Atlas Shrugged - Renegade Cut 

Imagine going into this production thinking you're going to make an epic trilogy that will prove the unfilmable can be filmed like Lord of the Rings.

@@stapler942 The last movie was financed via crowfunding... That goes beyond satire.

The last movie was crowdfunded. So, the making of the movie itself is making a case against the movie. You can't get more meta or anti meta i guess than than.

@@kaoko111 Nah, people funded the movie because they wanted to it to happen to they can enjoy it.

@@cylemons8099 Enjoyment was the motive rather than profit? It makes me so happy you don't see the irony

@@howarddewing6617 last time i checked, ayn rand never said that monetary profit was the only valid reason to do something… what did you think the irony was?

Hey that's translating thing is a real talent. Hope you cultivate and grow it if that's something you want to do

That's pretty damn awesome honestly, both the Sindarin and not becoming a fascist!

That’s sick as hell

Omg I loved greenday when I was young , I would have my parents take me to target to buy all their cds ! I’m black btw

You're probably a really swell human frankly

Lets reframe your question. Lets say you have a bully. They are the town bully. It's a small town. Small town bully goes around, beats up everyone smaller than him and takes their pocket change. His dad is the sheriff so he's insulated. However sometimes His dad's buddies are in town. Some are government officials and some are other cops. They are doing a drive through town. The bully decides he's not going to pick on a kid as they drive through town. Was the bully performing a good act? Or was he just being smart about the way he is acting so that he can continue to act the way he does?

@@TheLarousse89 except that's not at all an equal scenario because the bully isn't doing a good act, he's taking the nonaction and not completing his usual evil act, which of course is not a good thing. If you want to keep the attempted grey and the scenario, A better reframe would be a regular victim of this bully knows when the other cops are in town, and antagonizes the bully into attacking him, knowing that the bully is gonna get caught and hauled off so he and his fellow victims are never bullied again. Is there a selfish motivator in that act of sacrifice? Absolutely. But that doesn't make it less of a good thing, taking a bully and an assaulter off the streets.

Howard Roark wasn’t a rich man. Peter Keating was though.

Wasn't Ayn a Russian (jew?), who witnessed the revolution as a tween and later left Soviet Union when she was in her twenties? Even though she wrote AS decades later, I do think personal experience with agressive socialism and communism left a vivid impression; and her 'uber-capitalism good, everything social-oriented - bad', higlly indivudualistic (egocentric) worldview have roots in that. That's at least worrh mentioning.

@@veronikavartanova4044 Actually her parents fled to the Crimea which was under control of the White Army. The father took them there to avoid the violence going on in St.Petersberg. This was in 1917 and she was born in 1905 so you have the age about right. After the Russian Revolution, Universities were opened to women for the first time. This allowed her to be in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University. Not to defend the communists but this seems to be one more instance of her benefiting from something and then demonizing whatever it was that she benefited from.

Karl Marx doesnt need to be a good writer, he didnt do novels. Ayn Rand has no excuse.

The whole book is about how the majority secretly agrees with her once a few assertions are made.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

I thing Phase 3 is still "Phase 3 - Profit!"

@Ryan Kruse i think the burial at sea dlc did a little to help that. Not much though.

@@blixer8384 That was blindingly obvious from the very first moment you as Booker has the baseball in your hand at the beginning of the game. Any threat to the prevailing (artificial) social order is ridiculed and stamped out ruthlessly. Violent resistance is given as the only viable option; all others would be snuffed out.

Bioshock took it to it’s extreme by leaning way into the egoism. Like any philosophy, it can be perverted by those who don’t understand the moderation factor of thought. Rand believes that we should be selfish FOR each other, that is trading less valuable things for valuable things selfishly so that the person you’re trading with is happy with the exchange

@@curtissheppard7469 Don't give me that wishy-washy "there's bad and good in every idea" BS. Rand and her followers are anti worker and pro "hard work", as long as said work is done by "the right people". It's nothing more than hypocrisy and selfishness justified behind a flimsy ideology, wrapped tightly in praise of the system as long as it profits them.

Curtis Sheppard That's not called trading, that's called exploitation. People aren't just arbitrarily happy to receive lesd valuable things. Trading works on the principle that a good is *relatively* less valuable to one person due to abundance or reproducability, whereby trading provides both parties with something difficult for them to get at the loss of something insignificant, which isn't an inherently selfish act.

Thats actually interesting. Can you elaborate further please so I can get your interpretation?

Tchalla was mlk Jr Kill monger was malcolm x

Hahahahahahahah!

Jeremiah B But it's a kind of "it doesn't matter how much money you make...as long as that money brings you happiness"? Finding joy in something small.

***** Also... I have to ask. Is this particular Renegade cut Trump inspired? I kept getting a rather fervent personal dislike in this one.

Jeremiah B So then the directors were supposed to aim for a box office success and cultural impact.

Jeremiah B Again, that really sounds more like a Zen thing, than an objectivist thing.

***** Cool then. Just that I've been seeing a lot of Trump from various producers.

I tried to read it and i just couldn't finish it . I was thinking of trying it again but it's just so bad . I mean what was she thinking when conciving such a book ? Why did she need to write it ? Her message would have been sent easier . It's far worse than even the cringy fanfictions .

I got through it. Mostly trying to understand the opposition, so to speak. I found it a mixed bag of reasonable points, bizarre caricatures, and absurd nonsense.

Well I read it. Hell, I even liked it. Realisation comes with time.

