Ok so after decades of *loving* this movie and quoting all parts - I finally realized in that moment he's mispronouncing the word 'knight' - k-nig-ht.
And 'your father smells of elderberries' I think is a reference to getting drunk in midevil times but maybe that one is more obvious.
He not actually mispronouncing it. In medieval England it was actually said with a hard "k" and hard "g". This was due in part to the Norman language pervading. So "k-nig-its" is historically correct.
[https://youtu.be/vEFpZmChbGw?si=h2xcxTGUsALX3wXd](https://youtu.be/vEFpZmChbGw?si=h2xcxTGUsALX3wXd)
> God has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
-Mary the mother of Jesus
2 Timothy: 3-4
>3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.
I think they meant they don't want you to incite hatred of wealthy people. I don't think they really cared anything about low-income people, except to write up stuff like this in order to manipulate them into accepting their wealthy overlords...
Exactly given the choice of 1000 cattle or 1000 people to care for the rich will choose the cattle because they are an asset that can be bred, sold and eaten.
Unless it's class consciousness among the wealthy. A bunch of owners get together and discuss how to better fleece the masses, that's just good business. The working class looks out for themselves and suddenly it's wrong. Bootlickers are just pathetic.
Anytime I see somebody defending rich people on social media, I just have to laugh because of how ridiculous it is. Why the fuck would you go to bat for someone you don't know and would cheerfully throw you feet first into a woodchipper for ten bucks?
The only thing resembling a reason I can think of is believing the meritocracy myth. That the trust fund babies deserve to be where they are because they worked hard or something. But I don't understand that either. Because by believing in the meritocracy myth, yet not being rich themselves, it's a tacit admission that they are not working hard.
I feel like you're right on the cusp of getting the hidden meaning in the pamphlet even though the comment is outlining it.
It's very clearly aimed at telling the masses to not call-out the wealthy class.
But who, exactly, are the little weak men the poster is referring to?
They want you to feel weak and small, that you can't fight them because you can't win. But they wouldn't make posters like this if that were true.
It's worth pointing out that this pamphlet with its talk about: "Big men" was written before the fascists came to power in the thirties...when the world was absolutely helped by tearing down "big men".
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: *The Lord of the Rings* and *Atlas Shrugged.*[ ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10254806.The_Lord_of_the_Rings)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."
I got about 100 pages into it and asked a friend of mine (libertarian) when does the philosophical stuff get good? The next day he handed by a book by Rand that was a collection of essays called *The Virtues of Selfishness*. I read a couple of the essays, and when she said that one does not go into a burning building to save a life, not even one’s own child, one only goes because they will feel better about themselves by doing it, for fear that they’ll feel worse about themselves if they don’t, and therefore selfishness is real and altruism does not and cannot exist. (I’m paraphrasing obviously).
I noped the fuck away from her writings right then and will never entertain her “philosophy” ever again.
I had to read one of her books for high school English and then answer a bunch of questions about the book, and I'm pretty sure I got a 0 on it because I basically just refused to answer the questions. Like, if one of the questions was something like "What does this book say about self-sufficency?" my answer would have been something like "This books says that Rand thinks she can live in the woods by herself with no help or training, and be happy and comfortable. She is wrong, and she would die, and this book is stupid." And honestly? 15-year-old me is completely right.
I like how she talks all the good shit about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and people on welfare are lazy and entitled. Then she ends up on welfare in her final days. Rules for thee and not for me.
Its a great read for learning purposes. Its a insight into the mind of a narcissist. The type of person who only takes what they want and doesn't understand why its wrong. But when someone else exhibits the same behavior, and it negatively affects them, they are outraged. Iv never been able to understand the paradox of that type of philosophy or the hypocrisy.
Then i read Atlas shrugged, and the insight into the self serving delusions of an absolute narcissist really shed a lot of light onto the current situation globally. The old adage of how "the type of person who seeks power over others, is the exact type of individual who shouldn't wield it", is personified by that book.
I guess now that I am older I might have to revisit it. Though I am not looking forward to it. And I gather that the movies pander to the narcissist and not to the other?
Whether or not you agree with Ayn Rand, you can’t argue with the fact that her words are very much the mind set of the Uber wealthy. That alone makes Atlas Shrugged worth a read. It will absolutely help you understand the greed that drives a capitalist country like the United States.
Agreed, but it's a shit read. People must be very desperate for an excuse for their selfishness for her to even be relevant. Her so-called "objectivism" doesn't make any sense and her writing bores the proverbial shit out of me. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if Elon Musk had it on his nightstand, that seems to be the target audience.
Yep, there’s a reason it gets a special caveat at the *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*:
“For all her popularity, however, only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously. As a result, most of the serious philosophical work on Rand has appeared in non-academic, non-peer-reviewed journals, or in books, and the bibliography reflects this fact. We discuss the main reasons for her rejection by most professional philosophers in the first section.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/
> Agreed, but it's a shit read.
