I have never read a more bizarre commentary on Ayn Rand than Mark Ames piece on AlterNet. In tracking the rising influence of Rand, my focus has been on libertarian, conservative or fairly neutral commentaries -- e.g. reviews of the two recent biographies. I had not credited the depth of panic, rage and insanity that her sudden popularity has caused in the Left...at least, if this fellow is any indication. He froths at the mouth so badly that my computer screen got wet. Is this the new left slant on A.R. -- Rand, the mother of serial killers?

Excerpt: One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of"ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books... Too many critics of Ayn Rand-- until I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed. But it can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as The Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.

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Sheldon Richman - 3/12/2010

It's not just Ames. It's Prescott too:

http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm

What's appalling? That lefties make a big deal of this or that Rand wrote this crap in her journals?

Sheldon Richman - 3/12/2010

But is he accurate about Rand and the serial killer?

Bill Courtney - 3/6/2010

Mark Ames, former publisher of the irreverent ex-pat paper "The eXile" in Russia (which makes "National Lampoon" look like "National Review"), is not to be taken too seriously. On the plus side, he has appeared on Scott Horton's Antiwar.com Radio. But really, this is a guy who is best at road-testing erectile dysfunction medication on ugly Russian prostitutes (I kid you not):
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7681&;IBLOCK_ID=35