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

[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.