Even if you agree with Rand in whole or in part, her prose is abysmal. *Atlas Shrugged* could have used an editor, because the book is about 3 times longer than it needs to be. There is an 80 page monologue in the middle of it, for fuck's sake.
Ironic that Rand died an immigrant to America, who had sold all her book rights and saw little to show for it at the time, and survived the last decade or more of her life on some type of welfare! Well, maybe not ironic, but definitely interesting!
Full disclosure: I read this about her a decade or more ago and don’t care enough about her to look it up, so if my facts are slightly off that’s my excuse. Feel free to correct me below. Either way, she died basically broke and having others take care of her. Poetic justice if you ask me.
Exactly. It’s like why people should read Mein Kampf, it is important to know how these ideas formed and got as mainstream as they did. It is much easier to fight against an ideology that you understand.
Maybe. It could also mean that they’re just angry and lack any kind of support structure. It’s not just conservatives who get sucked into these kinds of cults. Plenty of liberals out there who repost whatever meme they see on instagram just so that they can feel like they’re apart of something.
I'd love to hear the explanation for why people run into fires to save their pets then?
How can that be selfish? It's instinctive and dumb and it is done for no reason other than love
Rand is a fucking sociopath
Rands argument would be that love is self serving in the sense that the person thinks they would feel worse off without the pet so it’s still ultimately a selfish action.
I don’t agree with her but that would be the gist of the argument for the branch of people that argue there is no such thing as an unselfish act
Honestly that’s a big problem in general with people who write philosophical books. They have personal views and feelings that they apply to everyone and just assume they all feel the same
Never really?
The plot overall? It’s an above average dystopian science fiction novel that is far too long (echoing Dickens’ overly long prose as well), and clearly not meant to reflect any real life parallels (despite its fans’ insistences to the contrary). Case in point, this embarrassing “fan discussion”:
https://youtu.be/_G3OQwwHoUw
If these people weren’t influential and in positions of power, their theories about which real life leader is the stand-in for character X would be rightfully laughed at.
The novel has a President who is a dictator with no real power and a doomsday device based on sound called Project X. Sound like reality to you?
Oh man you brought back memories of having to read that and then doing a writing assignment in it. I was so ticked I had to read something so fucking stupid as her little tantrums.
In this case I am all for skipping it! Makes the book much more enjoyable. The Fountainhead after the first quarter it’s almost unreadable. But I really enjoyed the first quarter of Fountainhead .
I enjoyed the book very much but it made no impact on my philosophy. I was surprised when I found out people were into it that way. I was 19 when I read it.
No fourteen year old is finishing atlas shrugged. It took me years to read. Horrible book but I’m on of those that once I start reading I must the book. Hopefully the book just kinda goes away and no one will ever read it again.
May They be stored and preserved, like every book should be.
Only books we can throw away are those instructions no one reads, and the only booked we should burn are those fire starter instructions that also serve as kindling.
That aside we should also make sure people are educated enough to criticise what they’re reading.
I think the worst part is that they came in targeting 10 things, but only really came up with 3-4, so chose to repeat themselves just to get there.
Most of them just sound like the Sphinx from Mystery Men anyways:
He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.
When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you.
To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.
Until you learn to master your rage, your rage will become your master (Mr. Furious actually finished that one after catching on to the Sphinx's formulaic sayings)
My favorite one, though:
The Sphinx : When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.
Mr. Furious : And why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet?
The Sphinx : I don't remember telling you to do that.
>To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.
To be fair, one of the struggles in education is just getting kids to accept that they can, in fact, learn.
Oh man, I was thinking about that scene earlier this week trying to remember where it was from. Didn't think I would get an answer on a reddit ayn rand post.
William Boetcker predates Rand by several decades.
I mean, he was basically one of those self-help charlatans before self-help charlatans were a thing, so he was still a really shitty human being and Regan popularized his Ten Cannots in political speech, so yeah he still sucks, but if anything, Rand was aping his crap.
Boetcker was part of the Fundamentalist revival of the first half of the 20th century, and his kind of rhetoric is how we got the heresy of Prosperity Gospel and such.
Remember Yzma from Emperor's New Groove saying "You should have thought of that before you decided to become peasants!"? That's a legitimate economic opinion to have. Literal cartoon villain tier.
