Quote from: bitcoin0918 on June 30, 2011, 11:53:38 PM

Brilliant.. how? The typical "Ayn Rand type" was a "heavy metal headbanger who worshipped Charles Manson"?! Huh

I've only been to one Objectivist Conference in my time, but I didn't see a single one in the lot that fit that description. It reminded me more of a meeting of businessmen than death worshippers. Clearly his assertion is not based in reality.

I don't think the point is that Rand's followers are those types, but that they base all their "morality" off her books and her books were inspired by exactly that type of thinking. I never looked at it that way: that she was quite probably a sociopath, and that that's why she's such a poster-girl for cut-throat greed. But everything she ever writes... it's just more blatantly hypocritical bullshit peddled by a nasty old hypocrite of a woman. FFS, she's often used as the inspiration for killing medicare, and yet IIRC she utilized medicare at the end of her life to pay for her cancer (or whatever it was) treatment.

All you really need to know to understand Ayn Rand's books is that she was a rich girl who's family lost everything when the revolution came through her town, and that that traumatic event framed her thinking for the rest of her life.