Those essays can be some good stuff. I recommend you check 'em out as well. At her best, reading 70s essay writer Rand is like reading Justice Scalia's opinions, where she whips out her poison pen and does a fine job at making the other side look stupid (if you knew nothing about them and thought that Rand's impressions of their beliefs was not a straw man). At her worst, it's amusing to marvel at her logic, as she in dead seriousness will cite her novels as proof of her position. (Look, missy, I realize that when you're the author, you can make the collectivists the bad guys and the individualist industrialists the good guys sustaining the world from collapse. Some Marxist can easily go write a novel where it's the reverse, and I can go write a novel that implies that all garbage collectors are part of an insidious cult to enslave humanity. It doesn't prove we should start arresting garbage collectors.)
I've chatted with ARI members before, and their position is basically "Well, Objectivism is Ayn Rand's philosophy. She owns it. If you disagree with her about anything, that's fine, but call what you believe something else, it's not Objectivism. What's the problem here?" There's something to it - there certainly exist bizarro cults that claim to be part of Christianity / Islam / etc. that appear to have very little to do with the main beliefs of said religions, and it's questionable if they should be given that designation - but the level of "No, change is bad, Rand gave us the ONE TRUE REVELATION OF RATIONALITY" leads to some rather awkward positions that seem quite dated by 2013 standards. On the bright side, the feuding between ARI / other Objectivists whom the ARI considers apostates and not really objectivists / vanilla Libertarians is kind of amusing, and I actually wish there was more such feuding on the far right. The far left is always totally riven by pointless internal debates about whether the Trotskyist diaclectic is inevitable enough or if bourgeois socialism is an acceptable stepping stone to communism or whatever, it'd be nice if the far right types all hated each other as well and argued about whether it'll be Chinese pilots or Vietnamese pilots in the UN black helicopters to take over America.
Since we've descended into "Idiot Movie of the Day," to switch gears from Rand a bit, I highly recommend everyone here watch "Left Behind 2" and "Left Behind 3." They are quality cinematic entertainment, I've totally watched 'em 3 times. Watch the UN's nefarious plan to stick cheap CGI green poison into the Bibles, and you won't believe the stunning countermeasure available.