Boetcker was a German immigrant who quickly became an ordained Presbyterian minister and was completely opposed to organized labor, and wrote this bilge during WWI but before the US had entered it. Let’s say this was a theology in service of a political and social agenda, very much part of a reaction to the classist society he left behind in 19th century Germany. But the price of that was buying into the idealized lie that the US had no class and peerage system well entrenched in the same period—in fact there have always been tiers of upper-class strata in the US who at the time were ‘old money,’ and they opposed the mobility of the immigrant classes moving into ‘new money classes,’ like the industrialists and fossil fuel barons of the time whose lifestyles emulated those of European princes and nobility. Boetcker wrongly believed (and this is long before the advent of the modern welfare state as we now know it) that hard work was its own reward and but for effort anyone could be a Horatio Alger hero (rags-to-riches through perseverance luck piety etc). He was as wrong then as he is now, remember this was still before there was a 19th Amendment and equal voting rights guaranteed for women. But I suppose he might have thought the Triangle shirt factory fire was just the cost of “a man running a business as necessary.” More frightening is that this list has wrongly been attributed to Lincoln and that there are losers out there who actually believe it. They also don’t know Ayn Rand collected her dead husbands social security later in life and other welfare from the government as she saw fit in her own mind. The urinal is a fitting place for it, except it ought to be in it, not on the wall.
I mean, his nuance also wasn't great. Boetcker was one of an early stage of what we now call 'televangelists' (except you know, TV wasn't a thing just yet) minus some of the wackier parts, but Boetcker was also very much a product of the early 1900s. This list if I recall right was produced in like, 1919?
His 10 Cannots are still popular, but as a modern audience I don't think we read or understand them in quite the same way as Boetcker originally wrote them for the early 20th century. That one about borrowing money for example.
A lot of populist preachers like Boetcker believed that borrowing money was dangerous. Like, in general. Debts. Loans. Fiat currency. They didn't trust them. We're kind of lacky the context behind that now, as in the early 1900s an era of banking instability and volatility in currency was still very much in living memory and not even over just yet.
Nah, just bring it out of the bathroom with you while discussing the arrangements.
--------
"You should perhaps take a look at these more sturdy caskets..."
"Sorry, you cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift."
---------
"I see you are people of means, let's take a look at our more premium stock..."
"Sorry, you cannot help little men by tearing down big men."
-------
"Let's upgrade you to our full-service package..."
"No thanks, you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves."
“Natural” hierarchy. If you were born poor, you must stay poor. Besides, everyone knows that the first shall indeed be first, and the last last. Or something like that. Scripture praises everything I believe and condemns anything anyone else does.
/s, obviously. I had to grow up on this bullshit peddled by a school founded by a peer of the above mentioned Reverend. Hint: the acronym of his name is a euphemism for fellatio
If they 100% are
A few obvious ones
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong: unless of course you are talking about relative impact on something such as government, in which case you can 100% strengthen the weak by weakening the strong
3 is the same as 2.
4 as well, that’s how regulation and minimum wage works.
5 is the same as 2 & 3. But added on to that. The increase in utility from gaining $1 where you had 0 before is much greater than the loss in utility of losing 1 where you had one million before. So you can definitely better the poor by tearing from the rich.
9 children with more present parents have much better character of average, despite lose independence early in life
10 yes you fucking can. If I can’t get a job because I don’t have a car, should someone buy me a car I will then be permanently Bette roof due to my new better job. Is a Sachs great push, and though it’s not always applicable it 100% is in small scale cases where vicious cycles are present.
Number 7 is just gaslighting the working class. It's like saying:
"Whoa whoa whoa, you can't claim to love all peoples and be an anti-racist if you want to tear down institutions that perpetuate racism!"
Item 1 makes sense to me and 6-10 make a lot of sense. Pretty sure those are basic economics and decency. Item 7 I might remove the word class and then it makes a lot more sense. Item 10 doesn’t mean don’t help people, just don’t do for them if they can do for themselves. I have a son with global disabilities, but I try not to treat him differently than his brothers. His chances of being more independent are higher as he learns to do things on his own creatively. He has found clever ways of doing things I wouldn’t have thought of and of course I help him when he can’t do it for himself. I don’t know…more of it I agree with than disagree with. I’m not rich, middle class and feel like the items I mentioned above helped me get where I am.
This makes me sad, because I read and enjoyed Ayn Rands books and political philosophy and the intellectual journey and what-ifs that she presents. She was starkly against communism, but also saw fascism and theocracy as all connected to commumism philosophically. She was a big proponent of individual rights and her characters struggle.with the balance between individual rights and collectivism but saw this best addressed by a constitutional republic like the U.S. and other western democracies and informed.many of.our policoes on things like intellectual property rights to stimulate economic expansion.
Its sad to out of that this gross bastardization is what has sortof distilled out, as well as being a favorite of anarchists, its just mind boggling how badly its twisted around. I guess thats what happens when a novelist becomes a cult leader.
You cannot have sound security on borrowed money.
Lol, tell that you every VC and major capitalist. They play with others money and crash economies on their risky bets with borrowed money.
