 Mexican Immigrants and the "Objectivist" Center
by Adam Reed
That racist propaganda is widely tolerated among America's "Conservatives" and "Liberals" is scandal enough. That it is spread by the magazine of an "Objectivist" organization is beyond scandal. It is treason.
(Read more...)
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Notes on "Reading Lolita in Teheran"
by Adam Reed
The ultimate paradox of theocracy, is that it exists for the purpose of imposing the primacy of consciousness on reality itself. It creates, in Azar Nafisi's parting words, "a place where the film censor is nearly blind and where they hang people in the streets and put a curtain across the sea to segregate men and women." And where pedophiles "marry" nine-year-old girls, with the full endorsement of the mullahs of the Islamic Republic. (Read more...)
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 Why Cloning Really Matters
by Adam Reed
President Bush has promised to veto any repeal of the cloning ban as long as he remains in office. By the end of his presidency, the total number of people killed by the ban that delays medical research into human cloning will exceed 30 million. We are witnessing the third-largest democide in history.
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 The Ontology of Space
by Adam Reed
Does the concept of space correspond to a real existent? The naïve answer would be "no:" to the non-scientist, space denotes emptiness, the absence of existents. And of course absence is not an existent. Fortunately, this naïve view of the ontology of space is wrong. (Read more...)
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 Please Don't Feed The Trolls
by Adam Reed
The troll's long-term goal is to make converts, but in the short term his goal is to get his marks to consider his crackpottery intellectually respectable. His "proof" of purported intellectual respectability is that rational people consider his crackpottery debatable. The only effective countermeasure is to refuse to be drawn into the troll's project. Please don't feed the trolls. (Read more...)
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The Ontology of Emergence
by Adam Reed
An emergent property is a non-reductive property—that is, a property that cannot be "reduced to" (computed or deduced from) the measurements of the attributes of the separate components that compose the system. Emergent properties require emergent attributes, that is, system attributes whose measurements cannot be reduced to the measurements of the attributes of the system's components. Do such attributes exist? (Read more...)
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 Marian Bielicki: Making Individuals Under Communism
by Adam Reed
The real beauty of the book's approach was that no one—censor, critic, teacher, student—would have dared point out the book's actual message and the reversal of collectivism and individualism in the plot. To denounce the book for its real message, the censor would have had to identify, as lies, the lies that the Marxist State was built on. And for that, he knew, he would have been killed. (Read more...)
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The Ontology of Information, and Hard Atheism
by Adam Reed
In view of the new knowledge acquired since the time when Ayn Rand wrote on the subject, "soft atheism" is obsolete. We humans now know, in the same sense in which we know anything at all, that an entity with the attributes traditionally ascribed to a God cannot exist in reality. (Read more...)
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Natural Functions, Natural Goals, and the Misuse of Purpose
by Adam Reed
The human faculty of auditory pattern recognition evolved for the function of hunting. Is every man who chooses to exercise this faculty by listening to a symphony, rather than for stalking small animals in the brush, an "unnatural" pervert? I have hunted, and I have reproduced, and I have nothing against either. But listening purely for music, and sex purely for pleasure and love, is surely, for a Human animal, the most natural thing in the world. (Read more...)
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 Living with "Into the Blue"
by Adam Reed
The painting explodes with the joy of the human spirit breaking out of the two-dimensional surface of the world into three-dimensional life; of the artist shaking the bonds of photo-realist illustration and finding, with incredible lightness, that they never bound him at all. (Read more...)
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George Washington and the "Objectivist Center"
by Adam Reed
The man, for whom the city in which they voted for this bill is named, said 215 years ago, "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights." That two traitors to this principle should be honored and legitimized - in the name of the woman who gave us unprecedented understanding of Americanism as a body of principles, including this one - is an unspeakable obscenity. (Read more...)
