And yet to criticise these works is not to misrepresent the original statements into some largely inaccurate comic book characterisation and then proceed to dismantle it. If one is to attack the bible they don't first need to inaccurately summarise it as a survival horror work with a zombie protagonist agitating for the violent overthrow of the totalitarian Roman government at the time. Doing so just marks them as someone not to be taken seriously.
There are plenty of problems with objectivism, or if you want to delve into messy character assassinations, Ayn Rand herself. It is not necessary to construct these ridiculous parodies of strawmen and then proceed to whip them in as self righteous a fashion as is humanly possible.
There are kernels of good ideas in both Rand's work (people own themselves, and ought to behave in a fashion cogniscent with providing for their own lives and providing value of their own in exchange for value received from others. Beware people who claim to represent "the public" and want your value for no payment, because "the public" is a dangerously nebulous concept which can be and is warped in modern times in much the same way as "god" was in ancient times) and the bible (Do to others as you would have them do to you). If one needs to take anything from these works, perhaps they ought to focus on the right, rather than the wrong?
That's pretty much all you need to know about how much this fellow understands about "the spirit of Rand".
"Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed second-hand by people who have never read it."
And it's rejected by lefties in precisely the same way. Usually under the helpful guidance of an undergrad prof. :-)
Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power.
This is nonsense, it would be like me claiming that bastiat and hobbes were just spinning the same tired old bullshit that statists had always spun before, attempting to push forward with the divine right of kings idea as justification for totalitarian states, and if we don't accept their logic we'll all just devolve into a state of eternal war amongst all humans.
You could make that argument about those positions, but in doing so, you make it clear that you're not attempting to accurately portray anything bordering on nuance, you're just trying to join a chorus portraying them in the worst possible light.
Politely responding with "Well don't you think you might actually have missed this little point here on the side" is to validate the position being offered as if it had any kind of bearing on reality. It's simply not an appropriate response to this kind of reality warping polemic.
