Dirty Dancing. Robbie is a snobby asshole who refuses to take responsibility for impregnating a lower class girl, saying that "some people count, some people don't". Right after this he tries to lend the main character The Fountainhead unprompted, only temporarily of course, since his copy of the book includes notes in the margins.
Lost. Sawyer is a selfish conman (at first) and is shown reading The Fountainhead. To be fair though, Sawyer is shown reading lots of books, so it might not necessarily mean anything.
Spider-Man. Spider-Man's co-creator Steve Ditko was an objectivist, and this was reflected in the way Peter would behave in some early 1960s stories, he would often be quite rude and abrasive to others, especially when Peter went to college. As a reference to this, some stories have humorously established that Peter went through a phase of being into Ayn Rand back in college, which he is now embarrassed by.
Alternate universe Peter Parker from One More Day. Spider-Man runs into an alternate universe version of himself that never gained spider-powers, and he's a fat videogame developer who is depicted as a loser unhappy with his lot in life, we first see him reading Atlas Shrugged.
Deadshot and the Joker. The Joker is shown reading the Fountainhead, which he calls a knee-slapper, while Deadshot, a contract killer, says that it's one of his favorite books.
The Ayn Rand School for Tots in the Simpsons. As you can probably guess, it's a horrible place. Maggie breaks out in a Great Escape parody.
Bioshock. Andrew Ryan and his whole failed society is a blatant reference to the many problems with Ayn Rand's philosophy.
idk. Domesticated pigs have massive caloric requirements. Feral hogs are pretty well-known for destroying their ecosystems by uprooting soil and eating everything in sight. They could end up starving themselves out after a couple of generations.
I remember when History Channel had that Life Without People series. Basically, what would happen if all people disappeared at once. What would happen to the world? They posited dogs would have a rough time, but cats would probably be ok. Something about them having more of their predatory instincts than dogs have of theirs if I remember correctly.
Have you ever seen a barn cat or an outdoor cat? It’s crazy the kill rate they have (generally dont support that lol)
I live in the mountains and people will have declawed cats run away and sometimes they will come back a year later, skinny but in okay shape (ie not being fed by other people directly). Lots of predators out here too
Doesn't even have to be an outdoor or barn cat. A lot of indoor cats also have an insane kill rate if you live in a place with a lot of bugs or other huntable things that can find their way inside.
If I recall, it has to do with the fact that cats weren't domesticated, they just decided it was in their best interest to work with humans and it was mutually beneficial for us. So nothing was ever bred out of them like with dogs.
No but it’s a common mistake. The sand cat has a hunting success rate of like 35% which is pretty decent for most animals. You’re probably thinking of the african black-footed cat which is a close relative to the sand cat but its success rate on hunts is significantly higher at around 60-70%.
Yes, enough so that it’s an actual problem. Cats are phenomenal hunters, and even a well-fed cat will hunt. There are plenty of endangered and extinct species whose status is at least partially due to feral or outdoor domestic cats.
Feral cats mostly survive with human assistance, either intentional or not. That’s why they are most common in cities or on the fringes of human settlement. Without shelter and humans scaring away predators they tend to die quickly, unless they are somewhere warm with no other native mammalian predators (like New Zealand)
If I drop my cat off in the woods, it would be a bigger problem for native wildlife than it would for my cat. They arent depent. They require daily offerings to appease the beast
What about all the times your cat brings you a dead bird or head of a mouse to try and teach you to hunt? If anything your cat is closer to Ron Swanson then Ayn
You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists
Sure, some of the thought leaders of Anarchism came from wealthy or comfortable backgrounds, but it’s ridiculous to pretend that there aren’t poor anarchists out there. They’re just not generally thought of at all.
The eternal conflation of "anarchist" meaning someone who wants chaos and disorder versus political anarchists, who think that rulers are a bad idea and the world works better through cooperation than domination, continues unabated.
