Some background: https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2025/05/horizon-worlds-meta-horizo...
I love his defeated responded of "It is amazing just how pedestrian those books are. There is nothing interesting in them.".
Hedges is always worth listening to even if you won't always agree but he does make doomers look like utopian optimists.
Chris Hedges is a self reported socialist. So makes sense they would not like books negative on socialism. But you can be a socialist and still engage with competing thoughts. Just like a capitalist can review Marx and admit the ideas are important/interesting.
In a layered complex world both the above statement and the statement that there's little of interest in Rand's books for socialists, for hedge fund traders, or for the majority of people with a background in political science, can be true.
Stephen Fry, well known for his love of the English language and breadth of eclectic interest, when discussing the Scot said:
I am too kind to you and to [McGonagall's] memory to reproduce the entire poem'
Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse.
His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it.
It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.
Regardless of anyone's position on the political stance of Rand, her written works deserve little more than to be the subject of atrocious parody of her robber baron sick o' fantasy, the breathless bodice ripping drama of trains repeatedly entering and being reversed out of tunnels against a soundscape of a geared steampunk stock ticker of yore.
I was... astounded. Here, truly, was the Florence Foster Jenkins of poetry writing, destined to fame for all the wrong reasons.
I have yet to hear positive things come from anyone who isn’t a libertarian. The sort of person who identifies with the characters because they could also envision themselves doing a monologue that lasts 45 pages.
Oh and even back then Atlas Shrugged was too damn preachy.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Rand is a clear intellectual trap for lazy thinkers. If you like her, you're not thinking.
"Genghis Khan the 73rd, who got high on some really weird drugs in the fifth year of his reign, decided that everybody in his empire should be tortured for at least 73 minutes every day. And everybody loved it and completely voluntarily sang his praises and said it was the best thing that ever happened to society and there were just all sorts of benefits and you should totally organize your society this way too because look how well it is working for this one."
Only if you take the work as-given. Whenever I read a fiction book I take it as a starting point for thinking about things. The book provides a what-if. It's up to the reader to figure out if that what-if makes any sense, and if the conclusions in the book follow from that.
but then we weren't the pricks who thought you could make up for a shit lighting setup with polygon count cough any screenshot from horizon worlds cough
It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.
Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.