 Objectivity and Art
by Joseph Rowlands
One of the central principles of Objectivism, as well as one of the more powerful tools, is the concept of objectivity. (Read more...)
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 Valiant Valentine!
by Lindsay Perigo
Valentine's Day, when your fancy may unashamedly turn to romance. The Human Wrongs Commissariat won't try to have you arrested & even the Ministry of Ugly Wimmin's Affairs will acknowledge the last word of its title. (Read more...)
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 The Holy Sixth Century
by Kyrel Zantonavitch
Rationality and philosophy were discovered and invented around the early 500s BC in eastern Ionia. The almost instantaneous result of these wondrous creations was much more happiness, pleasure, ambition, and overall hope in life for all the new Greek men of reason. It was nothing less than a spiritual revolution. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
February 11, 2004 |
 Explanations and Lies About North Korea
by Tibor R. Machan
The BBC World News reported recently on North Korea's devastating food shortage problem. Some 6 million human beings are at the brink of starvation there! (Read more...)
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Valentine's Gifts
by Joseph Rowlands
Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Romance is in the air. Little red hearts are on every storefront. Young couples are planning to celebrate their love. Yes tomorrow, Cupid is in command. What more fitting a time could there be to talk about property rights! (Read more...)
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 Sixty Issues And Ten Years On
by Lindsay Perigo
In my very first editorial in the very first Free Radical -- in May, 1994 -- I explained the magazine's mission by quoting a businessman's admonition: "The trouble with you, Lindsay, is that you reduce everything to an issue of freedom." (Read more...)
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Hey Greenie, Wanna Get Rich?
by David Bertelsen
Joe Bigwig straightened his Armani suit, set his sunglasses back down on his face, and drew a last, deep suck from his Cuban cigar, delighting once again on that plausible taste of communist sweat as he drew up to the bedraggled, dubious excuse for a human being that was holding up the lamp post. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
February 18, 2004 |
Self and Inconsistency
by Tibor R. Machan
Many more years ago than I like to admit I read a wonderful little book, Prescott Lecky's Self-Consistency: A Theory of Personality (New York: Island Press, 1945). (Read more...)
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Thursday
February 19, 2004 |
Freedom of Speech means Freedom to Offend
by Reginald Firehammer
What is the most dangerous epidemic in the world today? Is it SARS, bird flu, AIDS, or some other lurking devastating infection? No! It is none of these. It is something much worse, much more insidious, much more destructive and ultimately deadly. (Read more...)
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Not Enough Justice?
by Joseph Rowlands
A common type of question Objectivists get involves some horrific action a person can take that is technically not a violation of anyone's rights. This may include the torture of animals, a guy is emotionally abusive to his girlfriend, parents who refuse to educate their children, or a wife who insists on cooking vegetarian dishes. All of them travesties of justice, and yet the law is not allowed to remedy them. (Read more...)
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Law vs Custom
by Lindsay Perigo
In his excellent essay below, "Not Enough Justice," Joe Rowlands spotlights a type of conundrum routinely flung at Objectivists... (Read more...)
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 Evaluating Music -- and Franz Lehar
by Rodney Rawlings
The title of this article might make some modern intellectuals scoff. They hold the subjectivist theories that art is anything intended or recognized as such, and that it has only to be "sincere" to be pronounced worthy. So how can one say any art is good or bad? To them, music is even more problematic, because when it stands alone (as opposed to occurring in a song or play) nothing in it seems to refer to the outside world. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
February 25, 2004 |
Murray Rothbard's Randian Austrianism
by Edward W. Younkins
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was a grand system builder. In his monumental Man, Economy, and State (1962), Rothbard continued, embodied, and extended Ludwig von Mises' methodological approach of praxeology to economics. His magnum opus was modeled after Mises' Human Action and, for the most part, was a massive restatement, defense, and development of the Misesian praxeological tradition. Rothbard followed up and complemented Man, Economy, and State with his brilliant The Ethics of Liberty (1982) in which he provided the foundation for his metanormative ethical theory. Exhibiting an architectonic character, these two works form an integrated system of philosophy. (Read more...)
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Thursday
February 26, 2004 |
A Free Market of, by and for Human Life
by Jonathan R
In a free country, who should have the moral-and hence legal-right to decide what an individual does with his own body: the state or the individual? Whose body-and hence whose life-is it? (Read more...)
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The Rights of Intervention
by Dustin Hawkins
Does a dictator have the right to exist uninterrupted? (Read more...)
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 Showtime! SoloHQ 2.0
by Lindsay Perigo
Below is a message from SOLO’s Executive Director Joseph Rowlands. It heralds the arrival of the much-anticipated SOLOHQ 2.0. Joe & SOLOHQ’s web master, Jeff Landauer have been slaving away for months bringing this new, more interactive site to life. I salute them on its birth.
... (Read more...)
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A Public Statement on The Objectivist Center
by Diana Mertz Hsieh
As many of you know, for the past ten years, I have actively been involved with and supportive of The Objectivist Center, formerly the Institute for Objectivist Studies. In that time, I attended every Summer Seminar. I recommended IOS/TOC to countless people. Early on, I often defended the ideas in Truth and Toleration... (Read more...)
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 Contributions of Post-Randian Philosophers of Human Flourishing
by Edward W. Younkins
A post-Randian or neo-Aristotelian self-perfectionist approach to ethics can be shown to support the natural right to liberty which itself provides a solid foundation for a minimal state. This approach gives liberty moral significance by illustrating how the natural right to liberty is a social and political condition ... (Read more...)
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Borderlines
by Joseph Rowlands
One of the topics in Objectivist epistemology is the method of concept-formation. It discusses how it is we can take different entities in reality, and create a useful mental abstraction. How do we go from individual trees to the concept 'tree'? How do we go from instances of the color blue, to the concept 'blue'? ... (Read more...)
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Constitution Bashing
by Ross Elliot
"Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the Constitution of any State or Federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups." And so says the recent... (Read more...)
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The Orwellian Popular Culture of Modernity
by G. Stolyarov II
The society of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984 employs entertainment of the utmost vulgarity and a perversity not encountered by a man of proper tastes in order to satisfy the “instinctive urges” of its proletariat. The Oceanians’ music possesses an inhuman crudeness and resembles more the severe thumping of a drum than a me... (Read more...)
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This is not what that meant by land of the free
by Dustin Hawkins
Apparently there is some confusion when describing America as the land of the free. At one point, the "free" involved individuals having freedom. Get it? America was to be the land where people would be free to do what they choose and to pursue those dreams they desired, so long as to not interfere with others' rights ... (Read more...)
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Campaign Finance Reform in Buckley v. Valeo
by Jonathan R
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Congress amended existing campaign finance laws to limit the amount that could be contributed to, or spent by, political campaigns. The Supreme Court considered these regulations in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and made a momentous hash of the legislation. The verdict therefore bot... (Read more...)
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 In Praise of Mel Gibson
by Reginald Firehammer
Mel Gibson is a hero. I do not mean he is my hero, or a hero to any particular group, but symbolically, he is an American hero. There is another symbolic American hero named Howard Roark, who, though a fictional character, is the same kind of hero as Mel Gibson. (Read more...)
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Flirting with Friedrich
by Lindsay Perigo
Back by popular demand (from Lindsay.) (Read more...)
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