Caltrops - Wall Street Kid





	[quote name="Bananadine"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]I'm not going to read Atlas Shrugged, because there are a thousand other books I'd like to read first, and the entire objectivist argument seems to be completely retarded, unrealistic, devoid of compassion and almost exclusively held by petulant neckbeards.[/quote] Ayn Rand herself was not exactly a petulant neckbeard, and within the framework of the book, the argument generally makes sense and leads to something higher and better than ordinary compassion. That the framework itself is severely unrealistic tends to cripple the book as an illustration of a real philosophy, but leaves its status as a huge, epic fantasy story unsullied (except at one point when the author finally decides the way has been paved for the reader to actively enjoy a pure dose of philosophy, and drops in a lecture that stops all drama for fifty pages--but that's only like a twentieth of the book). I like epic fantasy stories myself, and I don't care much about philosophy, so I just pretended all the heroic industrialists were a strange, new kind of elf, while the life-hating collectivists were only especially talky orcs, and that, solidly buttressed by my fascination with craziness, made it easy for me to enjoy the book--which was a big surprise after I'd heard it denounced so many times as a tedious presentation of a bad philosophy. It's still somewhat retarded though, and it would be perfectly reasonable for you to skip it.[/quote]