There are certainly different ways of looking at oppression, but the Social Darwinsits of Ayn Rand's ilk choose to either ignore the oppressed or even view them with contempt because of their weakness.

This would be like getting mad at a quadripelegic for not going to work. She can't get to work without an apparatus, which requires *help from other people.* YOU (R.R) needed help once, too. Although you completely separate yourself from the reality that you were once utterly helpless and (most likely) completely dependent on a woman's breast for sustenance, somehow how that dependence doesn't count or isn't related to other's people's needs in your mind.

The sort of "pull yourself up from your own bootstraps" mentality you advocate is not natural to our species, despite your insinuating that it is "natural" for a bird to shove her young out the nest, etc. (Are we birds??) Humans are social animals who need others in order to survive. Archeologists have found extremely old remains of elderly people who appeared to have been in good physical condition, yet were toothless. The obvious question is, "how did they survive?" The answer is that others in the human group *looked after them,* even to the point of grinding or chewing up food for them.

Social Darwinism is *not* a legitimate theory (unlike Scientific Darwinism, which is completely unrelated) and should have vanished with the Horatio Algiers novels that accompanied its formal inception. Unfornately, the culture of selfishness and cruelty seems to morph into other forms of the same ol' B.S.

Just because you've lost your idealism, don't try to sell it to the rest of us as "Radical Objectivism."