Currently re-reading 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand and it's warping my mind. Most of the problem is that it is IMMENSE (1000+ pages of tiny dense script)., deeply deeply philosphical and fucking totally right-wing (in a mosly good way*). Side-effects currently include spontaneous philosophical combustion in the workplace. Everyone at work thinks I'm weird, whcih is fine, it's part of my work-image - I learned in my first programming job many eons ago that if you act all hell-of smart and quirky (like dropping jokes about prime numbers into watercooler conversations), people assume you are some sort of uber-geek and therefore you can get away with just aout anything - BUT ranting about Objectivism as a basis for moral life is really pushing the edges of the acceptable.
Rand was born in Russia and writes with the strangely dense and meandering intensity of all her Russian friends ... the characters wander off on 10 page inner monologues or talk at each in immense soliloquies (there's a dinner party scene that must take 40 or 50 pages as the guest take turns to rant at each other). The the same ideas are repeated over and over ... it is the literary equivalent of World War I trench warfare ... a slow, grinding war of attrition.
That aside, it's a pretty amazing book ... the basic point is to that individual logic and reasoning form the basis for all meaningful living. Tbe book attacks communism, fascism and other state-cotnrolled interference as antithetical to the rights of the individual. Ayn Rand eventually formed a philosophy called Objectivism that formally explored some of these concepts.
Wikipedia:
Atlas Shrugged
* That sounds contradictory, I know, but the right and left both end up meeting when you follow them far enough ... I am a laisez-faire capitalist, myself, but got that way through radical ecomonic anarchy. It's been a long day, i'll shut up.
Rand was born in Russia and writes with the strangely dense and meandering intensity of all her Russian friends ... the characters wander off on 10 page inner monologues or talk at each in immense soliloquies (there's a dinner party scene that must take 40 or 50 pages as the guest take turns to rant at each other). The the same ideas are repeated over and over ... it is the literary equivalent of World War I trench warfare ... a slow, grinding war of attrition.
That aside, it's a pretty amazing book ... the basic point is to that individual logic and reasoning form the basis for all meaningful living. Tbe book attacks communism, fascism and other state-cotnrolled interference as antithetical to the rights of the individual. Ayn Rand eventually formed a philosophy called Objectivism that formally explored some of these concepts.
Wikipedia:
Atlas Shrugged
* That sounds contradictory, I know, but the right and left both end up meeting when you follow them far enough ... I am a laisez-faire capitalist, myself, but got that way through radical ecomonic anarchy. It's been a long day, i'll shut up.