Paul Shirley is an objectivist douchebag

Shirley among his Menorca (Spain) teammates. Obviously afraid of the water surrounding his tiny island home. In fact, obviously so afraid he couldn't even play more than a few minutes. (Image via Wikipedia)

I’m going out on a limb here and saying I think Paul Shirley just finished reading The Fountainhead.

Yup. In an essay for flipcollective.com (a website Shirley runs),  the former NBA benchwarmer turned “writer,” exhibits all the signs of a recent Rand-reader.

1) Being an asshole
Shirley displays his rectal tendencies in this conclusion of his “letter” to the Haitian people:

As we prepare to assist you in this difficult time, a polite request: If it’s possible, could you not re-build your island home in the image of its predecessor? Could you not resort to the creation of flimsy shanty- and shack-towns? And could some of you maybe use a condom once in a while?

Sincerely,

The Rest of the World

If you rebuild it, they will come

2) Self-righteously faulting people for the conditions of their poverty

After the tsunami of 2004, the citizens of the world wailed and donated and volunteered for cleanup, rarely asking the important – and, I think, obvious – question: What were all those people doing there in the first place? Just as important: If they move back to a place near the ocean that had just been destroyed by a giant wave, shouldn’t our instinct be to say, “Go ahead if you want, but you’re on your own now.”?

That’s right, Shirley can’t believe people live in Southeast Asia. What are all those people doing there? You know, on those large fertile landmasses? Sheesh.

3) Disliking large groups of people for arbitrary reasons
Paul Shirley is quite clearly afraid of the hurricane belt, and is spiteful of those who are brave enough to bare it….

We did the same after Hurricane Katrina. We were quick to vilify humans who were too slow to respond to the needs of victims, forgetting that the victims had built and maintained a major city below sea level in a known target zone for hurricanes. Our response: Make the same mistake again. Rebuild a doomed city, putting aside logic as we did.

If forced to do so through logic-colored glasses, no one would look at Haiti and think, “You know what? It was a great idea to put 10 million people on half of an island. The place is routinely battered by hurricanes (in 2008, $900 million was lost/spent on recovery from them), it holds the aforementioned title of poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and it happens to sit on a tectonic fault line.”

4) Did I mention the asshole thing? How about the self-righteous thing?

I recoil at the notion that I’m SUPPOSED to do something. I would like to help, but only if I feel that my assistance is deserved and justified.

I’ll tell you what Shirley, leave the thinking to actual thinkers and stick to what you do best — playing basketball against Europeans for two minutes a game.