Mr Rael asks a great question:

> What part of Rand's thinking, specifically, was deleterious, in your
> opinion?

I would love to see some thoughtful, specific answers in this forum to this
question.

God knows I've been quite willing to be quite critical of the old girl. But
are any of my criticisms that important?

I had a girlfriend I turned on to Atlas Shrugged. One day at work, she
evicted an IT guy from her cubicle with pointed finger, trembling anger and
the epithet "whim-worshipping looter!" He had come to inventory her Sun box.
(That's a computer, not a Japanese haiku name for vagina.) So definitely
Rand made this girl go a little overboard, and I've had several friends tell
me stories about blossoming outrage getting them into embarrassing
situations after reading Rand. But I suspect that even this Sun-worshipping
Unix-geek girl would look back at her outburst more with amusement and pride
than real chagrin.

I can think of lots of things about Rand and her work that I don't like or I
disagree with, but I'm having a pretty hard time pointing to real harm done
me. Of course, I'm not everyone.

Of course, you look at Lenny the Peikoff, and it's pretty obvious that he
was molested by a duck, not by Ayn Rand.

Even doctrinaire Objectivists don't seem to me to be particularly good
examples of Rand-damaged goods. For all we know, they'd have gone Virginia
Tech by now without Ayn's soothing influence. I do believe that Rand herself
was saved from being a garden-variety psycho bitch by her intellectual
prowess. People who think that intelligence is a morally neutral capacity
have never been mauled by a lion, but should be.

As far as the good she's done, Rand was the best ever at speaking truth to
power, for real, not like Nazi Pelosi and her fellow grovelers.

In my life, Rand was an intellectual terrorista. She's the Tarantino of
philosophy: the conversion of the conventionally evil to the righteous, the
Ezekiel 25:17 sense of vengeance and redemption, the sympathy for people who
are confused and aren't making it in the world they're supposed to thrive
in.

On balance, way overbalanced, Rand helped me, not harmed me.

Mike Lee
Do you see a sign on my lawn that says dead Imus storage?