Atlas Shrugged Movie And Ayn Rand

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/27/atlas-shrugged-economy/ - Commentary

So the rebooted Ayn Rand novel movie is coming out right in time for the tail end of election season and Ayn Rand herself is a pretty popular source of personal philosophy in some political spheres though the name hasn't quite achieved household status.

The producers and financiers of the movie are counting on her philosophy of objectivism to ring true with viewers who may not be aware of her ideas and unlike the flop that was the last attempt at this flick, marketing is up along with production values.

So how do you guys feel about Objectivism or Ayn Rand in general?

If i wanted to read a 35k word speech about egotism I'd read it. But who really wants to read a 35k word page speech in the middle of a novel.

I never bothered to read it. From what I understand it is a wannabe 1984... only not good.

link

Read The Fountainhead at 17. Got to the job creator paradise utopia superfriends club part in Atlas Shrugged and was like wtf am i reading.

I think a lot of people who don't like Rand equate her with her followers. The hardcore Marxists out there are some of the most annoying people on the planet. Marx's actual works by contrast, though I disagree with them, are reasoned scholarly discourses; I've got no beef with that. Rand's followers can be, well I be political here and say abrasive, but her actual philosophies are well considered scholarly pursuits. As a game theory professor of mine put it back in the day "True scholars are above petty vendettas and grudges over ideology, but will engage in vigorous debate and argument in the search of truth: this world has precious few real scholars."

Anthem is not a terrible read if you want the gist of objectivism. It's also pamphlet-sized compared to the coffee table that is Atlas Shrugged.

Part 1: 28/100 on metacritic

Yeah no thanks, if I want to torture myself I'll read it in the original awful form.

Read the essay, Ayn Rand followers aren't "real scholars".
I've read Marx, and he's wrong.

I take issue with some of Rand's work, but some of the most brilliant and insightful people I've ever met sing her the highest of praises. And I agree with Marx being wrong but he made bold claims that were over time empirically testable. Unfortunately his modern day disciples take his work as penultimate truth entirely apart from the evidence.

This made me laugh.
It was interesting to an extent. Which disciples in particular do you mean?

That's funny. I've never seen a Randhead cast Embrava.

I'm not thinking of a specific group so much as the many Marxists out there who view his theories as truth unto themselves. If you look at some of the things Marx said he specifically predicted that (in England since that was where he was drawing from) the well being of the ordinary man would decline while the fat cats at the top continued to get richer as a result of industrialization and people would rise up and take back the means of production. Of course what we actually saw was a period of unprecedented rapid growth in the well being of the ordinary citizen in England thanks to industrialization and thus no such uprising. He had a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong, but that's no biggie; it's all part of being a scientist.

I just went into my bathroom to see if I could summon the ghost of Ayn Rand by spinning around and saying her name three times.

It didn't work, but now my roommate things I'm a sociopath.

This just in: the development team will be implementing Ayn Rand before Cait Sith.

That's what you were saying, right? This thread is making my brain fuzzy.

I only have two qualms Rand.

She acts like middle ground is an awful idea: every character is a pure extreme. She makes sure it's known that only by 100% being on her page can you be 'good', and anything else leads to a reveal about how you're 100% evil.

She can't write worth a damn.

Sorry you'll need to retract; that phrase is reserved for describing Stephanie Meyer

No, I think I'll stand by it. It's an extension of my first point.

After the first few chapters, her plot is extraordinarily predictable and her characters even moreso because they are very, very 1-dimensional. She also has an addiction to trying to sound lofty.

Acts like?

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/26/opinion/la-oe-schneider-atlas-shrugged-reviews-20120826

From the link I posted earlier, a critic in 1957 wrote:

Thread title reminded me Cloud Atlas is coming out this month.

...moving right along.

Well you're either in the moral right or moral wrong. That's a pretty common sentiment for ethics, and her characters and their actions really just exist to demonstrate her philosophy. But as you said 1-dimensional characters aren't particularly engaging in novel form.

Yeah, Fountainhead and definitely Atlas Shrugged are exaggerated a lot. But I don't think any more than other books (that I've read, anyway) that are also trying to send a message. The big one that really stuck with me was Catch-22, and my imperfect memory tells me it was much more irritating and extreme in its exaggerations than Atlas Shrugged.

As far as the characters themselves being larger than life? I really don't know. It's not like they were average people - to me, they were more of Howard Hughes types. Uncommon, yeah, but not unheard of.

Wait, what? Who is John Galt?

PS: I feel bad for actually hitting submit. :)

Obama: Ayn Rand Is For Misunderstood Teenagers

Ugh. This book was assigned for one of my literature classes in college. There were roughly 30 students in the class, the set-up was we all have x-number of weeks to read each assigned book and then we have class discussions.

Just to give you an idea of how popular this one was, on the first day of Atlas Shrugged discussion no one could discuss a single thing, and after scolding and bellowing from the professor all 30 of us admitted that not a single one of us had read it. The professor ended up assigning a chapter here, a chapter there, because no one wanted to read the whole book.

I didn't read my assigned chapters, either. :x It was some painfully awkward sex scene (I don't think she could have written the language to be more awkward if she tried) and then the other chapter was some blathering about not letting anyone but you own your heart or your life or something like that. But after we all 'read' our assignments, we watched videos in class of Ayn Rand's interviews over the years and ended up focusing on her views on religion/creation for a week or two. Go figure.

Honestly, as a college senior in literature classes, I couldn't handle this book. It was very long, very boring, and even more sleep-inducing than Thoreau's Walden. I have no idea how teenagers even manage to read the darn thing.

It feeds their ego and convinces them that they really are better than everyone around them.