I have an acquaintance whose main method of argument is shouting out names of logical fallacies without pointing out to the person he's arguing with where and how it applies.
This list is helpful as a guide to spot errors in reasoning. It is not helpful as a tool to facilitate discussion.
If you use this reference, do us all a favor and discuss how the fallacy applies in the current discussion, and treat the person with some respect at least.
That QM is random to us is no more correct on its face than a dice roll being random. A dice roll follows rules of classical physics and given enough information about the state of the system we can accurately predict /exactly/ how the die will land. It ceases to be random as we increase knowledge.
That QM has a limit to the knowledge we can acquire within the confines of our observations does not indicate some philosophical "true randomness."
"Crazy" suffices to say that the behavior set is far outside of regular norms as to be unworkable with normal reason. It doesn't have to imply the actor is schizophrenic or anything.
It doesn't matter if the actor, behaving rationally towards his ends, has ends that are absolutely incompatible with ours, or if he's acting irrationally. [edit: I mean it doesn't matter from a defense of his behavior standpoint. It's fine to call him "crazy" if his ends are absolutely unacceptable]
I agree with the critique of the piece - no one thinks North Koreans are inferior as human beings. We think they've been fed a ubiquitous dose of propaganda their entire lives. We think that a dictator, so very isolated through years of behavior that necessitates (and invites) it, lacks any sense of acceptable end-states for his country.
I also agree that it's misguided to dismiss him as actually crazy. One must treat him as a rational actor - moves you make will have moves he makes. There is rationality involved. May be shitty rationality, may be myopic rationality, but it's rationality. You move warships towards North Korea he's not going going to launch Rubber Ducks at you. That'd be crazy. He's not going to poop his pants and eat the feces on live television and announce he's a little princess.
Yes, the characters are intended to be one dimensional. You'll notice all the characters have differences from each other in important ways, because they are meant to show how certain beliefs (and contradictions in beliefs) interact and have consequences.
Dagny and Rearden have internal contradictions, and it's not the point to find relation to them as people, but how their contradictions affect them.
The one sided villains aren't meant to be rich characters full of life, but people who carry out principles you here uttered in real life to their extreme conclusions.
The purpose is to take people at what they claim their values are and illustrate their implications.
I love articles like these because it's nothing but regurgitated BS by people who don't get Rand, about people who aren't really 'devotees'.
Writing caricatures of people and ideas and how those caricatures of people ideas relate to each other is great.
Here's an honest sentence "Paul Ryan, who has never really done anything the protagonists of Rand's novels would, is said to have liked the book a lot"