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ATLAS SHRUGGED: Does it suck or is it better than Mendeleev's Beard??

Mal12345

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Good read, but a bit repetitive and long. She tends to make the same point over and over again.

I suspect the John Galt speech might be the longest rant in literature. Someone told me that the audio version of the rant was 2 hours long.

How long did it take to write?
 

highlander

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This thread's about the novel by Ayn Rand. So where do you come on the spectrum? I think it sucks myself. :D

I believe I have read all of her books and liked this one the least. I recall reading it on the train to and from work every day. It seemed extremely tedious to get through. I'm sure it's good. It just doesn't match my tastes.
 

Mal12345

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I believe I have read all of her books and liked this one the least. I recall reading it on the train to and from work every day. It seemed extremely tedious to get through. I'm sure it's good. It just doesn't match my tastes.

You say you have read all her books. Can you rate them for us on a scale of best to worst?
 

Tellenbach

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Mal12345 said:
How long did it take to write?

There are 1607 lines to that chapter in my ebook file with an average word count of about 15 words/line (24,000 words). If she typed at 60 wpm, it would have taken her 400 minutes or roughly 6.6 hours, if she typed continuosly. I'm not sure if she's the Stephen King or the George RR Martin type of writer, so I can't answer the question, but it's probably somewhere between 7 hours and 700 hours.
 

Mal12345

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There are 1607 lines to that chapter in my ebook file with an average word count of about 15 words/line (24,000 words). If she typed at 60 wpm, it would have taken her 400 minutes or roughly 6.6 hours, if she typed continuosly. I'm not sure if she's the Stephen King or the George RR Martin type of writer, so I can't answer the question, but it's probably somewhere between 7 hours and 700 hours.

Two years.
 

highlander

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You say you have read all her books. Can you rate them for us on a scale of best to worst?

Maybe I should correct that to say I read all the fiction and novels. I liked Fountainhead and Anthem.
 

Tellenbach

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Two years for one chapter? Did she use Egyptian hieroglyphs and carve out each character? I kid.

What's amazing about the book is the fact that all the weasels portrayed actually do exist. All the corruption, incompetence, the cultural rot, and the destruction of the human spirit (from being dependent on the government) is coming to pass. We are witnesses to the beginnings of the world described in the book. If I had read the book in the 80s, I would have concluded that Rand was paranoid and just wrong, but I read the book in 2010 and she's absolutely right about the dangers of collectivism.
 

zago

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Then don't you mean "pain" and "stupidity" are the worst things ever? It's not just communism that makes those.

Pain and stupidity are timeless. Communism is not, which makes it able to be the worst thing ever. Like, how good or bad something is is measured by how much pain and stupidity it causes. I wouldn't say "temperature is the hottest thing ever."

Then again, now I'm thinking religion might win this fight.

But if you really boil it down, it's all a question of power. Communism and religion have that in common. When you get a small number of people making decisions over a large number of people, atrocity follows. Simple recipe. If I don't know anything about economics but I think high prices are unfair, I can say "gasoline from now on will be a dollar a gallon. It is illegal to charge more than a dollar for a gallon of gas." That's well-intentioned, but will gas even be profitable to produce anymore? No. Either that or people will buy it all up immediately and there will be a massive shortage. So guess what? You have to force people to continue to make it even though it isn't profitable. And you have to tell people they only get to buy a certain amount (but who needs how much? Can you say "favoritism"?). Now translate this into an entire economy, and you have an insane rube goldberg machine which amounts to straight up slavery and 100% chance of a thriving black market that is only slightly less corrupt than the state itself.

^Which is exactly what happens in Atlas Shrugged AND real communism.

Or you could just let the market call the shots. Ya know.
 

zago

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By the way, Atlas Shrugged and Animal Farm (and to a lesser extent 1984) are basically the same book. The difference is, Atlas Shrugged is more in-your-face and it declares an alternative, which gives people the ability to disagree. Animal Farm is like "shit this is hopeless the world is fucked. End."
 

Mal12345

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Two years for one chapter? Did she use Egyptian hieroglyphs and carve out each character? I kid.

It was hand-written.
DSCN0305.jpg


What's amazing about the book is the fact that all the weasels portrayed actually do exist. All the corruption, incompetence, the cultural rot, and the destruction of the human spirit (from being dependent on the government) is coming to pass. We are witnesses to the beginnings of the world described in the book. If I had read the book in the 80s, I would have concluded that Rand was paranoid and just wrong, but I read the book in 2010 and she's absolutely right about the dangers of collectivism.

Objectivism is largely a Jewish socio-economic movement. If you look at it closely enough, particularly in its fictional-symbolic form, you will find presages of the messiah and the new Jerusalem.
 

Mal12345

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Not counting the scratched out sentences that didn't make it to publication, this rough draft basically says "...if, like them, you come to think that one's highest values are not to be attained and one's greatest vision is not to be made real—don't damn this earth, as they did, don't damn existence. You have seen the Atlantis they were seeking, it is here, it exists—but one must enter it naked..."
 

tinker683

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I actually liked it, at the very least because the idea and the premise it went on was very different than what I would normally expect to read in that subject. Most of the time when it comes to stories about the rich/poor dynamic, the rich are always depicted as these ruthlessly evil people who are trying to squeeze every ounce of life out of you and th workers inevitably have to go on strike just to be able to feed their families and pay the bills.

I felt it was refreshing to switch that equation around. I don't know how much that would actually play out in real life but it was an interesting story to explore in that respect.

Also, while I don't consider myself an Objectivist by any means, there were many values that she espoused that I actually really liked and still hold to to this day.
 

Mal12345

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I actually liked it, at the very least because the idea and the premise it went on was very different than what I would normally expect to read in that subject. Most of the time when it comes to stories about the rich/poor dynamic, the rich are always depicted as these ruthlessly evil people who are trying to squeeze every ounce of life out of you and th workers inevitably have to go on strike just to be able to feed their families and pay the bills.

I felt it was refreshing to switch that equation around. I don't know how much that would actually play out in real life but it was an interesting story to explore in that respect.

Also, while I don't consider myself an Objectivist by any means, there were many values that she espoused that I actually really liked and still hold to to this day.

But is it the best book you've ever read?
 

tinker683

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What does an unmanly beard look like?

I'd say the ones I try and grow would fit that classification: Like a beard that's incomplete and looks bad. A beard that wants to be a beard but hasn't done enough push ups to get there.

Hence, why I keep a clean shaven face. I can't pull off facial hair
 

Nicodemus

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Way too in-your-face for my taste. A book that treads me like an idiot is not going to earn my appreciation. Before trying to read Atlas Shrugged, I had found Ayn Rand interesting. Not anymore.
 

Mal12345

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Way too in-your-face for my taste. A book that treads me like an idiot is not going to earn my appreciation. Before trying to read Atlas Shrugged, I had found Ayn Rand interesting. Not anymore.

Yes, she wonks and wonks on certain themes and sounds like an omniscient goddess.
 
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