my "best friend" in junior high foisted Rand on me and I didn't resist very hard, I'm sorry to say.

Rand's take on communism was very myopic and fueled by vindictiveness because her affluent father, who I believe she adored, lost his business in the Russian revolution. she didn't realize that all the goody-goody stuff packaged with communism about sharing was just a gloss to disguise communism's true goal which was maximize industrialism, a goal by the way, which it achieved quite well in Russia and China, at huge human costs, of course.

ironically, Rand shares with the Leftists the idea that the modern industrialized world could be a lot more tolerable if we just had the right leaders in place. both Rand and the Leftists worship the industrial mega-machine and both of them are big apologists for it.

I guess the difference between Rand and the Leftists is that she's more honest and true to simple-minded peasant nature by advocating only being true to yourself and the ones you know and love, while the Leftists advocate the Christ-like attitude of loving everyone uniformly.

but for me, Rand's position is untenable because I don't believe you can operate on both the personal and impersonal level concurrently and when you try, the personal sphere always suffers and you become less human thereby. it's not worth the sacrifice.

Rand was also an egomaniac. I saw a documentary about her once and it told how she was given a diesel locomotive to drive for an hour and the people who knew Rand said that it was the only time they ever knew Rand to be happy "in the moment". that's not a healthy, human way to be, in my opinion. I believe she was also an amphetamine abuser.

Let me say that Jesus Christ of Biblical fame believed and taught in loving everyone uniformly as equals. He wasn't lefty or righty or communist or capitalist.

He did say that the second commandment was like unto the first - to love your neighbor as yourself.

That is a very old idea and Ayn Rand stands 180 degrees opposite of it.

I think that Rand's philosophy of objectivism forgets that there are other people in the world that might have needs and desires and relegates them to second class citizens.

I personally hate both the economic jungle law as promoted by hard libertarians, as well as the sexual cave-age law, that the most primitive 'alpha males' should be able to appropriate all women. Well, there's nothing to do these days about the latter thing, but as to the former, we can simply elect different politicians.

Rand was a total elitist, which I totally abhor. But I see her as part of a Russian tradition of being a down-to-earth, semi-autonomous peasant. This is a tradition she was faithful to even though she worshiped cities and technology. Some other Russians writers in this tradition are the famous anarchists, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. It's a little bit of a stretch, I admit, but there is a bit of an anarchic spirit in her lead characters who answer to no one but themselves.

Rand's idea of ownership of ideas was totally fruit-loops. When first reading "The Fountainhead" and it comes to the part early on where the noble architect, Howard Roark, blows up a newly built and unoccupied housing development because someone else took his design and bastardized it, that was totally nuts. I should have thrown down the book and walked away from Rand forever at that point.

I also have no respect for her changing her name from the Russian-Jewish Rosenbaum to the WASP Rand. Maybe she had to do that in the first half of the 20th century but after she'd achieved her literary success and started to present herself as a deep thinker she should have changed her name back.

I disapprove of Mr. Christ's teachings as well. Forcing people to be loving to strangers mostly serves the powers-that-be. Christianity wouldn't have become so popular if it hadn't been hugely useful to the powers-that-be. But I don't want to get into a big fight over this.

Ayn Rand's "CRUSH" on a serial killer may be found here! (http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 89x7799159)

One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it 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 by 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.'"