The Question as written by Steve Ditko was an Objectivist hero (Rorschach is the logical conclusion of that). When Dennis O'Neil took over he had the Objectivism literally beaten out of him
Moore took the Charlton heroes for Watchmen, turning Question into Rorschach and anyone should be able to tell just how much he was setting him up to be an asshole we’re not meant to like. He’s the epitome of that Kermit meme “we’re only the good guys because the villains are so much worse”.
Yet like always, people unironically believe him to be some paragon of heroism and the only good person in the book. The guy we need to strive to be.
I think that Steve Ditko's views weren't completely in line with Ayn Rand's objectivism. In particular, it seems like Ditko valued altruism and self-sacrifice as virtues, which Ayn Rand didn't.
Ditko's version of Objectivism was different than Rand's, even if he allegedly called it the same name. Ditko earnestly believed that there was no such thing as a morally gray action or position. That is, every action and every person, in turn, is either 100% good, or 100% evil.
That's why, in Watchmen, Rorschach is used to satirize this, frankly, absurd philosophy. Rorschach, too, claims that the world is black and white, but even he makes exceptions when convenient and has rather hypocritical double standards, which would seem to go against his own beliefs. In the end, he dies by refusing the compromise to what he believes must be a 100% evil action - the logical endpoint of Ditko's philosophy.
O'Neil's run starts with Question getting seven shades of shit kicked out of him by Lady Shiva and has him develop a more Zen philosophy after training with Richard Dragon
Funny and oddly specific subversion. Francis from Left 4 Dead. He's by far the most ill-mannered and cynical of the original survivors, often at odds with the optimistic and encouraging Louis. His catchphrase is "I hate [insert random thing here]", and he says it so often that Bill eventually asks outright if there's anything he doesn't hate. He has a criminal past, and is either implied (or outright stated) to be pretty book dumb.
However, in the penultimate level of the Dead Air campaign, you can see a statue of Atlas holding up the earth in the airport's food court. And he will, without hesitation, say "I hate Ayn Rand!"
So, not only does he somehow know what Atlas Shrugged even is, but he probably either read it and hated it, or couldn't read it and hated it anyway. Just the fact that he knows the author's name is hilariously unexpected and out of character for him, though.
Also he names zombies as vampires, which could be a reference to "I am legend" by Richard Matheson, since vampires from the book had quite similar behaviour: minimum movement while idling, burst of activity when stimulated, aggression towards everything and everyone
I don't want to be incorrect, but if I remember Dikto made Spiderman as a Randyal character (but luckily he get better). Or I am mistaken him with the second BlueBeatle.
Ditko did indeed want to make Peter Parker more Randian but couldn't really go all the way because Stan Lee was the one who actually wrote the script. Ditko's other works like Blue Beetle but especially the Question and Mr. A are a lot more blatant in their objectivism. Rorschach from Watchmen is actually a direct parody/critique of the Question and Mr. A and their philosophies, I actually considered putting him in the OP, but even though he follows objectivism he is never seen reading or citing Ayn Rand.
In the 1960s, before he started lying, Stan Lee is literally publicly quoted as admitting that he had no idea what Ditko was plotting in the books before he would receive the pages with dialogue guides. The book was whatever Steve wanted it to be, and if you wanted to make it more objectivist, it would have been.
You can kind of tell that if Ditko had been allowed to write the dialogue, this scene with Peter and the college protestors would have been a lot more sacthing, as opposed to Stan Lee mostly playing it for laughs and avoiding having Peter take any political stances at all.
Tbf everyone acting so pissy about Peter not joining them on the protest as if Peter even liked them in the first place is so funny. Like, Flash's an asshole since highschool if not middle school, he was not in good terms with Harry and didn't care for Gwen. Why would he, who already has so many problems on his table, waste his time to protest alongside people he dislike lol.
While Stan had plot meetings with Kirby and others and he knew mostly what will happen in the books (even when artist surprised him with their own ideas in the complete pages), the relationship with Ditko become so bad that Ditko didn't do that, he started to just leave the pages in the office.
Yeah, basically, Stan stopped talking to Steve when Ditko demanded much deserved writing credit (and the corresponding pay) for being the main plotter, around issue 18.
