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Looks like @KulakRevolt got a shoutout from Scott for his (her? Whence the catgirl branding?) review of a certain novel. Putting it in a Twitter thread was kind of weird, but I thought the piece was fascinating. The comparisons to Tolstoy and Tolkien are not only viscerally upsetting but also remarkably accurate. There are a couple points I wanted to address, but first, a little background.
The year was 20XX. I was a broke 19-year-old, fresh out of my freshman year, scrounging for scholarship opportunities. My mother ran across one held by some sort of Ayn Rand fan club. Read Atlas Shrugged, write an essay, and receive a decent one-off award. My memory suggests it was guaranteed, but a quick search only finds the more sane framing of a contest. They do apparently provide the book, though. In the end, I didn't bother with the contest, since I got an actual job for the summer, thus avoiding any creative output. How ironic.
This brings me to my first point: Atlas Shrugged in schools. A book which inspires diehard followers to spend their time and money bringing its insights to the unenlightened masses. A book which, simultaneously, people must be paid to read. That contrast is enough to make Atlas Shrugged useless in the eyes of public schools; it would be enough even if elites were united in their admiration for Rand's morality. In a vacuum, the book is Objectively a train wreck. But its true potential is revealed only under a certain sort of engagement, one which is anathema to public-school demands for measurable outcomes.
I'm talking about immersion. It is the same flavor of suspension-of-disbelief which lets humans devour hundreds or thousands of pages about hobbits. He who delves wholeheartedly into the book, populates its barren vistas and soulless boardrooms with art-deco trappings or noir atmosphere, fills in the caricatures with the look and feel and essence distilled from decades of American cultural mythology--yea, he shall be rewarded. And when he comes up for air, it is not the clumsy plotting or the inhuman dialogue which comes with him. Verisimilitude has been outsourced to his own mind.
No matter the flesh in which the well-immersed reader clothes it, though, the philosophy of Rand's heroes remains unambiguous. It is the one area where she leaves no room for improvisation. When the converts gather for book club, they are envisioning different Roarks and Tooheys, different Taggarts and Stadlers and Galts. But they know Objectivism when they see it.
Her works are remembered not for their style but for their steel spine.
It's a bit terrifying to me how well @KulakRevolt took to Twitter, like a fish discovering water for the first time. One of his threads was effusively praised by Scott Adams during one of his livestreams, and he's also followed by Jordan Peterson of all people.
It's kind of funny how Kulak's Twitter poasting style resembles Kamil Galeev's. Maybe it's just ending the final sentences without a full stop that does it
Also funny pics to keep the attention.
Kulak is finally living up to the libertarian/objectivist ideal of ruthless optimization.
Galeev, by the way, is lately posting in Russian on the futility of developing unique products in peripheral countries:
His tweeting style is designed to scale. So is Kulak's. It's not unique but it gets the job done.
Yeah, apparently he keeps a spreadsheet of all his tweets to track how well they do and he's reposting old ones now that he has more followers.
Yes, and note that Kulak is writing about the US even though he's Canadian. He often writes about specific things that have no applicability to Canada at all, like the legality of advocating for revolution. This is a criminal offence in Canada.
Its ambiguous... I avow Marxist political economy ( but libertarian actual economics)...
So it'd be a struggle for them to actually prosecute me without defacto claiming that all marxist deserve jail time or worse.
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