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21 February 2005 
Atlas Rugged. (Via Boing Boing via MIA blogger Tomo, who's also responsible for the heading.)
07:23 PM |
20 February 2005
No, I'm not getting any better at posting here regularly or substantively, but lately I've been commenting up a storm on gay marriage and individual rights over at the Western Standard (read from the bottom up).
10:51 PM |
11 February 2005
Shop Wal-Mart!
The Meatriarchy reports that Wal-Mart Canada is under a boycott threat due to its shutting down of a unionized store in Quebec. I'm making my shopping list for this weekend already.
Update: Wow, looks like the threats got more serious fast.
02:36 PM |
6 February 2005
Heather Mallick doesn't like the gay marriage bill recently brought before the House of Commons. If you're familiar with Mallick, and therefore know that she's reliably to the left of Michael Moore, this might surprise you. But only for the moment it takes to realize that, of course, the reason she wouldn't like the bill is that it doesn't go far enough.
I shall ask all MPs to vote for the bill introduced in Parliament this week, but with great contempt because it is tainted.... It permits religious types to refuse to perform the ceremony. In other words, it allows gay marriage except for those who don't allow gay marriage.Well, I do have to admire Mallick for sticking to her principles even when the short-term political consequences of speaking out might be unfavorable to her cause. Clergy being forced to perform marriages is one of the religious social conservatives' big fears. Her column will undoubtedly be latched onto pretty quickly as proof those fears are well-founded.
As I say, though, I actually admire her for ignoring short-term politics. What I find morbidly fascinating is her twisted logic — and psychology. Here we have an atheist who wants other atheists, along with "believers" who explicitly defy a church's teachings, to be able to demand, with the force of law, that clergy put an explicitly religious imprimatur on their marriages. It's not enough to have equal rights and protections for gay couples under the law. Mallick demands the forced "approval" of those that disagree with her. Either that or she spitefully relishes the thought of seeing her opponents forced to act against their beliefs. Whichever motive it is that drives her, it isn't pretty.
12:29 PM |
4 February 2005
A new website from the Ayn Rand Institute: www.aynrand100.org.
08:08 PM |
2 February 2005
David Veksler chose this quote to mark today:
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.Put this in front of the next person who tells you Ayn Rand and her philosophy are cold and unfeeling.
12:04 PM |
Don't miss Ian Hamet's personal reflections on the occasion of Ayn Rand's centenary.
11:25 AM |
Starting new ventures on Ayn Rand's birthday is becoming a habit for me. Last year, Selective Memory was inaugurated on this day. This year, another new site, and one that couldn't be started on a more appropriate day. Ladies and gentlement, I give you Randex, whose mission is to record online news references to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. To start, the site is at the bare minimum of functionality I could live with. More features should be appearing over the coming weeks.
12:37 AM |
One hundred years ago today, Ayn Rand was born. I very much liked the piece Onkar Ghate wrote for ARI to mark this event. An excerpt:
It remains... all too common for a young person to be told that his interest in Ayn Rand is a stage he will soon grow out of. "It's fine to believe in that now," the refrain goes, "but wait until you're older. You'll discover that life is not like that."But when one actually considers the essence of what Rand teaches, the accusation that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her ideas but of the adult world from which the accusation stems.
The key to Rand's popularity is that she appeals to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: "There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days--the conviction that ideas matter." The nature of this conviction? "That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth."
To sustain this youthful conviction throughout life, Rand argues, one must achieve a radical independence of mind.
One of my favorite Ayn Rand quotes might have been appropriate for this piece:
To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started.Happy Ayn Rand's Birthday. Here's to unchanging youth and (as the quote currently on the left says) "a life which is a reason unto itself."
12:11 AM |
1 February 2005
Cox & Forkum observe the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth.
02:33 PM |