[sanderjd]

You're painting pretty broadly with that stereotype brush. Books influence people but are not the only influence on people. You have no idea which books _why appreciates or the extent to which they have influenced his personality, so stop guessing.

I hate words like "Randroid", "Republitard", "Democrap", etc. regardless of whether I agree or disagree with their connotation. They are the adult, but no more mature, equivalent of the childhood poopypants slur - you are other so you are bad.

[philwelch]

I used to be a Randroid myself--it's a surprisingly apt moniker, and when you run into enough people on forums relentlessly parroting Rand's idiosyncratic style of argumentation you'll see why.

I'm not ruling out the idea that _why may have read or appreciated Rand at some point, I'm just ruling out the idea that she was a major influence. If you understand Rand and you understand _why, you can see some very deep philosophical differences.

[sanderjd]

You're conflating two groups with each other, one that is the larger group of people who appreciate or have been influenced by Rand's work, and one that is presumably a subset and is made up by people you have interacted with and formed an impression of. This is how stereotypes work, you conflate a subset of people that you have direct evidence of with the superset of people that they are related to in some way. Just because I can't argue with the existence of the subset in your evidence does not mean that your stereotype is not ridiculous.

I don't claim that _why and Rand would agree with each other in a philosophical discussion, but that is not proof that she had no influence on him. Often what influences us most is that which forces us to think very hard about why we disagree.

And everyone who uses those sorts of childish words believes them to be apt. "But Republicans really are retards". Please.

[philwelch]

I thought it was clear I wasn't conflating the two groups, since I explicitly said _why could easily be part of the larger group. In fact, I know they are separate groups because at age 17 I was a Randroid and today I'm a relatively sane human being who appreciates Rand's work.