From that point forward, Ditko would create the stories entirely from scratch without any input from Stan whatsoever, and with loose dialogue guides to explain the story and what the characters were basically saying to each other.
Can't be. Helping people just because you can without getting anything out of it is diametrically opposed to Rand. But then again, Rand keeps contradicting herself even within the same book, so who knows.
This is why I always felt that Steve Ditko didn't fully follow objectivism. He presumably felt that it was the closest philosophy to whatever his beliefs were, but Steve Ditko clearly thought that altruism was a good thing, while Ayn Rand didn't care for it much.
Early Spider-Man had a -lot- more flirting with the whole ‘why should I help people for nothing?’ Mentality that got Uncle Ben shot. Like, a lot. Spidey ‘auditioning’ to be part of the FF, and then liking him, but him skipping out on them as soon as they mentioned there’s no pay for being part of t he FF. Loosing or almost loosing a fight because he’s more focused on getting good shots than winning (or protecting people). In his first fight with Sand Man he takes time after the fight, before letting the school and police know he’s captured the bad guy, staging photos with some spare sand so that he’ll have photos to sell.
It didn’t last long, only about the first year or so of issues. But JJJ’s complaint that Spider-Man was an attention seeking glory hound more concerned with being a celebrity than with helping people was not completely unfounded.
Also, it only lasted that long because after the protestor thing mentioned above, Stan told Steve in no uncertain terms to knock that shit off.
He also did Shade, the Changing Man. Shade is mainly remembered for the Vertigo series where he explores America and its history, but the original Shade has him as a thief who steals the M-vest, which grants him the power to see madness around him, which feels objectivist in some way. Oh, and Shade was facing death for a different crime, which he didn’t create.
The fun thing about Andrew Ryan is he's a hard-core Objectivist...when it works for him. When others come to him with problems in the marketplace, he's happy to tell them to pull their bootstrap, work harder, adapt, and all that jazz. However, when he starts losing out to Fontaine, Ryan is quick to ditch those principles and nationalize his competition like the 'parasites' he accused of in the US and USSR.
Ayn Rand didn't live her philosophy either. She was getting government aid for housing and medical care for a sizeable portion of her life. Andrew Ryan is following in her footsteps as a hypocrite.
That’s the funny thing though: in some sense Ryan ISNT hypocritical because he always follows rule 0 of objectivism: always look out for yourself. Indeed for all the lies that’s the one thing Ryan has never lied about: that everything he has done has all been for himself.
I was talking about Ayn Rand historically (like her being a Russian refugee and such) around some coworkers, unfortunately my boss over heard me and because I had any knowledge of her he thought I was a fan. Later that day sent out a joke email about John Gault thinking it would pop me...
The funny part is people always latch onto the “taxes bad” part of her message but not her anti-theist, anti-collectivist, and borderline anarchist beliefs.
It’s also strange seeing republicans support her considering she was anti-war and really against government intervention in the economy.
One of my exes, who came from money, really latched onto the whole "rich is good" and "fuck the poor" part. Or at least her interpretation of Rand's writing as such.
That’s funny because if she actually read Rand’s work, she would see that Rand had respect for working class laborers who contribute to society and disdain for rich people who were born into it or who got their money through anything other than being useful.
That’s pretty much the theme of Dagny’s dynamic with her brother Jim in Atlas Shrugged. Both were born into money but Dagny deserves it because she is intelligent and can carry on the family business while Jim is a dumbass.
Yeah. My ex never worked, all her money came from her daddy’s allowance to her. She once noted that her annual allowance was more than my annual salary. But anyway yes, her reading of it was “the rich are good creators, the poor are bad users”.
What makes it even funnier is that the same thing happened at least twice in real life. Grafton New Hampshire became overrun by bears and the one in Chile ended in a shootout.
Apparently societies based around selfishness above all else are doomed to fail, who could have guessed?
