Read this in 2015 at your recommendation. I'm pleased to have had so many stimulating conversations about this book with you over the years. Excellent but somewhat flawed read. Rand's depiction of religion is an easy bone to pick, but her lack of nuance in the morally grey is also another. But the message is well conveyed once you get used to her style- and her propensity for characters to give several hour long speeches at dinner parties.
I never thought I would enjoy a book with long speeches so well. But yes, we have had so many good talks about the subjects and concepts presented. While the good guys come across as a little to clean, despite strong handed attacks at cultural norms, it is the antagonists that make the book. Except for Danneskjold.
Also you have to wonder why the allegedly intellectual "men of the mind" in Atlas Shrugged don't seem particularly well read. You'd think that the strikers in Galt's Gulch would have home libraries, and that someone would have set up a print shop & book store to serve the literary needs of that community.
The novel would make more biological sense if it showed that John Galt & Dagny Taggart got a late start in forming a family after the misrulers' regime collapsed. That would demonstrate the triumph of human flourishing in the most literal & tangible way. Instead the novel is implicitly & unsubtly anti-natalist. I mean god forbid that an auto factory worker were to get his daughter the braces she needed under his company's family dental plan.
I doubt Rand, making an argument for objectivism, and with a commitment to something like rationalism, would be focusing on biology as the key layline of the argument. It was written by Ayn Rand, not Lyndon McCloud.
@@redactedllc Biology is the foundation of man's nature, and family formation is human flourishing in the most literal & tangible sense. A normal woman would not want to strike a little girl's face and knock her teeth out just because a socialized health care system got this child some braces.
You're really hung up on the braces scene. I cannot find your other comment on this topic. I doubt Rand was a natalist. Natalism, as a term didn't reach common use until the 1970's, so it would be anachronistic to expect her to include such an argument in her book at the time of writing.
YES!
indeed
Read this in 2015 at your recommendation. I'm pleased to have had so many stimulating conversations about this book with you over the years. Excellent but somewhat flawed read. Rand's depiction of religion is an easy bone to pick, but her lack of nuance in the morally grey is also another. But the message is well conveyed once you get used to her style- and her propensity for characters to give several hour long speeches at dinner parties.
I never thought I would enjoy a book with long speeches so well. But yes, we have had so many good talks about the subjects and concepts presented. While the good guys come across as a little to clean, despite strong handed attacks at cultural norms, it is the antagonists that make the book.
Except for Danneskjold.
Also you have to wonder why the allegedly intellectual "men of the mind" in Atlas Shrugged don't seem particularly well read. You'd think that the strikers in Galt's Gulch would have home libraries, and that someone would have set up a print shop & book store to serve the literary needs of that community.
What is your argument?
The novel would make more biological sense if it showed that John Galt & Dagny Taggart got a late start in forming a family after the misrulers' regime collapsed. That would demonstrate the triumph of human flourishing in the most literal & tangible way.
Instead the novel is implicitly & unsubtly anti-natalist. I mean god forbid that an auto factory worker were to get his daughter the braces she needed under his company's family dental plan.
I doubt Rand, making an argument for objectivism, and with a commitment to something like rationalism, would be focusing on biology as the key layline of the argument.
It was written by Ayn Rand, not Lyndon McCloud.
@@redactedllc Biology is the foundation of man's nature, and family formation is human flourishing in the most literal & tangible sense. A normal woman would not want to strike a little girl's face and knock her teeth out just because a socialized health care system got this child some braces.
You're really hung up on the braces scene. I cannot find your other comment on this topic.
I doubt Rand was a natalist. Natalism, as a term didn't reach common use until the 1970's, so it would be anachronistic to expect her to include such an argument in her book at the time of writing.