FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
I'd make the case for Ayn Rand in real-world conditions that have been worsened due to her influence. Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, and several other dweebs used to have a brain trust "The Ayn Rand Collective" where they sat around and read Atlas Shrugged to each other, simped for Rand, and dreamed up evil shit for when they gained power and could enact it. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Fed, has probably had more influence on the world than Thatcher as British PM. And while Thatcherism has collapsed and been replaced by new ghoulery there is still the ongoing threat of things like social security privatization and financial deregulation which as concepts crawled directly from Ayn Rand's living room into global economic systems.
You say you're against collectivism, yet you form a collective. Hmm... :very-intelligent:
Both are influential for conservatives, but Thatcher had power and used it to cause great harm and is arguably far more influential for it. Rand was just some asshole by comparison :thinkin-lenin:
This.
Thatcher destroyed unions, wrecked social support networks and made education about LGBT issues in schools impossible for decades. Her actions have lasting, catastrophic impact on the lives of the British working class until this day.
Ayn Rand was also a repulsive human being, but she was just some rando we'd today see in the dunk tank. Her garbage ideology definitely influenced a ton of invisible hand idiots, and she deserves all the dunks she can get, but if i had to choose on which of their graves to pee, i'd pick Maggie (ofc the correct thing to do is pee on both of their graves).
But Ayn Rand is annoying and when I see her books in libraries/stores I think about horrible things. Nobody is selling Thatcher books because she was illiterate.
As an American, I can’t really get worked up about Thatcher cause we had Ronnie and Bush Sr at the same time.
I can get worked up about Ayn Rand. I’ve met too many people who talk about her philosophy positively, and most annoyingly they think it’s more enlightening or even act as it’s more true than actual events in real history.
I will give her this, Atlas Shrugged is an incredible title. Did Margret Thatcher ever name anything so well? Doubt it. Case closed.
Well fellas, we have no choice but to abandon communism
🎵~ Oh, we love you Mrs. Thatcher
You´re the darling of us all
You’re the curse of the Irish nation
Fianna Fail and Fine Gael
You´ve destroyed me hired purchase
And you put me on the dole
If I could get my hands on you
I´d kick you up the hole ~ 🎵
🎵 ~ Oh, we love you Mrs. Thatcher
Like your old man likes the brew
Such a lad your husband Denis
When he´s had a drink or two
He´ll take a pint of Guinness
and glass of irish mist
And because he sleeps with you each night
no wonder hes so pissed ~ 🎵
The plot is so poorly written that it requires multiple kinds of science magic to be invented (perpetual motion machines, magic metal) for the bazinga rich asshole utopia to be tenable even in the fiction.
I mean, its speculative sci-fi. I don't think Star Trek is worse for having FTL travel or universal translators or replication machines. Reardon Steele and Galt's Engine simply posit the possibility of a greater future surplus labor value than we enjoy today and then speculate as to how people will respond to the new bounty.
And, for all her garbage prose, I don't even think Rand was wildly off the mark. A handful of greedy, sex-pest assholes trying to corner the market on technological innovation and horde it in the face of public revolt sounds... pretty spot on to me. The real problem with Rand's fantasy free-market utopia is the fact that her heroes just kinda suck. They don't convince anybody, other than their own little insulated cabal. They don't build any kind of popular reactionary base among labor. They lose the media war. They lose control of government. And they ultimately have to retreat to a secret bunker where none of their miracle inventions can operate as more than unrefined prototypes.
Rand writes like a fucking liberal. Her triumphant conclusion is one in which the brightest, most ambitious, most hard working people in the world get completely washed. And then when they're gone everyone feels sorry about it. Even Edgar Allen Poe would cringe at that level of vainglorious self-pity.
Margaret Thatcher had actual power, so I would argue she was worse.
I can live with some idiot wiriting Idiocracy aimed for a redpilled audience, but at least Ayn Rand was a snob with the decency to never hold an office.
If we can attach real blame to Ayn Rand, it's through her influence on Alan Greenspan.
During their lifetimes, Thatcher was far worse. But over time, the people influenced by Rand's work have collectively surpassed the evils of The Iron Lady. But I think that's giving Rand too much credit, as some other libertarian figurehead would have arisen for them to model their worldviews on.
I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that anyone deeply influenced by Any Rand was a paragon of altruism to begin with. In my experience, people mostly just use her as a post-hoc justification for doing the shitty stuff they already wanted to do.
Seriously. When's the last time anybody ran into a well-read libertarian?
Can you imagine if Rand was on Twitter? Shit would be primo dunking material. I'd love to bully her.
Like if Joyce Carol Oates was main character for a day by insisting "A is A" was a philosophical game changer.
Thatcher was a fucking demon of every possible colour.
Her entire time in power was dedicated to destroying and pulverising the working classes - she had a pathological hatred of unions and self-determination. Almost brought low by the miner's strike, she started a war with Argentina purely to save her own boney arse and stay in government. Then, beginning with privatisation and deregulation, Thatcher annihilated manufacturing and large-scale industry purely as revenge on workers - as a result the UK was stripped of assets, infrastructure, and investment with all the profit going overseas never to be seen again. And fuck her for starting the fucking Poll Tax in Scotland (again as revenge - Scotland always fucking hated her because of the closure of the shipyards amongst other things). A tax that, by the way, was only ended when people in the South of England - her key voters, started complaining despite there being a year of growing protests north of the border.
She was directly responsible for Tony Blair and New Labour and their fuckery - happily continuing the Tories' work of blithely assaulting civil liberties, union representation, and public services in the name of neoliberalism and profit.
Fuck that fucking rancid bitch. A thousand deaths isn't enough.
Everyone from Donald Trump, to Alan Greenspan, to Brad Pitt have sung Ayn Rand's praises.
High school level copywriting going on in this description.
although she lived by the doctrine of her own greatness
Didn't she make use of healthcare at the end of her life despite being against public services?
Had Ayn Rand not existed, conservatives would hold up Heinlein or Orson Scott Card or HP Lovecraft or George Orwell as their explicit go-to for jerk-off fiction. It isn't as though there's a shortage of revanchist fantasy from the Cold War Era.
But as an actual head of government leading one of the globe's surviving military/colonial powers and socio-economic centers, Thatcher got to turn that fantasy into reality. She inflicted far more material harm than Ayn Rand could have dreamed of doing with her mediocre sci-fi.
Its like asking who was the better Marxist - Terry Pratchett or Fidel Castro? No offense to Pratchett, but Castro actually did the thing.
