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Manfred comments on In Defense of Ayn Rand - Less Wrong
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How are you using "justify" here? Do you mean "show to be morally permissible?" In that case sure, free country, etc.
Do you mean "show to be good role model behavior?" Not so much.
Do you mean "show to be in strict accordance with objectivism, which is a source of justification?" This is quite possibly Rand's own intent with the whole "what I say is objectivism" route, but if objectivism is to have any hope of meeting mild standards for good philosophy, said route cannot work.
From this side of the author/audience divide, what I feel like you are doing when justifying is repeating things that others said that made you feel okay about the thing being justified. But we, your audience, are not you, and so repeating things that worked for you probably won't work for us. You have to break things down and then build them up again to try and find the truth about a specific question.
By "justify" I meant "show that her actions were not a contradiction of her philosophy", which is what I think you said in your third question.
However, I was not trying to provide a justification for objectivism, and I was not attempting to use the tenets of objectivism in any clever sort of way.
I also was not trying to give strong justifications of her actions, only to show that if one were to give her main ideas a charitable reading, one would find a significant amount of evidence showing that her portrayal in Guardians of Ayn Rand was not consistent with the facts. Each time I "defended" her actions, I gave a quote that showed her characters acting in a similar way or giving credence to a similar action. Again, this was not a defense of her philosophy.
What I wrote was not about the structure of objectivism or lack thereof, not about objectivism being a closed system, and not about Rand's motives in her construction of objectivism. I specifically stated that I am not an expert on objectivism, and I would not try to defend it a community of rationalists.
My only motive behind this post was to highlight factual inaccuracies and (in my opinion) deceitful rhetoric in the original essay. It would have liked to have put in a comment, but it seemed much too long; so I formatted it a little and posted it here. Next time I'll have to treat these posts like a formal analysis and not like a casual writeup.
A casual writeup is fine if I know what you're writing up :P