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"hack writer's awkward attempt to paint Simon Legree mustaches..." THEN "or mount an ad hominem attack on the critic,.."

Anything seem hypocritical in your post?

What has the asbestos lawsuit industry done and how is that comparable to the train wreck story.....Well, for starters, billions in cash is being wrung from the economy to "purge" buildings of asbestos, lawsuits have successfully put hundreds/thousands of productive companies out of business, litigators have gotten very wealthy and true victims have hardly seen anything.

On top of that, how much longer would the Trade Center have stayed intact if it still had the structural protection of asbestos?

Could it be that parasites and lazy people cause catastrophes or at minimum exacerbate the situation?

Er, no hypocrisy I can detect, young Randian, and a little confused by your use of the word in this context. That aside, I was critiquing her shallow, overbearing attempt to make otherwise sympathetic victims of a train disaster into highly unsympathetic parasites who, according to your Guiding Light, deserved what was coming to them. Any novelist or painter attempting to pound home a political point is a propagandist, not an artist. Unless presented as an allegory, such as Orwell's 'Animal Farm', or possessing incredible literary or artistic gifts, such as Orwell (again) or Kathe Kollwitz, the work of a propagandist is usually didactic, superficial, and false. Rand was neither capable of successful allegory nor possessed of extraordinary literary gifts. Her philosophy, such as it is, is a flagrant, pale imitation of Nietszche--who at least had the intellectual humility to recognize that some of his ideas--like eternal recurrence of the same--were probably wrong. 'Humility' and 'Ayn Rand' are mutually exclusive terms.

I'm not an architect or engineer, so I can't address the whole asbestos, World Trade Center deal. And while it's true that some people contribute to their own destruction in some way, large or small, it is equally true that bad choices are not confined to 'parasites or lazy people'. (Use of the dehumanizing term 'parasites' says worlds about your leader's philosophy, by the way. It allows self-styled elites to rationalize, say, foisting off nonsense disguised as Deep Truth on an unsuspecting public.)