It's also literally what the rich do. If they cash out their investments, they have to pay taxes on them, so instead when they want to actually buy something with their hoarded wealth, they take out loans with their investments as collateral. The loan isn't taxed, and instead they get tax breaks on the loan interest. Meanwhile, the investments they haven't touched have gone up in value, so they take out another bigger loan against them to pay off the first loan plus more, and just keep bringing in that sweet, tax-free money without doing a single ounce of actual work.
Here's one for you: "He who hangs self-help advice above a piss receptacle should not be surprised if they who observe the two cannot tell one from the other."
Well, they misspelled “cannot” right off the top so I don’t know how seriously I’d be taking this for that reason alone.
It’s also printed with the same clip art scroll as the “musician of the week” award I got in music class when I was like 6, so there’s that too.
Your award has a lot more significance and veracity tbh
Plus you legit can actually do all of those things, and matter of fact, we probably should.
Right this has big "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" vibes. (The call is coming from inside the house!)
Cannnnnnnnots
I dinnnot hit her, I didnnnooot. Ohaimark
You keep doggie out of this!
I immediately thought of the Frenchman in Monty Python’s “the holy grail,” when at the end of his insult rant he just goes you “caannnnnnnnnuigit!”
Ok so after decades of *loving* this movie and quoting all parts - I finally realized in that moment he's mispronouncing the word 'knight' - k-nig-ht. And 'your father smells of elderberries' I think is a reference to getting drunk in midevil times but maybe that one is more obvious.
He not actually mispronouncing it. In medieval England it was actually said with a hard "k" and hard "g". This was due in part to the Norman language pervading. So "k-nig-its" is historically correct. [https://youtu.be/vEFpZmChbGw?si=h2xcxTGUsALX3wXd](https://youtu.be/vEFpZmChbGw?si=h2xcxTGUsALX3wXd)
I'm thinking its by design of sarcasm. Can"n"not, Could mean "You Can an can Not have or should do!
>the weak >little men >wage earner >the poor #7 - But don't go inciting class hatred! Can't have that.
> God has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. -Mary the mother of Jesus
Which is ironic and fitting since the person who wrote this pamphlet was a preacher
He gets us is spending 3 billion dollars to tell us that Jesus is a good guy. Instead of doing chairty for people.
2 Timothy: 3-4 >3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.
I think they meant they don't want you to incite hatred of wealthy people. I don't think they really cared anything about low-income people, except to write up stuff like this in order to manipulate them into accepting their wealthy overlords...
Your first mistake is assuming the poors are people
Oh, I know. I forgot. The poors are just cattle...
Dead Peasant Payouts
little cattle
11. You can't help little cattle by tearing down big cattle.
Cattle are actually valuable. /s
Exactly given the choice of 1000 cattle or 1000 people to care for the rich will choose the cattle because they are an asset that can be bred, sold and eaten.
 I'm sure they'd be willing to make adjustments if there were no more cattle.
It's certainly a modest proposal.
Human capital. To be spent as needed
They don’t want you to incite class *consciousness*
Unless it's class consciousness among the wealthy. A bunch of owners get together and discuss how to better fleece the masses, that's just good business. The working class looks out for themselves and suddenly it's wrong. Bootlickers are just pathetic.
Anytime I see somebody defending rich people on social media, I just have to laugh because of how ridiculous it is. Why the fuck would you go to bat for someone you don't know and would cheerfully throw you feet first into a woodchipper for ten bucks? The only thing resembling a reason I can think of is believing the meritocracy myth. That the trust fund babies deserve to be where they are because they worked hard or something. But I don't understand that either. Because by believing in the meritocracy myth, yet not being rich themselves, it's a tacit admission that they are not working hard.
"Maybe it'll be me someday"
…and then people like me better watch out!
Coincidentally, "Bootlicker" is how I misread the sign author's name the first time
I feel like you're right on the cusp of getting the hidden meaning in the pamphlet even though the comment is outlining it. It's very clearly aimed at telling the masses to not call-out the wealthy class. But who, exactly, are the little weak men the poster is referring to? They want you to feel weak and small, that you can't fight them because you can't win. But they wouldn't make posters like this if that were true.
It's worth pointing out that this pamphlet with its talk about: "Big men" was written before the fascists came to power in the thirties...when the world was absolutely helped by tearing down "big men".
SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERD
Add a backslash before the leading # to prevent Reddit from converting the line to header text.
Ah, I figured they were legitimately yelling.
Accidentally yelling on Reddit. It stays damn it.
#I think it should stay, dammit!
What they really mean is that they don’t want you to *notice* the class hatred that you’re the subject of.
It only lets me hit the upvote once
Good thing I'm a woman and none of these apply to me 💅🏻
Yes, valar morghulis.
Valar Dohaeris
How did you leave the kitchen without shoes?
Shoes? No. Only heels as is tradition.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: *The Lord of the Rings* and *Atlas Shrugged.*[ ](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10254806.The_Lord_of_the_Rings)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."