I did. I have to say, I got fascinated with how many times she could repeat the same message within one paragraph again and again, the number of times a miraculous McGuffin came up: a) the amazing Reardon metal, B) the accidental discovery of an equally miraculous machine that could produce infinite amounts of energy in defiance of the laws of thermodynamics, c) a pirate who could constantly evade the world's navies without any difficulty but no details of his adventures ever given. d) and the miraculous Galt's Gulch where an entire industrial civilisation could be set up without any prior infrastructure and apparently without any workers to do the manual labor) I laughed at the 'Buddhist' politician who forced people to do things. It was also remarkable how as the book proceeded people seemed to be at one point in favor of and then against the Randian superman who promptly left to go to Galt's Gulch and enjoy all the amazing discoveries immediately being made there. It was also amazing how the telephone system kept working flawlessly when everything else was going to hell so that communications were conducted the same as usual without any problem. If you go to a site called 'Patheos' and look around there is (or was, haven't looked at it for a long time) an enormous section where someone goes through the book and then the films in minute detail absolutely eviscerating them.

@@paulohagan3309 that’s Ayn Rand in a nutshell. She uses 30 words to say what a normal person could say with only 5 words. She takes forever to say nothing.

I read the book a few years ago because it was supposed to be "great literature". I found it so unrealistic, contrived and infuriating that I had to force myself to finish it. I have never seen such a piece of hogwash.

Ayn Rand literally said my ancestors were savages that deserved to be colonized. Fun times!

Because they think they acheived everything on their own?

Because they have professional careers, are often in IT, and would do just fine?

@@Eudaimonist Most people don't have professional career and often work as minimum wage worker. Are you delusional or something.

@@Eudaimonist No, they wouldn't.

No one would last in an Objectivist society because it would fall apart under the weight of its own absurdity.

Which video was that?

Well... as another (better) book and film once put it, they were "The Smartest Guys in the Room"

+stranget92 that's actually the movie that made me become against deregulation, due to their misuse of electrical prices jacking

they used their superior capitalist ceo powers™ and made them with their minds (i have not read the book and i refuse to do that to myself, so this is canon now, thank you)

As a former dumb-kid-who-really-liked-the-book, I can tell you that the way it worked was that the good guy corporations just magically always had good relations with the workers. The protagonists had unions, but there was no contention with them because of *course* an objectivist would know the exact proper wage to pay their employees; this was in contrast to the rotten government subsidized corporations with scummy socialist unions that are always striking for more pay than they deserve.

@Arachnofiend: Your last line is how I finally realized Rand wasn't advocating for equal self interest, only for the already rich/powerful sans the Gov't. Even an anti-collectivist reading is contradicted as the rich need not only workers but connections, partnerships as well as trust in business to do anything.

The closest I can think of is Dagny's lackey Eddie (who meets an unfortunate fate) and that worker that Rearden saves from a factory accident.

I found the book such a strange comedy. These men of industry, with wealth and power apparently had no ability to influence the country in any way. It’s literally science fiction. Just awful.

Just as capitalism cannot handle a pandemic without adopting social mesures, objectivism cannot handle, well, anything really

Funny you should mention, but I noticed Armin Shimerman shows up in these movies. Voice of Andrew Ryan. He's also Quark, a quintessential Feregi which is a comical adaptation of Rand's philosophy. I wonder if he's making a character study of this whole philosophy? Or more likely.. he's acting in self-interest, because work is work.

I've heard them say that there is no such thing as a society...

Yeahhhhhh.

If you read about her life, there's something very off about the woman.

+LobsterTaco Yep. I liked this style too. Keep it up, Leon! 👍🏽

No I felt the jokes were out of place.

I totally agree. I love his content, but I've always found Leon just a liiittle too dry most of the time and this was a nice change.

I agree but feel like the humour was a defence mechanism for having to deal with the whole massive dark project. In other words I hope Leon doesn't have to stare into the abyss too often or he will be forever changed.

LobsterTaco Yeah we can both have an opinion.

Aza Smith I have wondered how much survivors guilt and self justification is woven into her philosophy. I understand that she ran from soviet Russia so how any people did she have to hurt to ensure her own wellbeing? I’m probably reading too much but that would at least give a reason for such impassioned distaste for community and cooperation.

wtf that sounds dystopian

Some people just want to justify their own selfish desires.

I hope it's a pun you just made

More like... a structural failure!

+Jess Newman so...the movie will be a BOMB?

Well,look on the bright side.Snyder`s finally found himself a film that actually deserves his hack direction!"Alright,people,in this scene uh,all the rich,talented people I wish I was gather in the ballroom,talking about politics and uh,boring shit like that,yeah,and,like,building projects and Aristotle and how capitalism and America are so awesome because they make people like me money!"

Maybe it'll be an epic battle between an army of zombies and a group of Randian supermen. 'All right, fall back to Galt's Gulch! Have we enough Reardon metal to produce the super weapon we can immediately develop to destroy these undead collectivists? Maybe Galt could give them a speech to send them into permanent hibernation?' Damn, I just gave the script away to Zack for free ...

It's the kind of laugh you make when you're trying not to cry

I think these movies broke him.

+Jeremiah B I'm independent but lean Libertarian but imho Ayn Rand was a scoundrel.

What was her view on art?

I would have burned em to be honest.

Even if you don't make an episode about it, consider playing the game should you ever find the time. It shows the inevitable and catastrophic consequences of trying to institute an objectivist utopia, and is one of the games people point to as evidence of a game's potential as a storytelling medium. It's also quite a bit of fun. :)

+Nothing to See Here agreed. Great game that took a lot of inspirations from atlas shrugged. So much so that it even named one of the characters Atlas

Yeah, I immideately thought of Bioshock when Leon started talking about Ayn Rands artistic legacy. Because even though it's a piece that contradicts her philosophic Ideas every step of the way, it is still part of her legacy and probably wouldn't exist without Atlas Shrugged. It is also absolutey fantastic.