[dk]

Your last statement is certainly true but it doesn't explain the vitriol. Most people don't have a positive bias towards, say, Plato. But you don't see at every single mention of his name this seeming compulsion to speak up and smear his image and spread misconceptions about his thought. By people who at times even confess that they haven't read his books.

[secretasiandan]

I would suggest that's because they don't (often) feel threatened by Plato or by the way people present Plato's views.

Also, the objectivists they're speaking to/at aren't always looking for dialog as much as "scoring points".

You can sometimes, with work and patience, introduce ideas that threaten someone's worldview. But I think people's efforts to do that are as rare as their efforts to objectively study ideas they aren't biased towards.

[_delirium]

You do see it with almost anything political, though. Take, say, Marx: most of the anti-Marx vitriol isn't from people who've read Das Kapital.