Because if you want to actually oppose an idea, the least you can do is accurately represent it. There are far worse books than Rands; for example the majority of the holy books in existence currently venerated by the vast majority of the world's population in some way shape or form.
And yet to criticise these works is not to misrepresent the original statements into some largely inaccurate comic book characterisation and then proceed to dismantle it. If one is to attack the bible they don't first need to inaccurately summarise it as a survival horror work with a zombie protagonist agitating for the violent overthrow of the totalitarian Roman government at the time. Doing so just marks them as someone not to be taken seriously.
There are plenty of problems with objectivism, or if you want to delve into messy character assassinations, Ayn Rand herself. It is not necessary to construct these ridiculous parodies of strawmen and then proceed to whip them in as self righteous a fashion as is humanly possible.
There are kernels of good ideas in both Rand's work (people own themselves, and ought to behave in a fashion cogniscent with providing for their own lives and providing value of their own in exchange for value received from others. Beware people who claim to represent "the public" and want your value for no payment, because "the public" is a dangerously nebulous concept which can be and is warped in modern times in much the same way as "god" was in ancient times) and the bible (Do to others as you would have them do to you). If one needs to take anything from these works, perhaps they ought to focus on the right, rather than the wrong?
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Because if you want to actually oppose an idea, the least you can do is accurately represent it. There are far worse books than Rands; for example the majority of the holy books in existence currently venerated by the vast majority of the world's population in some way shape or form.
And yet to criticise these works is not to misrepresent the original statements into some largely inaccurate comic book characterisation and then proceed to dismantle it. If one is to attack the bible they don't first need to inaccurately summarise it as a survival horror work with a zombie protagonist agitating for the violent overthrow of the totalitarian Roman government at the time. Doing so just marks them as someone not to be taken seriously.
There are plenty of problems with objectivism, or if you want to delve into messy character assassinations, Ayn Rand herself. It is not necessary to construct these ridiculous parodies of strawmen and then proceed to whip them in as self righteous a fashion as is humanly possible.
There are kernels of good ideas in both Rand's work (people own themselves, and ought to behave in a fashion cogniscent with providing for their own lives and providing value of their own in exchange for value received from others. Beware people who claim to represent "the public" and want your value for no payment, because "the public" is a dangerously nebulous concept which can be and is warped in modern times in much the same way as "god" was in ancient times) and the bible (Do to others as you would have them do to you). If one needs to take anything from these works, perhaps they ought to focus on the right, rather than the wrong?