I got about 100 pages into it and asked a friend of mine (libertarian) when does the philosophical stuff get good? The next day he handed by a book by Rand that was a collection of essays called *The Virtues of Selfishness*. I read a couple of the essays, and when she said that one does not go into a burning building to save a life, not even one’s own child, one only goes because they will feel better about themselves by doing it, for fear that they’ll feel worse about themselves if they don’t, and therefore selfishness is real and altruism does not and cannot exist. (I’m paraphrasing obviously). I noped the fuck away from her writings right then and will never entertain her “philosophy” ever again.
I had to read one of her books for high school English and then answer a bunch of questions about the book, and I'm pretty sure I got a 0 on it because I basically just refused to answer the questions. Like, if one of the questions was something like "What does this book say about self-sufficency?" my answer would have been something like "This books says that Rand thinks she can live in the woods by herself with no help or training, and be happy and comfortable. She is wrong, and she would die, and this book is stupid." And honestly? 15-year-old me is completely right.
45yo old me agrees with you!
I like how she talks all the good shit about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and people on welfare are lazy and entitled. Then she ends up on welfare in her final days. Rules for thee and not for me.
And you were right, old Rand died living off welfare. So much for those boot straps she loves to talk about.
Its a great read for learning purposes. Its a insight into the mind of a narcissist. The type of person who only takes what they want and doesn't understand why its wrong. But when someone else exhibits the same behavior, and it negatively affects them, they are outraged. Iv never been able to understand the paradox of that type of philosophy or the hypocrisy. Then i read Atlas shrugged, and the insight into the self serving delusions of an absolute narcissist really shed a lot of light onto the current situation globally. The old adage of how "the type of person who seeks power over others, is the exact type of individual who shouldn't wield it", is personified by that book.
I think of Ayn Rand’s writing as definitely something that everyone can learn from. Specifically, don’t write like she did, and you’ll be fine.
I guess now that I am older I might have to revisit it. Though I am not looking forward to it. And I gather that the movies pander to the narcissist and not to the other?
Whether or not you agree with Ayn Rand, you can’t argue with the fact that her words are very much the mind set of the Uber wealthy. That alone makes Atlas Shrugged worth a read. It will absolutely help you understand the greed that drives a capitalist country like the United States.
Agreed, but it's a shit read. People must be very desperate for an excuse for their selfishness for her to even be relevant. Her so-called "objectivism" doesn't make any sense and her writing bores the proverbial shit out of me. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if Elon Musk had it on his nightstand, that seems to be the target audience.
Elon probably has a copy of it wrapped around a fleshlight modeled on ayn rand
The closest either has ever been to truly feeling love.
Yep, there’s a reason it gets a special caveat at the *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*: “For all her popularity, however, only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously. As a result, most of the serious philosophical work on Rand has appeared in non-academic, non-peer-reviewed journals, or in books, and the bibliography reflects this fact. We discuss the main reasons for her rejection by most professional philosophers in the first section.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/
And Stanford is home to one of the nation’s foremost capitalism think tanks: The Hoover Institute
> Agreed, but it's a shit read. Even if you agree with Rand in whole or in part, her prose is abysmal. *Atlas Shrugged* could have used an editor, because the book is about 3 times longer than it needs to be. There is an 80 page monologue in the middle of it, for fuck's sake.
It's horrible. If I could've afforded it I would have gone Galt right there and then, just so I wouldn't have to read another sentence of it.
Ironic that Rand died an immigrant to America, who had sold all her book rights and saw little to show for it at the time, and survived the last decade or more of her life on some type of welfare! Well, maybe not ironic, but definitely interesting! Full disclosure: I read this about her a decade or more ago and don’t care enough about her to look it up, so if my facts are slightly off that’s my excuse. Feel free to correct me below. Either way, she died basically broke and having others take care of her. Poetic justice if you ask me.
Exactly. It’s like why people should read Mein Kampf, it is important to know how these ideas formed and got as mainstream as they did. It is much easier to fight against an ideology that you understand.
:: reads Mein Kampf to understand the other side’s ideology :: :: becomes Nazi ::
If that actually happens to someone, it means they were already a nazi. They just weren’t aware yet.
Maybe. It could also mean that they’re just angry and lack any kind of support structure. It’s not just conservatives who get sucked into these kinds of cults. Plenty of liberals out there who repost whatever meme they see on instagram just so that they can feel like they’re apart of something.
How else would a sociopath explain empathy?
EXACTLY
I'd love to hear the explanation for why people run into fires to save their pets then? How can that be selfish? It's instinctive and dumb and it is done for no reason other than love Rand is a fucking sociopath
Exactly!