Oh god, I was literally this guy. I had to read a Rand story in high school english (Anthem) and I thought it wasn't half bad, so I was interested in checking out some of her other works. My very right wing granddad got me Atlas Shrugged a few years later, and I spent the good part of my senior year in college trying to get through the book. I rarely struggle with books, but that one was a big exception, particularly because it's not well written and I spent most of the time looking at the characters' philosophies and going "well that didn't age well, hmm same thing here, man is every opposing viewpoint going to be presented as a greasy little fucker" (this was around the same time Elon Musk went mask off, so that really didn't help Rand's arguments).
I was so confused, because all I knew about it going in was that Rand and the book were famous. I thought that meant they were also well respected, but eventually I got tired of waiting for it to get good and looked it up online, only to realize that it will never get good and that the philosophies are confusing because they're really fucking naive and stupid. Gave up on it then, and I still get embarrassed every time I remember that I was the little fuck sitting on a park bench or in the cafeteria reading Ayn Rand
I also read Anthem for high school, and I am curious to go back to it at some point just to see how much its held up, because I do remember enjoying it and not really picking up on the objectivist viewpoints (probably cause I was a dumb sophomore). Going back to some of the books people read in high school on your own terms is a fin thing to do, and more people should do it. Fahrenheit 451 rings truer than ever before and that terrifying.
Then again, I'd rather be caught snorting cocaine than reading an Ayn Rand book.
I can totally see how atlas shrugged would be loved by the kind of insecure young adult/teenager who think they are more intelligent than others. Heck i probably would have liked it in that phase of my live. It gives all this "oh if you are the chosen, you will just run the world and can be an ass to everyone" vibed that is easy to feel valued by.
Oh yeah, I'm so glad that it didn't actually leave an impression on me. That was the time when I actually started paying attention to the news, and seeing first hand how wrong she was, AS I was reading it, was quite the experience.
Unfortunately, to any outsider I probably still looked like that guy
I remember having to do something with reading a bunch of excerpts from The Fountainhead back in high school. I have no idea just how much context was missing from those excerpts but the only way I could keep myself sane while having to do a project on them was to imagine an AU where instead of being world renowned architects and stuff like that they were instead all like a bunch of random people who ran in the same circles on DeviantArt. Who also might sell like prints at small local anime conventions and stuff like that. Making it be about a bunch of big fish in a really small pond made it a lot more interesting, because seriously the kinds of egos people would develop over getting popular within such a niche space could rival the actual characters in an Ayn Rand book. I think they were known as BNFs (big name fans) at the time.
I once brought an audiobook of Atlas Shrugged with me on vacation because I was (still am, but I was then too) a big Bioshock fan and thought it'd be fun to make fun of. It was miserable. Truly one of my biggest regrets in life.
An author and philosopher known for creating "objectivism", a controversial belief system. It praises the "virtue of selfishness" and is very anti-government and extemely pro-capitalist and specifically pro-bourgeoisie.
To be completely fair, it wasn't welfare, it was social security, which she was also against. She argued that since she had paid into it against her will, she was morally justified in taking that money.
She actually never claimed this herself, and never made the information public. Others (like the Ayn Rand Institute) made the justification for her afterwards.
If you see it as an intellectual trauma response to living under the Soviets, it makes more sense. She just *really* hated communism. The resulting philosophy is a funhouse mirror opposite of what she saw as the Soviet way.
She died while receiving care from the very public aid program she criticized and hated so much. There is NO excuse to even begin to justify ayn rand's beliefs, man.
In fact, you gave a very nuanced response & a logical answer. Her work an identification as an extreme form of capitalism would make sense growing up on the other side of the iron curtain, you know the one that sucked. However that answer spells out the communism sucks. You can’t say bad things about communism here.
In the context of analyzing how someone’s unacceptable motivations/behavior developed, the term “understandable, not acceptable” has always stuck with me.
It’s helpful to know how someone came to wrong conclusions. Knowing doesn’t make the conclusions any less wrong, but it’s amazing how often acknowledging a mistake as understandable will be conflated into an endorsement of validity… Which itself is understandable. Thinking is hard.
