Thanks, this is the point I am trying to make.
If you are opposing an ideology then have balls to attack the ideology straight on.
I don't see people often attacking Marxism on the basis that Karl Marx was hiding from child support obligations and that Lenin had syphilis. Yet it's par for the course to dismiss whatever ideology Rand is representing just by attacking her character.
Syphilis and child support payments aren't communicable by economic ideology in the same sort of way that lifestyles are by moral dictates.
Without taking a side either way of the AR thing - taking advice on how to live your life from people whose character you detest seems like it might be a bad call. Living your life in the manner they approve of, at least if they did so themselves, stands a good chance of making you more like them.
I don't think I understood. In the first paragraph you are saying that Marx's and Lenin's lifestyle choices are not going to affect their followers but in the second paragraph you are saying that following an ideology is going to make you like the ideology's leaders.
I don't think both of these can be true simultaneously so I guess I did not get what are you saying right.
You've dropped several conditionals that I placed in there.
The general theme is that things like macro economic theories place fewer constraints on individual action than moral ideologies - and that, provided that the person expounding the moral ideology claims to follow it themselves, your perception of their character counts as evidence for whether it's a good idea for you to accept it or not.
If the point you're trying to make is that attacking a person's character is a poor substitute for an argument against their beliefs, then point taken. But you weren't doing a very good job getting that point across.
