Has Anyone Else Read “Atlas Shrugged?”

Margot is an excellent commenter.

She is way above average at political forum.

Her comment that sent you into a tizzy is accurate.

 

nice try wong...

 

Well that's demonstrably false in my case. I began reading her work after I turned 30 and I still count myself an admirer at 47.

 

me too, and it still sells a half million copies or so per/year. that's highly significant. we have to ask why libs are threatened by a book ??

 

That makes no sense, idiot!

 

Of course it's not meant to be literally true. But the vast majority of people who read Atlas Shrugged do so as students, and drop any admiration after exposure to the real world.

What's to admire? Rand was wrong about everything, and promoted selfishness, violence, atheism, and other negative values.

 

Crack cocaine is also a best-seller. And libs aren't threatened by the book, just the idiocy, hypocrisy, and ignorance of people who promote the book's fraudulent values..

 

Thank you, Jeff. I would never read it but now I know how to talk to the idiots who swear by it.

 

You are approximately half right: Your four points are:

a) Rand was wrong about everything (which is demonstrably false)..
b) promoted selfishness (correct although what she means by this is likely not understood)..
c) promoted violence (a useless claim given it's out of context. Everyone promotes some violence within a particular context such as self defense or justifiable retaliation. More clarification is needed from you.)
d) promoted atheism (given that God is unproven, this is quite understandable. Given the relative damage and destruction caused by a great number of religiously motivated actions and given that no life threatening actions that I know of are motivated by mere atheism, calling atheism a negative value is off the mark.)

 

We have to ask why Rand fans convince themselves that "libs are threatened by a book."

Pulp fiction writers like Ms Rosenbaum provide harmless diversion for many adolescent males - "ChickLit" for the pimpled and puerile.



(There is a zany ilk of alienated malcontents for whom "liberals" has become their very own circumlocution for "most Americans.")

 

not only do the books sell well, look at all this discussion, very telling... no ? like the birth certificate, 0bots put an awful lot of time and energy into telling me they don't put into it lot's of time and energy.

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that sound sexist to me.

 

Telling, indeed! The Randies are a hoot!

Rosenbaum's fantasy prose is comparable to Stephen Hawking's non-fiction tomes Brief History of Time and The Grand Design, best-sellers, oft-discussed, seldom read.


Call it sexist, but I'd opt for the confections of Arthur C Clark or Isaac Asimov as the best of her genre.

 

Of course, when I say Rand was wrong about everything, I don't mean it literally. In the generally accepted sense of the term, she was indeed "wrong about everything."

The meaning of "selfishness" is pretty clear.

Rand's approval of violence is apparent in many events in Atlas Shrugged and in her descriptions and choices of words. No self-defense is involved.

Rand's promotion of atheism would certainly be disturbing to most people who admire her and Atlas Shrugged, if they had the reading comprehension to notice.

 

She made it clear to anyone who has read the intro to 'The Virtue of Selfishness' or this entry (Ayn Rand Lexicon):

In Objectivism, Selfishness refers to self benefiting values and actions and nothing more. Is this what call a negative value?

 

Self-benefiting values and NOTHING ELSE!!!!!

I rest my case.

 

Yeah, that value over all other values is negative.

 

Yeah, that's what selfishness refers to. Everyone is selfish to the extent that they attend to their own life which every single person does to the extent that they sustain life rather than proceed to self destruct. Your point isn't made at all. What makes being selfish negative?

 

Are you being sarcastic or are you literally saying that valuing your own self is negative? How do you stay alive? How do you prosper?

 

How do you fight a war?

 

We read it in one of the courses I took in college. Honestly, I skimmed it because I had a LOT else to do, working full-time, and, going to school full-time, too. The story always struck me as being a bit heavy-handed, although I agreed with the author's very obvious point-of-view. The post-World War II world that "Atlas Shrugged" made its appearance in was still very much a world of stark black-and-white interpretations of socio-political and economic structures.

I suggest that before, or after, you read "Atlas Shrugged", you should read at least the first volume of the original "Foundation" trilogy, by Issac Asimov. I got my first real understanding of who and what the "Insider"-hegemony are by studying the mind and manipulative methods of the first prominent character in the story, called "Hari Seldon": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Seldon

 

it's just a story guys, not a manifesto, don't take it too seriously.

 

No I am being serious. You must not be because you ignore what I said: "over all other values"

 

even this thread about reading atlas shrugged has six and a half thousand reads, six and a half hundred replies and sixty five pages about people not talking about no one ever reading ayn rand after high school. this is just like the Benghazi affair and the birther scandal that no one heard of that nobody talks about... the dam is breaking ladies and gents.

 

did you start your term paper on sunday night like obamavich, or did you just sign the cliff's notes and hand them in..like obamavich...... just kidding...

you skimmed it, and rendered commentary.... hmmm

I do respect your going to school and working though, that takes guts and fortitude.. i'm waiting for the movie to come out.

I would add heinlein and huxley to your list. hey, I just noticed that Huxley died the day jfk was assassinated.

 

Never bought a "cliff's notes" in my life... never needed one. But, no, I didn't read "Atlas Shrugged" with nail-biting, word-for-word exactness. Although I agreed with some of Ayn Rand's philosophy, I found the book itself to be, frankly, a bit of a pedantic bore. Not so with Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy. I read and re-read every word about the character, "Hari Seldon", with great intensity. Very heady stuff for a young guy, back in the ancient day....

Anybody can go to college if they just try. I did nothing special. I worked my way through the University of Texas at Austin, made good grades, and did fairly well in life afterward. And I've never forgotten what I learned through that "Hari Seldon" character....

Hint: I'll be willing to bet that the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, has also read the "Foundation" trilogy, and that he probably imagines that he is some kind of "Hari Seldon" in our time.