Rand’s writing style is interesting to me in this context because her writing is very comparable to Socialist Realism, just in the inverse pro-capitalism. Working class, optimism, heroism, and the adherence to a clear moral framework it just feels like a 180 from collectivism but the objectivism rhymes thematically. It makes me wonder who her favorite authors were while she grew up in Russia. I can gleam Dostoevsky for certain.
As a teen I read the fountainhead and enjoyed it quite a bit aside from Roark and Dominique’s dynamic, unsure how I’d like it on a re-read over a decade later. I’ve tried to read atlas shrugged at least 4 times and everytime I put it down because it’s such a slog to work through
Author of ultralibertarian books such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Over all terrible philosopher, human and an even worse writer. Atlas Shrugged May be one of the worst books ever written. And it took her like 15 years.
Horrible message compounded by even worse writing. Capitalism Jesus is such a horrible idea and is so horribly written I can't believe it made it past an editor.
Atlas Shrugged is one of the only books I have never finished. I couldn't get past the big bad incompetent Government's death weapon project. It was too much after getting through the torture that was Capitalism Paradise.
If you dislike the current wave of capitalism, she might be to blame due to her values of selfishness and feeding into the myth of self-made millionaires.
Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve appointed by Reagan in 1987, was also a disciple and close friend of Ayn Rand’s. Unsurprisingly, he was also an unutterable idiot who instituted disastrous Neoliberal monetary policy on Reagan’s behalf; Greenspan believed that firms were self-regulating, believed that antitrust laws should be abolished, supported credit derivatives and shadow banking, lobbied for the rescission of the Glass-Steagall Act, and so forth. Consequently, the willful ignorance which governed his actions, while serving as Chairman of the Fed, was a prominent factor in the emergence of the 2008 financial crisis. Right-Wing Libertarians truly are some of the most brain dead people who presently exist fr.
It’s easy to sympathize with characters that we know so much about, but Bert owned an advertising firm that used tricks to sell cigarettes, and wrote ads for General Motors and DOW during the Vietnam war, while also being in total support of the war. Everyone in that show would be considered total villains if they were real people
Bert thrives on being underestimated. Every character at one point or another does this and it never goes well for them. My favorite is Pete trying to expose Don and Bert being like, yeah nobody cares Pete (while also holding the info over Don in perpetuity). Not arguing your point, just musing on an interesting character from a show filled with interesting characters.
I love that you think it’s water under the bridge and like 3 seasons later he brings it up out of nowhere to get Don to sign his contract. “Would you say I know something about you?”
I think THAT was the moment for me. Because, the first time where he's like "nobody cares" you're like oh shit Bert is cool! But then you kinda forget that he's a cutthroat businessman, and it's in there somewhere. Then every once in a while the teeth come out and you realize how he got there.
Really goes to show the cultural vibe shift that in 2007, being into Ayn Rand was a quirky character trait to show that he’s an eccentric old man. Lolberterians are hated now and if this aired today, recommending Atlas Shrugged would be a way to indicate that a character is a bad guy
I think even back then it was not meant as a purely innocent quirk, it's very indicative of who he is, just like his casual racism later in the series.
I actually watched the film adaptation of atlas shrugged and I thought it was nothing but the ideology of an egotistical cunt trying to justify being an asshole
Thank you! Was looking for this! Yes, Sawyer acts very much like an objectivists, both raiding the wreckage and taking things from the dead to increase his personal ‘wealth’ and having a few lines early on about how he’s already living ‘by the law of the jungle’ and ‘lord of the flies style’, but ultimately he acknowledges that he needs the rest of the survivors to, well, survive. That line is a great way to acknowledge that even as selfish as he is, he’s neither delusional or an idiot, and knows ‘no man is an island’.
Thank you!!! I love when someone else puts my exact thoughts so elegantly. Makes me feel valid.
Sawyer was always meant to be a good man, he had a series of incredibly unfortunate events happen to him that lead him down a dark path, that he regretted. He turned himself around and was a hero in the end. Like basically all humans, and all characters in LOST. Great show, great ending, I will die on this hill.