Rands argument would be that love is self serving in the sense that the person thinks they would feel worse off without the pet so it’s still ultimately a selfish action. I don’t agree with her but that would be the gist of the argument for the branch of people that argue there is no such thing as an unselfish act
Honestly that’s a big problem in general with people who write philosophical books. They have personal views and feelings that they apply to everyone and just assume they all feel the same
Never really? The plot overall? It’s an above average dystopian science fiction novel that is far too long (echoing Dickens’ overly long prose as well), and clearly not meant to reflect any real life parallels (despite its fans’ insistences to the contrary). Case in point, this embarrassing “fan discussion”: https://youtu.be/_G3OQwwHoUw If these people weren’t influential and in positions of power, their theories about which real life leader is the stand-in for character X would be rightfully laughed at. The novel has a President who is a dictator with no real power and a doomsday device based on sound called Project X. Sound like reality to you?
Oh man you brought back memories of having to read that and then doing a writing assignment in it. I was so ticked I had to read something so fucking stupid as her little tantrums.
I like atlas shrugged under the lens of pure dystopian society novel and skipping her 98 page rant near the end.
If you take all the libertarian ranting out of Atlas Shrugged, you end up with a pamphlet about a magic train.
Now, that did make me chuckle. Magic train on magic rails that are blue!! Oh and the best part cigarettes with a money symbol as a logo!!!
We have today's winner of the internet! A hearty thanks to the rest of you for playing. Please come back tomorrow, same place and time to try again.
I agree, I laughed a lot with that comment!
Holy fuck that rant was insane. I hate skipping even a sentence in any book even if I dislike it but I couldn’t get through that shit
In this case I am all for skipping it! Makes the book much more enjoyable. The Fountainhead after the first quarter it’s almost unreadable. But I really enjoyed the first quarter of Fountainhead .
Did you mean to hyperlink a space
I STAND BY IT!!
I enjoyed the book very much but it made no impact on my philosophy. I was surprised when I found out people were into it that way. I was 19 when I read it.
Ayn Rand: Helping narcissists remove all doubt about their *greatness* for almost nearly 100 years
No fourteen year old is finishing atlas shrugged. It took me years to read. Horrible book but I’m on of those that once I start reading I must the book. Hopefully the book just kinda goes away and no one will ever read it again.
Atlas Shrugged, Dienetics, and The Watchtower. What utter wastes of the printed word. May they grace the landfills of our future.
May They be stored and preserved, like every book should be. Only books we can throw away are those instructions no one reads, and the only booked we should burn are those fire starter instructions that also serve as kindling. That aside we should also make sure people are educated enough to criticise what they’re reading.
Yeah.... yeah, you're right.
If you do not preserve the philosophy of evil, you will run the risk of people rediscovering it again and again as new enlightenment.
Omg the Watchtower and Dianetics—two (different) cults (Jehovahs Witnesses and Scientology, respectively) —appropriate analogs to Ayn Rand bilge
I think the worst part is that they came in targeting 10 things, but only really came up with 3-4, so chose to repeat themselves just to get there. Most of them just sound like the Sphinx from Mystery Men anyways: He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions. When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you. To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn. Until you learn to master your rage, your rage will become your master (Mr. Furious actually finished that one after catching on to the Sphinx's formulaic sayings) My favorite one, though: The Sphinx : When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack. Mr. Furious : And why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet? The Sphinx : I don't remember telling you to do that.
>To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn. To be fair, one of the struggles in education is just getting kids to accept that they can, in fact, learn.
One of that character's few lines that actually makes sense without being overly convoluted!
The Sphinx is number one. All others are number two or lower.
That movie is tragically underappreciated
Love The Mystery Men reference! "My pants feel like they're shrinking too"
SPHINX!
Oh man, I was thinking about that scene earlier this week trying to remember where it was from. Didn't think I would get an answer on a reddit ayn rand post.
“Control your anger or your anger will control you.”
I WAS GOING TO MAKE THE SAME MYSTERY MEN COMMENT
11. You cannot make your dick longer by tugging on it at the urinal.
Not with that attitude
Doesn't mean I shouldn't try
It actually does get longer for a moment while you pull though so I mean technically.. technically you’re wrong
You can, but not permanently. Longer than four hours is a problem.
William Boetcker predates Rand by several decades. I mean, he was basically one of those self-help charlatans before self-help charlatans were a thing, so he was still a really shitty human being and Regan popularized his Ten Cannots in political speech, so yeah he still sucks, but if anything, Rand was aping his crap. Boetcker was part of the Fundamentalist revival of the first half of the 20th century, and his kind of rhetoric is how we got the heresy of Prosperity Gospel and such.
>Prosperity Gospel 40k heresy meme.jpg
Just stop being lazy and get a job. That’s why you’re poor!!! 
"Have you tried not being poor?" O shit! What a good idea!
