You’ll find a lot of the history here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6539&view=findpost&p=63531 The conversation gets pretty salty, but it’s in the “Rants” forum, so there’s fair warning. Ed Hudgins posts here, and on the home page you’ll find a forum titled David Kelley Corner, subtitled “Friendly discussions of…”, I think you can infer from there. I check out RoR periodically, but it has very little activity. A big problem there is that when someone disagrees with something in Objectivism they get restricted to the Dissent forum, that’s just no way to have a discussion. Tibor Machan posts there, his articles are pretty much the only draw. RoR and SOLOP are the result of a split some 5 years ago. Yes, that does explain a lot. And thank you for responding to this. I realize that it might have seemed like I was baiting or attempting to troll. I assure you that was not my intention. I guess I should explain more of where I'm coming from. For a long time, my only exposure to objectivism was from "The Fountainhead" (movie) and various excerpts of "Atlas Shrugged". I mostly just tried to apply such individualist principles to my world. Of course, I also equated libertarianism with it. It was not until much more recently that I came across the objectivist sub-community on the WWW (and also embarked on a mission to read the books in their entirety). I was immediately taken aback by the orthodoxy of it all. From my admittedly limited understanding of it at the time, I could not reconcile what I was reading from Objectivists with what I considered to be a philosophy of independent, rational, critical thought. It seemed that everyone was less interested in applying objectivist principles to the questions at hand than in applying Rand's own personal views on specific topics. I later came across the TAS site and found them to be - what I considered - more objective in their stances than the "true believers" were. I even started reading quite a bit from the CATO folks, though I have to admit their essays can be a little too "out there" for me sometimes. As for SOLOP, I was initially led to the that site by a link from their archives. This article in the SOLO archives came to me from a Google search using "Objectivism", "dogma", and I think "Randian" as search terms. It seemed to me to be in-line with what I was thinking and so I went to the new site on the assumption I'd find like-minded individuals. Boy, was I wrong on that one. Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I find the discussion on this site to be much more in keeping with my general mindset. Not that I need to seek validation necessarily, but I don't find it an enjoyable experience to be surrounded by those who oppose my viewpoints (sometimes with threats of violence even). I enjoy the writings of many here that I would not have gotten elsewhere, like George H. Smith, and I've already purchased a copy of N. Branden's "The Psychology of Self-Esteem" so that I might explore how psychology could possibly be the "practice" of the philosophical "theory". -Todd