Socialist theorists and not writing coherently, name a more iconic duo.
The protagonist of The Fountainhead actually rapes a woman and then blows up a housing project he designed because the construction company changed the slant of some of the roofs
He then defends himself in court without a lawyer by claiming he was allowed to blow it up because he's basically the same as a god because the housing projects wouldn't exist without him. The protagonist defends himself so well the main antagonist (a socialist newspaper editor) shoots himself in the head with a pistol he had always kept at his work desk specifically for that purpose. The protagonist then gets a job designing the tallest building on earth and the woman he raped falls madly in love with him. The end.
Giving her an education was good, not re-educating her when she became a reactionary chud was not.
:bruh: also what kind of a socialist hasn't met a man on a power trip they're called managers wtf
Reminder that if you're a teacher in the US, the Ayn Rand society can ship you free toilet paper.
Bioshock is the most honest exploration of “objectivism” that will ever appear in pop culture.
It was on sale for super cheap on switch and I tried it. Wasn't into it.
I get that. The mechanics haven’t aged as well as other games, but it was a great ride at the time.
Yeah, I felt that playing it. Very 2008 game. PS2 game but with better graphics.
Yup. They didn’t adapt much of the core gameplay loop from system shock. The in-game environmental cut scenes were pretty groundbreaking at the time.
Yeah, I would have enjoyed it then, maybe. I may plow through it sometime. It was like $3
It’s basically a walking simulator with a (now) shitty combat system bolted on. Approaching it with those expectations makes it a nicer ride imo
Ayn Rand honestly believed that whenever the railroad managers or execs call in sick they take all the trains and rail home
She actually just thought that all workers are just stupid automaton subs that can't function without a dom.
I never read Atlas Sucked mostly because South Park told me it was a book for chicken fuckers, a book so singularly bad it justified analphabetism. This is why I still have residual respect for Matt and Trey
But from the summary I assume looters is a cute term for soc-dem or even just Keynesian politicians.
It's really funny how there's this big internecine conflict inside libertarianism between the Objectivists and the people who really fucking hate Ayn Rand. Like one of the most thorough takedowns of Ayn Rand's cult was written by IIRC Murray fucking Rothbard of all people. It's like you've got this bloc who have this sort of hero-figure of a sociopathic "visionary" executive-founder-owner-engineer as literal Atlas analogue holding up businesses with the angularness of his chin and doing everything for everyone, and then a separate bloc who think corporate executives are communists and the "real" hero figures are small settler businessmen who seize resources that were "just there existing without being exploited" (either literally or figuratively), and they both just scream that the other bloc are fascists and rubes.
And of course the truth is that both of those blocs are basically fascist, or at least siblings to fascism.
:stalin-approval: “No, no, we’re going to kill all of you fashy boiz.”
Looters is a cute term for actual workers and not the owning class lol
People tried to do that during the BLM uprisings. It ended about as well as you’d expect.
You saved valuable time, it’s not worth reading and is also aggressively misogynistic.
recently I learned that "Emmerich" is the etymological root of "America" and I'm trying very hard to base a Metal Gear theory on that
"Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism”. - Parenti, Left Anti-Communism: The Unkindest Cut
He has "mixed feelings" about them, then immediately goes into fanboy trivia about his favorite character
And mixes up private and personal property throughout, which is fucking weird for an anarchist to do.
I don't wanna get into the territory of sexual pathology as politics, but Rand apparently had some kind of submission and/or rape fetish that probably leaked into her general worldview
Internalized misogyny is a fuck. Rand wrote a lot in Atlas Shrugged about it somehow being empowering for women to “allow” themselves to be owned by men.
If you don’t reconcile or accept your fetishes / sexuality, it will absolutely come out in random unhealthy ways that are extremely obvious to everyone else.
Rand wrote a lot in Atlas Shrugged about it somehow being empowering for women to “allow” themselves to be owned by men.
It's like she's the evil mirror universe version of William Moulton Marston.
As someone who has read Atlas Shrugged, yeah, she does. Like, it's not even subtle. Every sex scene in that book is gross. And apparently Fountainhead is worse? What a world.
Well he is on record saying that he would side with ancaps and libertarians against AUTHORITARIAN LEFTISTS (mls , leninists ,maoists etc)...
We like to mock takes like that as "reddit anarchist" phenomenon but fucking popular figureheads of "libleft" thought have these wall worthy radlib "viewpoints". Too much chomsky or Bookchin rots the brain
Sectarian brainworms in general are cringe and don’t reflect the realty of leftism in the imperial core. Important not to read any theory as scripture, leads you down the path of the armchair lifestylist.
Literally the same energy, thank you for getting that I wasn’t being sectarian.
Althusser is based and readable. The best philosopher out of the French scene.
This better not have been a “marxists always write perfectly” take because… they really don’t either.
Bookchin gets worse (and more flimsy in his analysis and proposals) the more you read him and the more you veer into his takes and worldview
Like when he said he would ally with libertarians and ancaps to take down a leninist US government
Or this https://bennorton.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Murray-Bookchin-Israel-Zionist.jpg
We justifiably dunk on poor uncle Chomsky from time to time but Bookchin has posted way worse radlib cringe.
The people on the right who call themselves 'libertarians' are proprietarians
cant get much worse that this
What if instead of Google Murray Bookchin it was Google Murray Blockchain and it was just for the... people that use blockchain I do not understand blockchain
Earlyish Bookchin is decent and he made some interesting contributions to anarchist theory, but he needed a goddamn editor. Even his good books are kind of a mess imo.
I have a pretty low tolerance for people who don’t get to the point, for what it’s worth. I have the same criticism of different marxist-adjacent writers as well (zizek comes to mind).
:zizek-fuck: (schniff)
“and now I will write sho terribly about ze philosophy of gender that othersh zink I am a transhphobe deshpite jusht being a dumbash and sho on and sho forth”
Seriously, read his shitty article on gender liberation where he makes up his own definition of gender and then argues about it with himself while not clearly even switching perspectives. Complete fucking mess.
Ironically, fairly early Bookchin is mostly better than late Bookchin. I recommend Post-Scarcity Anarchism.
I like the ideas of Apoism - synthesizing Bookchin with Mao - but everything I can find from Oçalan translated into English is vague as hell.
This is like when I bought The Sublime Object of Ideology and I opened it and was like "wait now who is this lacan fella"
I found post scarcity anarchism to be a pretty easy read even for someone like me who didnt have a solid theory backing at the time.
Firm disagree here. It’s a definite strain that comes from the cope around not accepting the privilege created by the imperial core’s stolen wealth, but by no means a majority.
There is a long and very proud history in america of actual socialists / leftists coming from the working class and other marginalized groups.