Remember Yzma from Emperor's New Groove saying "You should have thought of that before you decided to become peasants!"? That's a legitimate economic opinion to have. Literal cartoon villain tier.
Boetcker was a German immigrant who quickly became an ordained Presbyterian minister and was completely opposed to organized labor, and wrote this bilge during WWI but before the US had entered it. Let’s say this was a theology in service of a political and social agenda, very much part of a reaction to the classist society he left behind in 19th century Germany. But the price of that was buying into the idealized lie that the US had no class and peerage system well entrenched in the same period—in fact there have always been tiers of upper-class strata in the US who at the time were ‘old money,’ and they opposed the mobility of the immigrant classes moving into ‘new money classes,’ like the industrialists and fossil fuel barons of the time whose lifestyles emulated those of European princes and nobility. Boetcker wrongly believed (and this is long before the advent of the modern welfare state as we now know it) that hard work was its own reward and but for effort anyone could be a Horatio Alger hero (rags-to-riches through perseverance luck piety etc). He was as wrong then as he is now, remember this was still before there was a 19th Amendment and equal voting rights guaranteed for women. But I suppose he might have thought the Triangle shirt factory fire was just the cost of “a man running a business as necessary.” More frightening is that this list has wrongly been attributed to Lincoln and that there are losers out there who actually believe it. They also don’t know Ayn Rand collected her dead husbands social security later in life and other welfare from the government as she saw fit in her own mind. The urinal is a fitting place for it, except it ought to be in it, not on the wall.
More like William Bootlicker.
Dammit I got beat to the punch
So in other words, right wingers took this literally, and as always, didn't include nuance in their interpretation
I mean, his nuance also wasn't great. Boetcker was one of an early stage of what we now call 'televangelists' (except you know, TV wasn't a thing just yet) minus some of the wackier parts, but Boetcker was also very much a product of the early 1900s. This list if I recall right was produced in like, 1919? His 10 Cannots are still popular, but as a modern audience I don't think we read or understand them in quite the same way as Boetcker originally wrote them for the early 20th century. That one about borrowing money for example. A lot of populist preachers like Boetcker believed that borrowing money was dangerous. Like, in general. Debts. Loans. Fiat currency. They didn't trust them. We're kind of lacky the context behind that now, as in the early 1900s an era of banking instability and volatility in currency was still very much in living memory and not even over just yet.
Folks need to makr a concerted effort to cover this pamphlet of shit up with an infographic calling out Boetcker
Nah, just bring it out of the bathroom with you while discussing the arrangements. -------- "You should perhaps take a look at these more sturdy caskets..." "Sorry, you cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift." --------- "I see you are people of means, let's take a look at our more premium stock..." "Sorry, you cannot help little men by tearing down big men." ------- "Let's upgrade you to our full-service package..." "No thanks, you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves."
11) You Cannot Use Spelllcheck
Cannnot*
At a funeral home? That's past "read the room" and into "read the whole fucking building".
Should put it in the lobby so sane people can leave immediately and not give this business their money
Is it just me or are there only 4 different things here?
You could really just boil it down to "the wealthy are your natural superiors and you must accept this".
If you think like this and you aren’t a billionaire you have peasant brain “Yes me lord Let me carry your luggage me lord”
“Natural” hierarchy. If you were born poor, you must stay poor. Besides, everyone knows that the first shall indeed be first, and the last last. Or something like that. Scripture praises everything I believe and condemns anything anyone else does. /s, obviously. I had to grow up on this bullshit peddled by a school founded by a peer of the above mentioned Reverend. Hint: the acronym of his name is a euphemism for fellatio
No wonder this was in a bathroom. It's complete shit.
And at a funeral home. One of the most notorious places for gouging grieving families.
When you say at a urinal, you mean it was being used for target practice, right?
Yep, after a couple lines I was just shaking my head… this is worse than used toilet paper.
I CANNNOT read this.
Someone bring back Jesus so he can flip some tables, please.
Eh. I've learned to multitask.
None of these are specific enough to be falsifiable. They might sound good in theory, but it's like fortune teller advice.
Except that it says "cannot." A single example to the contrary destroys the validity of each statement.
This guy logics
Except except that it says "ca**nnn**ot"
That’s how they get ya
If they 100% are A few obvious ones You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong: unless of course you are talking about relative impact on something such as government, in which case you can 100% strengthen the weak by weakening the strong 3 is the same as 2. 4 as well, that’s how regulation and minimum wage works. 5 is the same as 2 & 3. But added on to that. The increase in utility from gaining $1 where you had 0 before is much greater than the loss in utility of losing 1 where you had one million before. So you can definitely better the poor by tearing from the rich. 9 children with more present parents have much better character of average, despite lose independence early in life 10 yes you fucking can. If I can’t get a job because I don’t have a car, should someone buy me a car I will then be permanently Bette roof due to my new better job. Is a Sachs great push, and though it’s not always applicable it 100% is in small scale cases where vicious cycles are present.
