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She was a lousy writer and pernicious thinker. Objectivists be damned.

I do not have any disagreement with what you say about Randian true believers. As with most true believers, they see what they want to see.

I am however curious as to your calling her a "pernicious thinker." Could you be a little more specific, giving an example from her non-fiction writings? As far as Objectivists go, I've found that they turn me off far more than their philosophy does. As a matter of fact, I find myself mostly agreeing with their philosophy, but with enough disagreement to not consider myself an objectivist. I wonder however what is it about objectivism that causes you to say "be damned."

Nietszche was asked once what determines the value of a thing, and he responded, "How much did you pay for it?" But he was only half-serious. The Overman, in his view, established his own values--and the values Nietszche was talking about had nothing to do with commerce. However wrongheaded that screwed-up German might've been, he was nothing if not intellectually fearless and brutally straightforward. Rand comes along, swipes those ideas of his that suit her, dumbs them down, and covers them with a capitalist veneer to make these ideas more palatable (and more salable) to a market that likes to believe itself a cut above the common herd. 'Overman' becomes 'Entrepreneur'. Hank Reardon of 'Atlas Shrugged' isn't a businessman with a head for metallurgy, oh no. He is an avatar of the new Randian Man: proudly atheistic, ruthless, coolly intelligent, sublimely selfish. "Who is John Galt?" I'll tell you: John Galt is a bean-counting elitist parading as messiah. And finally, the values promoted by Ayn Rand disciples are far from conservative, as we understand the term. No amount of Randian harping about the joys of free enterprise can hide the absolute fascism at its core. It is a philosophy--one of many--which holds compassion as a weakness. So when I say 'damned', I mean it in the literal, Christian sense of the term.