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Thursday
December 16, 2004 |
Archimedes and the Principle of Derivation
by Adam Reed
This is Archimedes' second, unstated principle: the Principle of Derivation. It is the more important of the two. There are not, after all, a great many situations in which one's life depends on knowing that the buoyant force is exactly equal to the weight of the displaced water. But knowing that behind every regularity of empirical observation is an operation of natural law, identifiable with reason, known with certainty when identified, and deriving its necessity from the nature of reality itself - that is a truly foundational principle of Life Qua Man. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
December 8, 2004 |
When I First Became a Criminal
by Adam Reed
A young woman whom I recognized from the NBI lecture was in the bookstore, leafing through W. Ross Ashby's "Introduction to Cybernetics," which I had read two years earlier. We started talking about the book, then about other things. By the time we came out of the bookstore, we were talking about the differences between Ayn Rand's and Aristotle's conceptions of rationality; and I was, for the first time in my life, in love. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
December 1, 2004 |
 Objectivist Morality Anime
by Adam Reed
"The Incredibles" is an Objectivist morality tale, one that I wish had been available back when I was bringing up a child. (Read more...)
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Elections to the House - and Constitutional Review
by Adam Reed
The principle of individual rights, and its corollary, that an ordinary individual American is entitled to judicial review of ANY legislative or executive action that adversely affects his or her individual rights, suffered an extraordinary 247-173 defeat in the House of Representatives on 23 September 2004. H.R.2028, the "Pledge Protection Act of 2003," bars all federal courts, including the Supreme Court, from reviewing cases involving the Pledge of Allegiance. (Read more...)
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Why I Am Voting for Kerry
by Adam Reed
I will vote for John Kerry because Kerry, whatever the ugly errors of his distant past, lacks the defects that make George W. Bush unfit for the presidency of the United States. Because Kerry's political concepts belong to modernity and the enlightenment, and not to the age of religion that is Bush's ideal. Because Kerry's economic advisers, like Clinton's before him, will be free-market neo-liberals, and not Bush's neo-conservative Keynesians. (Read more...)
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Tuesday
September 28, 2004 |
 Jeeping to Ouray
by Adam Reed
Jeeping is when this animal's mind challenges reality by driving a superbly agile machine, one of the mind's noblest products, into fun. (Read more...)
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Deja Vu
by Adam Reed
Barbara Branden wrote, "By the fall of 1940," Ayn Rand "had only seven hundred dollars left. It was under these circumstances that she took three months off from writing, using the last of her savings, to work for the election of Wendell Willkie." In 1940 Ayn Rand was 35. I am 58 in 2004, and ought to be wiser. (Read more...)
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How Bush Terminated Stem Cell Research in America
by Adam Reed
If you develop products that the Bush administration disapproves of, you will not be allowed to sell them. This amounts to a de-facto ban on private industry investment in disapproved stem-cell research. With the exception of a few tiny efforts by the surviving remnants of non-profit institutions without federal funding, stem-cell therapy research has been terminated in America. (Read more...)
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Where TOC Shines
by Adam Reed
TOC's presentation of what it purports to present as "Objectivism" to the general public is abysmal. On the other hand, TOC's Advanced Seminar, and Will Thomas' presentations of his original work at the regular TOC Summer Seminar, are a fabulously productive venue for fruitful technical exploration of new and forgotten aspects of Objectivism. (Read more...)
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In Praise of Live Music
by Adam Reed
The human ears are exquisitely sensitive not only to the amplitude and balance and frequency of sound, which are faithfully reproduced on stereo recordings, but also to phase, which isn't. Phase is the difference between the waveforms that hit the two ears from the same source. (Read more...)
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A Fortress Against Objectivism
by Adam Reed
Donway's article is an attempt to disinterr and resurrect the zombie of an old dichotomy between "bourgeois individualism" and "romantic individualism". This is the same dichotomy that Rand killed and buried by presenting a new, integrated, coherent vision of individualism in "The Fountainhead." (Read more...)
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Silence
by Adam Reed
Yesterday I googled the Objectivist Center and the Ayn Rand Institute and their bookstores, the Objectivist Bookstore and the Ayn Rand Bookstore, for my favorite feel-good film, "Chocolat." The results were: (Read more...)
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A Petition of the Software Merchants
by Adam Reed
On January 8, 2004, Darl McBride, president and CEO of the SCO Group, Inc., sent to US Senators and members of the House of Representatives a letter urging them to restrict, by law, the development of open source software. (Read more...)
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Iraq: Could-Have-Been
by Adam Reed
I recently returned from a trip to Poland, where one of my friends was involved in the subsequently aborted plan for Poland to manage the reconstruction of Iraq. (Read more...)
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