I'm considering reading Atlas Shrugged. Would I be wasting my time?
yes.
>>8064258
You definitely wasted mine.
>>8064258
Yes
>>8064258
No. If you assume that it's set in an alternate universe where humans are greedier than they are in reality, it's a pretty fun read.
>>8064258
A guy in my 10th grade class read Atlas Shrugged and walked away with nothing. He basically told me the entire book is about "don't trust anyone ever". I should have know none of us would have the literary skills to read Atlas Shrugged.
>>8064428
I agree with this. You aren't going to turn into a crazy libertarian unless you already lean that way.
It's a fun book.
>Alisa Rosenbaum
>Entire book is about how capitalists are superior and goys are inferior
>>8064428
>>8064475
It's fiction, you morons. Either like a book or don't. Your ideology motivated qualifiers make you look like morons.
"I was afraid of the ideas in this book, so I made sure to tell myself that they can't hurt me and that's not how the world really is before reading. That allowed me to enjoy the book."
Fucking morons.
>>8064258
I really liked it when I was 20. Got a stupid tattoo. I feel like a tool now. But whatever. It was, in retrospect, okay.
>>8065468
Post tattoo.
Unfortunately yes. It's too long. It seems like the ideas could have been expressed far more succinctly, the plot is not great and the prose was bland.
The whole thing reads like Rand wanted to just write an academic essay, but realised few people read academic essays so at the least minute she created some stock characters and a loose wish-fulfilment plot to sell her ideas to the public. In my opinion it should have stayed an essay.
>>8064528
I don't think you understand the purpose of that novel. She didn't set out to write a great work of art. It's a novel of ideas, meant not only to present her philosophy, but to convince people it's right. Those guilty of using "ideology motivated qualifiers" are meeting her on her own terms. It's explicitly a work of ideology.
>>8064258
thats a big book
>>8064528
It doesn't matter if its fiction or not. This book was used millions times as argument against socialism. Same as 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and others.
Thus it only makes a people who believed in these fictional ideas looks stupid.
the lice in rand's knotted up pubic hair probably had more interesting things to say than anything in her self-published level ramblings
>>8065668
Except 1984 wasn't ever meant as a critique of socialism.
Skip it and read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.
It's better written and clearer.
>>8065723
Except it was
>>8065723
>Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism or the English Socialist Party) is the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
>>8065977
Yeah, it's not like George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War with the POUM or anything...
>>8065977
it was a critique of totalitarianism that was present in socialist thought in the belief that socialism would be stronger without it. It is not a critique of socialism in and of itself.
Absolutely not, my boy. Take $0.05 out of that bonus check and get yourself a copy.
The trouble is that Orwell was naive.
Socialism demands totalitarianism; they simply didn't like the types of totalitarianism they were seeing.
>>8066152
I think it was 95 cents
