I found the opening comment by philosophy graduate student Kathleen O'Neal to be correct. It was accurate and precise. She drew a proper analogy between Marxism and Objectivism in that many people claim to be "socialists" but they often are among the least informed on the subject. Similarly, easily 25 million people might claim to be "influenced" by Ayn Rand. (See my estimate here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...

I am not an active reader of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. That is what Kathleen O'Neal was referring to because JARS is in the same organization as studies of William James and Bertrand Russell. You can get people here up in arms over Obamacare. No one wants to think about why it is that concept formation requires excluding measurement. Few people here can draw the links between that statement and a moral defense of capitalism. But that is what O'Neal is interested in.

It is easy to find "big name" Objectivists such as Robert Campbell and others "influenced" by Rand such as Roderick Long both of whom teach at universities today. I met one at Eastern Michigan University. Gregory Browne published his doctoral dissertation as a book, Necessary Factual Truths. I was waiting for another class to let out and I was walking the halls, and there was "Ayn Rand" on a blackboard in three or four columns of great philosophers from ancient to modern times. No one here will recognize Gregory Browne's name, and that's fine. It is all the more to the point: Rand's work is being taken seriously by very many people, few of whom carry protest signs.

But those signs are, indeed, signs of the times… and the times they are a-changin'…

I agree with your parenthetical assessment. Many of the commenters took the attitude that Objectivists are just too unenlightened to "get it" with no compelling alternative. Their reasoning seems to boil down to "of course it's better not to be selfish! Can't you see that!"

I've never been a fan of that kind of "reasoning" but there seems to be a lot of it out there. It very much reminds me of the "reasons" why the Iran deal was the best we could do.