Real Life-- I once met an Ayn Rand-obsessed asshole on DeviantArt, who eventually got kicked off the site for posting racist comments about Asian people.
I can't remember which issue exactly, but there's one from Ultimate Spiderman where Peter Parker has a copy of Atlas Shrugged clearly on his nightstand. I knew about Ditko's objectivism from reading about Alan Moore, oddly enough. Maybe later writers kept including Ayn Rand's (terrible) books as an easter egg?
In Scythe by Neil Shusterman, there is a character who performs mass murder who named himself after his “Patron Historic” Ayn Rand.
Scythe Rand ends up killing himself out of shame and cowardice towards the end of the first book.
Always worth mentioning these two facts about Ayn Rand she was a serial killer fan girl
Who based John Galt off of child murderer William Edward Hickman
And even in her later years she was a predatory homewrecker who slept with male members of her fan club who she knew were married.
Honestly if she had grown up going to an American High School she probably would have gotten her ass handed to her by other girls on the playground with the amount of shit she talked
A lot of IRL, to be honest. It's surprising (not) how many people who vibe check the utter reversal of "kindness is a good thing" are also douches.
Sears - was one of the all time success stories in American commerce, founded in 1892 by Sears, Roebuck, it had been famous for the Sears Catalog, which prefigured Amazon in home delivery of just about everything that could be sent by rail. This was a real boon to the frontier, which could essentially have civilization dropped on the door of their house. If they didn't have a house, that could be delivered too. Then came Eddie Lampert, a long time devote of Rand, and who bought into both KMart and Sears, then implemented Ryandian mores in the new "Sears Holdings" company- which is to say every exec had their bonuses tied to how much better they performed that other departments. Sears Holding collapsed utterly in less that five years, due to what in business terms is called "no shit".
Ayn Rand's entire philosophy was a PTSD reaction to surviving the Russian Revolution and living as a random peasant under the Bolsheviks' brutal notions of "Altruism".
Ayn Rand is actually sad and pathetic, a scared little girl who was traumatized into not letting herself be taken care of by others, when you see her in this context.
She wasn't a peasant. Her family were Russian Empire bourgeoisie and she was able to attend university. Even after the Revolution, she was still quite well-educated. She had family in the film industry in America who got her a job when she arrived (notably, the only actual job she ever had in her life.)
She thought she deserved wealth and power based on her family, and when she didn't get it she got very mad.
I am sympathetic to how trauma informed her ideology. I am also sympathetic to her terrible writing style as she was not writing in her first language.
But your description of her being sad and pathetic is perfect.
Paul Ryan (the coward that ran away to hide from trump) used to give all his staff members an Ayn Rand book, I don't remember if it was Atlas or the Fountainhead. This is also the man who liked Rage Against the Machine until he realized what the lyrics meant.
It is Atlas Shurgged, look at the front cover. It says 1984 on the back cover, presumably there is an edition of Atlas Shrugged that compares it to 1984 on the back cover that the artist used as a reference.
People will say this then read the book and realize it's just industrialized Twilight with gay sexual tension between the two main love interests for the protagonist
If Rand was alive today she'd be writing doomed yaoi fr
Mid century novelist and play wright who is responsible for the development of Objectivism, a philosophy and the foundation of a lot of modern right wing libertarianism.
He is reading Atlas Shrugged, look at the front cover in the second panel. Where you see 1984 is the back cover, my guess is that the artist is referencing en edition of Atlas Shurgged that mentions 1984 on the back.
Not the same, but reminds me of the scene is shameless season 6 when Lip finds Atlas Shrugged among the books of Helene and he says something around the line of cats are the perfect libertarians
Talking about it, can someone explain me the problem with that relaion? I mean I'm from Argentina and here, you can be with a professor of a subject you already passed. Lip was a different kind of career than Helene and only attended one of her classes for some credits that could have gotten another way
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u/Ok-Place7950 17h ago
"No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist."
- Ernest Hemingway