioned. Its like a rule of the internet that anytime it is mentioned, people must show up and dunk on it.
- YuriNiyazov 4y agoBecause later on in life, you meet people in corporate boardrooms who love doing layoffs and say things like "Atlas Shrugged was the best book I've ever read, it changed my life"
- tb_technical 4y agoAnd you've been in those boardrooms?
- YuriNiyazov 4y agoIs this the equivalent of "Citation Needed"? Either I have been, or people that I trust have been.
- loki49152 4y agoIt's easier to snark at something than to actually address its content. Witness the vacuous "dunkage" of that quote above. Literally any book with heroes, people of principle, or people who achieve things can be in the second slot. It's just something for people who have nothing to say, to say.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoI've often been surprised by how many women are fans of Atlas Shrugged but I guess having a female main character written by a woman has something to do with it as the philosophical themes usually aren't aligned with those reader's ideological preferences. Male Ayn Rand fans much more frequently prefer The Fountainhead, which also features strong female characters but is told from a male's perspective. No idea if this is just a reflection of people I know or true in the larger societal context.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoPossibly the reader-hero/-author mirror effect. I wouldn't ascribe too much to gender equating to philosophical tendencies. I'm often disappointed by the lack of philosophical depth and nuance objectivist adherents display. Plus, the arrogance of assuming one's perception is exactly the way reality is when there are as many viewpoints as there are individuals. Beyond math and gravity, subjectivity and ambiguity are the norm. Furthermore, no one is an island and cannot scale their efforts beyond themselves without cooperation and friendships that require solidarity. Modern libertarianism, the political extension of hyper-individualist objectivism, is largely an ideology sold and popularized by billionaire climate deniers to cynically benefit themselves.
- anthony_d 4y agoI’m guessing that’s just a reflection of who you know. In my experience no one likes Fountainhead and most of the people who like Atlas Shrugged are men.
- lukewrites 4y agoGore Vidal wrote my favorite summation of Ayn Rand: This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the "freedom is slavery" sort. What interests me most about her is not the absurdity of her "philosophy," but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about). She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the "welfare" state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you're dumb or incompetent that's your lookout. …For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more difficult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea which ahs figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race. We often fail. That predatory demon "I" is difficult to contain but until now we have all agreed that to help others is a right action. … Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4595/comment-0761/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4595/comment-0761/
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoThere's a good reason Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy holding "History of the National Security State". If we don't live for others, he who dies with most toys still wins a lonely, meaningless death. I believe Ayn had a chip on her shoulder from growing up in the Soviet Union and took an extremist contrarian view rather than a moderate one. Extremism is often what catapults people into fame. "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt - until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." -G.V.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoIs it satire? It reads like a narcissism-rationalizing shitpost in the spirit of "throwing trash on the ground creates jobs". There is quite a difference in culture between US military families and Europeans on one-side and "It's all about me" on the other.
- etrevino 4y agoThis is satire. McSweeney's is a humor literary journal.
- mikestew 4y agoIt would probably be helpful had you previously read Atlas Shrugged. I am by no means recommending the book (in fact, I'd advise avoiding such poor writing and childish naivety), but having been one of the unfortunate folks who wasted hours on that book, I knew what the author was going for from the first paragraph. And I found it quite humorous.
- bjourne 4y agoSpoiler alert: there is no hardcore sex in Atlas Shrugged.
- mikestew 4y agoSpoiler alert: it's a humor piece. There's sex in Atlas Shrugged, maybe it just doesn't fall into your category of "hard core", but again I will point out that it could have been described as such for humorous effect.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kderbyma 4y agoMost people who have a dislike for Atlas Shrugged have a poor understanding due to having only engorged themselves on satire about the book, poor rendered assumptions about the nature of the messages written by enraged people who take offense at what I can only assume stems from seeing themselves as part of the groups which Rand disparages (collectivism) and frankly tend to have never read the book in its entirety let alone anything else written by her to have a sense of the ongoing themes and an improvement to her writing style. the book inspires the idea of individual potential....which if you have no personal desire to achieve tends to enrage and put one on the defence, but for those who have a spark of fire they get inspired. I like the book, and would love to have an honest discourse on its flaws that is equally willing to acknowledge the depths of its actual arguments and the strengths of propositions when taken into account the underlying presumptions that are at the heart of the novel. It is a novel after all and not an academic treatise which many liken it to because of the marketing.
- dilyevsky 4y agoI’ve read about 2/3rds of it. It’s a terribly written book - too drawn out and on the nose and the “message” is obvious since chapter two or so. It’s like one of those idiotic self help books where if you read first couple chapters you’ve read the whole thing Same thing with Fountainhead which i read whole
- kderbyma 4y agoI agree it has flaws and needed an editor. The book is about 30-40% too long, and does repeat the ideas, but if you ignore that aspect which is fair given many books suffer from that which are popular and well loved. The biggest flaw is the repetition and the final monologue is 5x too long. it is much better when you see the fountainhead. which is very similar themes, but has a lot less of those writing problems.
- kderbyma 4y agoAlso...it is a novel...so the message part isn't the whole point. There is a plot...
- rufus_foreman 4y agoNowhere near as funny as the very seasonally appropriate "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers." -- https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-sea...
- dublin 4y agoNow THAT'S funny, I don't care who you are. (Although it will certainly gag pretty much any content filter that can't buffer more than a few dozen F-bombs...)
- jti107 4y agoi cant think of any successful/stable long term civilization/tribe/country/society/city state that is based on this concept. might work if you're a hermit or lone monk.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoIt also works for people who have enough weight to throw around so that they don't have to care about the consequences of their actions. You would think that the social repercussions of doing such would be enough to alert someone that they were self-sabotaging, but the mindset has a built in mechanism that prevents this insight from occurring, namely that it allows the user to reframe such feedback as other's attempts at looting them from their rewards. It's a bit of a strange mental attractor in that respect, once a stable orbit of the assemblage of ideas takes place, it is very difficult to perturb one out of it.