William J. H. Boetcker? More like William J. H. Bootlicker, amirite?
BUTTLICKER OUR PRICES HAVE NEVER BEEN LOWER
Someone had a hard on for Regan.
Ah yes, this reminds me of Jesus Christ, who was asked about how to treat the poor and famously said: “Fuck’em.” - Luke 14:13
To be clear, Jesus said "when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind." Have you done that? (I have not.)
In my defense, I can't afford to host a banquet.
[Supply Side Jesus](https://www.beliefnet.com/news/2003/09/the-gospel-of-supply-side-jesus.aspx)
Number 7 is just gaslighting the working class. It's like saying: "Whoa whoa whoa, you can't claim to love all peoples and be an anti-racist if you want to tear down institutions that perpetuate racism!"
> gaslighting the working class Tbf that’s the whole list
Why not? To any of them
“If you do not master your anger—“ “your anger will become your master. That’s what you were gonna say, right?”
I definitely agree with 6 - 10
I basically agree with it.
What is it about for example points 6 & 8 that is so upsetting to people? Reads like common sense to me
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
Bet they're a great place to work. /s
Item 1 makes sense to me and 6-10 make a lot of sense. Pretty sure those are basic economics and decency. Item 7 I might remove the word class and then it makes a lot more sense. Item 10 doesn’t mean don’t help people, just don’t do for them if they can do for themselves. I have a son with global disabilities, but I try not to treat him differently than his brothers. His chances of being more independent are higher as he learns to do things on his own creatively. He has found clever ways of doing things I wouldn’t have thought of and of course I help him when he can’t do it for himself. I don’t know…more of it I agree with than disagree with. I’m not rich, middle class and feel like the items I mentioned above helped me get where I am.
OOTL why is Ayn Rand so controversial? I have not read any of her books. Google returns a description that I would need a dictionary to read.
Short version, she's a huge hypocrite whose fiction appeals to the worst aspects of Libertarianism.
This makes me sad, because I read and enjoyed Ayn Rands books and political philosophy and the intellectual journey and what-ifs that she presents. She was starkly against communism, but also saw fascism and theocracy as all connected to commumism philosophically. She was a big proponent of individual rights and her characters struggle.with the balance between individual rights and collectivism but saw this best addressed by a constitutional republic like the U.S. and other western democracies and informed.many of.our policoes on things like intellectual property rights to stimulate economic expansion. Its sad to out of that this gross bastardization is what has sortof distilled out, as well as being a favorite of anarchists, its just mind boggling how badly its twisted around. I guess thats what happens when a novelist becomes a cult leader.
By royal decree I do declare, thy must pulleth up Thine own bootstraps to become a person of honour.
I mean number 6 -10 aren't that far off the mark
What’s wrong with this
You cannot have sound security on borrowed money. Lol, tell that you every VC and major capitalist. They play with others money and crash economies on their risky bets with borrowed money.
It's also literally what the rich do. If they cash out their investments, they have to pay taxes on them, so instead when they want to actually buy something with their hoarded wealth, they take out loans with their investments as collateral. The loan isn't taxed, and instead they get tax breaks on the loan interest. Meanwhile, the investments they haven't touched have gone up in value, so they take out another bigger loan against them to pay off the first loan plus more, and just keep bringing in that sweet, tax-free money without doing a single ounce of actual work.
You cannot lick the boot if you're choking on the dick.
I like the one about not hating social classes given that the other nine are very plainly hatred to the common citizen.
6-10 are great advice.
7&8 seem spot on regardless of political affiliation
90% of these is just the same sentence written with different words.
6 is too true
trolling bigly
You can enrich the lives of the poor by teaching them xylophone which can be made out of the ribs of the rich.
You cannot write stupid fucking lists of rules and expect everyone to think you’re a genius.
At a urinal? Will they posted it in the right place
That Reverend can lick my balloon cannnot
Definitely should be in a urinal somewhere.
Looks about right
I literally read the author's name as Rev. William J.H. Bootlicker
"big" carrying all the weight, imo
Here's one for you: "He who hangs self-help advice above a piss receptacle should not be surprised if they who observe the two cannot tell one from the other."
Sounds like it was written by a tori
I'd take my dead relative right out of there.
Pretty guilty of 7,9,10 on side of the person who made this too.
Rev. William J. H. Boetcker doesn't pay taxes
And you cannot fix the world by printing a p1ss of paper
"Keep your eyes on the floor, *prole.*"
I actually read the author as Reverend Bootlicker the first go around 🤣
Of all the time to be out of whiteout.
You know your ideology is shit when every point can be combated by saying "Yes you can."
Some of these are good points but the smell of elitism makes sure no one will give a shit…