this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 120 points 8 months ago (10 children)

Turned from 0 to French real fucking quick

[–] [email protected] 55 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Taking advantage of an underclass then having that underclass threaten to guillotine you... Seems like it just went from French to French... Whole scenario is French.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

Taking advantage of an underclass

Nah this is just normal

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

I don't know the way things are going here in the United States I think it might be time to start rolling out the guillotines.

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 8 months ago (69 children)

The funny part is how we rationalize exploiting thousands and often millions of people..... Some of whom work to the point of death

But everyone goes nuts if we threaten violence against those who make our lives miserable.

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (10 children)

I understand why Ayn Rand is in this comic, but she never financed a damn thing. She was working class herself and on welfare at the end of her life.

So, on top of everything else, she was a hypocrite, but she was not a capitalist, despite her obvious longing to be one.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Usually the gist of existentialcomics (great comic btw if you haven't read it) is taking well-known philosophers from humanity's history and pitting them against each other to play with ideas and crack philosophical jokes. With that in mind Ayn Rand's and her book "Atlas Shrugged" is presented as a philosophy, which may clear up why she is here.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm familiar with them myself, I'm just saying in this case Ayn Rand is doubling as both the philosopher and the person with money, and in real life she was only a wannabe.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (10 children)

I think people do not understand where Ayn Rand was coming from. She came from the Soviet Union, a highly collectivist society. Everyone is expected to conform and be all the same economically. Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy. Unfortunately, some rich American asshats saw that her ideas have self-serving utility to justify their ultra-capitalist beliefs and privileges and continue exploitation, and then spread her nonsensical "objectivist" ideas around. Not many people actually believe the philosophy, although we unconsciously apply this especially with middle class NIMBYISM.

"Oh, poor homeless people. I hope they could be housed. But I will elect a politician who will not build social housing because it will bring down the value of my property."

"I support mitigating climate change. But I do not want windfarms nearby. They are eye sores."

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I mean, lots of people with terrible and damaging ideas came from backgrounds that explain their terrible and damaging ideas. She doesn't get a pass because the USSR was corrupt, nor does she get a pass because western capitalist society is also corrupt.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

She came to the West and made it more corrupt with her half-baked ideas by amplifying the excessive use of individualist values.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Then she got sick of it, emigrated and formed her own Iam14butthisisdeep philosophy.

No, you're being disingenuous. She formulated her philosophy moral objectivism from her experiences as a child.

This is what happened (from her wikipedia):

Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, into a Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg in what was then the Russian Empire. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan). She was 12 when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted her family's lives. Her father's pharmacy was nationalized, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.

When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, Rand was among the first to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. She was one of many bourgeois students purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many purged students, including Rand, were reinstated. She completed her studies at the renamed Leningrad State University in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri; it became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn (pronounced /aɪn/).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (9 children)

Where is your objection? She formed her philosophy after experiencing a collectivist dystopia. Her family's business was nationalised. That is part and parcel of such extreme collectivist socio-economics and thus enamoured by hyperindividualist extreme counterpart.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Also, in that reality, in panel 5 Rand's private paramilitary security team would show up and start clubbing the workers.

In the real reality, Rand would borrow the state's police and/or national guard, just as it has historically happened.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

To be fair the owning class are even bigger welfare queens

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 8 months ago (8 children)

My god so much of my young life was spent idolizing this hack.

It’s humiliating, and it damaged every relationship I had. I mean, naturally. Who the fuck am I that anyone who spends time with me would do so from their own rational self interest?

That’s not how love works and I wish I had seen that earlier in my life, because the only thing I’ve found that has any real value is the love of other people. Even if someone were to live by the “philosophy” of objectivism for self preservation, once everyone knows what a selfish twat you are, it’s a matter of time until you find that you NEED other people to survive.

Empathy has value. Altruism is a virtue. Those two sentences were all I needed. Not thousands of pages of nonsense that even the author couldn’t live by.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I mean... rational self interest to anyone with a modicum of foresight is to be kind and foster cooperation

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yes. Exactly. Being self absorbed is against rational self interest.

I have needed so many people in my life, and they’ve needed me. Even when I absolutely did not want to be there, I did it anyway because they’d do it for me.

It’s been a long time since I read those books, probably more than 20 years now. I probably can’t remember 99% of what I read. I remember the hero worship, I remember that town that fell apart after the factory closed, little things.

I was primed to fall right into that shit. Young, questioning my religion (Appalachian Pentecostal. Like, deeeeeply engrained in everything I was), and from the poorest part of the country and ashamed of it. I seen the hypocrisy of the people around me, the preachers living off of offerings while everyone around me starved, knowing very few people who weren’t dirt poor and living with chickens in their houses (like the town that lost the factory).

I thought that maybe the thing that was holding me back was my altruism, because I wanted to rise above that mess.

Altruism is the only way that people forgotten by the world survive. I wouldn’t have made it without food stamps. I wouldn’t have made it without the people who crawled under the house to fix the sewage and never charged my mother a dime. It didn’t matter how smart I was, I wasn’t on an even playing field. It didn’t matter how much I wanted better things. I wasn’t on an even playing field. So many people are worse off than me, and they come from harder backgrounds than me. Meeting the right people is what it takes to get out of it.

Sorry for the wall of text. I mean, maybe I needed to take that shit so seriously to become a better person by damaging myself trying to be selfish. I feel like I would have been better off without it though.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago (2 children)

In case anyone didn't know, Ayn Rand idolized serial killer William Edward Hickman.

The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/ayn-rand-became-big-admirer-sadistic-serial-killer-william-hickman/

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago

Well that makes a depressing amount of sense.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Story 3/10, execution 10/10

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

In this comic, the owner is acting greedily to the point of heavily antagonizing their workers. Draconian exploitation of the workforce, reneging on previous agreements, and not adequately compensating them is irrational.

One of the fallacies with Rand's "moral objectivism" is the assumption that business owners will act rationally in their logical self interest in negotiations with their labor force and not out of spite, malice, sadism, racism, etc.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago (1 children)

One of the problems with economic theory in general is assuming rational actors.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I was told by my first economics professor that if I could solve that problem, and eliminate the assumption of rationality, I'd be the richest man on earth over night.

It's a problem, they know it's a problem, they just don't have a better answer.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

You can't even assume everyone can agree on the same definition of rational. If a business owner is a sadist they might value treating their employees like dirt more than the money they'd make if the business ran more efficiently. For a dickhead, rational self interest could mean forgoing profit to cause misery.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Rational in the economics sense just means that people do things for a reason. We're not acting randomly, we believe that when we put money towards a thing that we are receiving something of value for it.

Any more specific than that and we're not talking about rationality in the economics sense any more. Rationality does not mean correct. Just with cause.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago

Oh, so the engineers who thought up and built the machine must own it, right? Right?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I was expecting him to lay off half of them.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

The problem about guillotines is that they seldomly are applied where it matters, just were it sells.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)
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