Two Things...

[pyat]

Sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged have quadrupled in the first four months of the year.

The founder of 4chan has been named the Most Influential Person in the World by Time. Cause, you know, everyone outside of the English-speaking Internet knows ALL about him!

Both these things irritate me!

Comments

[dronon.livejournal.com]

Be comforted at least that the Time thing came about not as a result of actual public opinion, but through some creative hacking (http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack/).

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Blaargh!

[dronon.livejournal.com]

Um... can I cheer you up with a kitty (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU2EtLHVoiI)?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

That kitty is probably a Libertarian!

[paka.livejournal.com]

But, you have to admit, they're sort of related.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. And that's scary.

[relee.livejournal.com]

There was a video game loosely based on Atlas Shrugged released last year, called Bioshock. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock) A lot of people became curious about the origins of the twisted ethics of the failed utopia under the sea, and that might explain the surge. Bioshock 2 has been hyped a lot lately in gaming news.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

OH! I didn't realize BIOShock was a randfest! That explains it.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Two of the main characters are named Andrew Ryan and Atlas.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Wow. What you miss when you don't play a game :)

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Well, Bioshock would be a Randfest if... the ideas they had basically worked. Taken as it is, it's actually pretty anti-Randian considering the Objectivist Paradise Under the Sea failed spectacularly.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

It's a Randfest in the sense that it displays the dystopic nature of the whole Objectivist Paradise by having characters who act in concert with that philosophy with the result being a collective harm to the society. If they had been successful, happy, and all was lovely, it would have been the other kind of Randfest, but I don't think anyone would have believed it :)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Partly, perhaps, but I think most of it is the Going Galt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_galt) horsepucky in response to the tax changes in the US.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Yep - in hard economic times even more idiots come to believe that they'd be rich instead of even more impoverished if only the US embraced libertarianism. This wouldn't be nearly as disturbing (to me at least) if the US didn't have one of the two major political parties cheering these people on.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

How else can they subvert the other party than to lie, cheat, and undermine? Oh, wait, they were doing that before.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure 4chan qualifies as English any more. Throw in some Hungarian and it might be closer to Cityspeak.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

CitySpeak, if CitySpeak was entirely comprised of the punchline of Knock Knock jokes!

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Something doesn't need to reach the entire world to reach the most people in it of any one something.

That said... uh, wtf. If 4chan is influential, that does not bode well.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of Atlas Shrugged as a Doc Savage story where Doc never actually shows up...

I know I'm going to hell for saying this but at the time I read this (some 20 years or so ago) I thought it was pretty good as a story if you just leave all the lecturing out.

::B::

[kianir.livejournal.com]

If you leave the lecturing out, the book can be distilled into three or four pages. So yeah, though I don't agree with the premise in the slightest, I imagine it would have made an adequate short story. :)

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, sure. But no one reads, say, Bulldog Drummond books and tries to make it into a philosophy.

No one worth talking to, leastways.

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

I liked Atlas Shrugged better when Robert Anton Wilson made fun of it as Telemachus Sneezed -- and I don't even like Wilson much to begin with.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both points...

[neutopian.livejournal.com]

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/03/11/123-mad-men/

The main character's boss is an Objectivist, pushes Rand at every opportunity. Major plot point in that another character tries to blackmail the hero with revelation of hero's sordid origins; attempt fails when it only impresses Randian-inclined boss further.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

I find myself wondering if the sales of Karl Marx books or works on socialism have gone up a similar amount.

When Hugo Chavez gave that book "Open Veins of Latin America" to Obama it shot to the top of amazon's bestseller list.

[redeem147.livejournal.com]

I don't like Ayn Rand. I remember seeing her on Donahue, and she seemed mean.

Never read her books.

What's a 4chan?

If you read the subtext

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

Time has as much as said that this was _supposed_ to happen. It's a good story. The editor is quoted as saying something of the effect of "It's an online poll - this sort of shenanigans is kind of the point."

And it's not enough to say that Moot was Most Influential - they also rigged the whole top 20 to read "mARBLECAKE ALSO THE GAME".

I still find the news media's fascination with 4chan somehwat ironic, given that, despite moderators' best efforts, a lot of illegal porn flies around there.

I mean, how do they rationalize "omg, 4chan is cool - they make all the memes we joke about, and they're going after Scientology!" with "omg, pedophiles!"