General Discussion

They appeal to a lot of teens which was when I first read them. They had a certain novelty for me as some one raised in a more leftish political environment.

Even then I noticed the part where the leads (Dagny and Hank) were driving though a wilderness and she says “People talk about unspoiled wilderness with no billboards. Well here it is for them. I hate people like that.”

As a military brat without any really cohesive political philosophy at 15 or 16 who was still always a fan of unspoiled wilderness, that made me reconsider enthusiasm for a book that if nothing else seemed calculated to annoy my grand-dad, a significant (and very annoying ) influence in my life. He huffed that “this woman is in the pay of American business-men and their dog eat dog worldview”. He was right I realized when I was around 21 and confronted with the daily realities of American capitalism.

As TurbineGuy notes above, her worldview was very warped by her experiences in the Soviet Bloc. I also agree with DUer snot upthread. It’s a useful exercise to interrogate worldviews alien to one.

It’s one of the negative aspects of the present time that people feel mere exposure to the opposite side can somehow contaminate one.

For me lately it’s grounded in the dawning realization that possibly these damn AI infested things are distributed or embedded in ways one wasn’t expecting and below the threshold of conscious awareness. I am still not sure of where it is just broken human behavior versus broken human behavior worsened by junk tech.

Those things have no idea what the human host is thinking and may bombard one with stuff one follows out of negative curiosity rather than positive. A shitty initial state may be really hard to recover from. Which is why I am for rebooting the whole damn thing rather than struggling with irreversible brain rot forever to please some shit corporation.

Morrison and Boyd is harder for the enfeebled modern mind to focus on. So if you consume junk while procrastinating, that seems to set you up for being slammed with more junk setting off a vicious cycle. Seems to make every difficulty with education or pursuit of good health worse.

God those books are rubbish though. But still, it is fun to read conservatives. I should read this Public Choice Theory jerk James Buchanan at some point.