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.

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.

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.

12:11 AM |

1 February 2005  

Cox & Forkum observe the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand's birth.

02:33 PM |

26 January 2005  

Margaret Wente was ticked off (subscribers only, but see the handy tip at the end of this post) with Stephen Harper's fear-mongering polygamy comments, too. And her thoughts pretty much echo my own:

I want to get behind Stephen Harper, I really do. I think of myself as a natural-born, small-c conservative -- one of those tolerant, live-and-let-live types who think governments work best when they are modest in their ambitions and stay out of your hair. I'm also sick and tired of the federal Liberals, who are way overdue for a nice long time-out.

There are lots of people like me across the country -- people desperate for a chance to cast their vote for a decent, halfway credible alternative to the globe-trotting Mr. Dithers and his band of tired, clapped-out has-beens. We are low-hanging fruit. We are practically begging to fall into Mr. Harper's lap. All he has to do is stand there, act statesmanlike, and gently pluck us.

Instead, he yanks our chain.

"I don't want to get into the polygamy debate," he said last week, "but I fear if we do this, the next thing on the Liberal agenda will be polygamy, and who knows what else."

Excuse me? Until Mr. Harper brought it up, there was no polygamy debate, except on the outer lunatic fringes. But, according to him, gay marriage is just the first step on the slippery slope, and next thing you know, the Liberals will probably be arguing for your right to marry your pet goat.

Even Mr. Harper must have realized that his remark about polygamy was ridiculous.

02:17 PM |

22 January 2005  

Harper adds heat, not light, to marriage debate.

I don't want to get into the polygamy debate, but I fear if we do this [legalize same-sex marriage], the next thing on the Liberal agenda will be polygamy, and who knows what else.

- Stephen Harper, quoted in the Globe and Mail, 21 Jan 05, p. A4

Even aside from his own unexpressed ideas on the slipperiness of the gay-marriage slope, it seems unlikely that Harper really fears that the Liberals will soon be rolling out pro-polygamy legislation, let alone "who knows what else." If he does, again, he should provide some evidence for that fear. In the absence of this, his comments are pretty clearly an attempt to gain support by pandering to voters who do have such fears. Just like the Conservatives' placing of anti-gay marriage ads only in ethnic newspapers, it seems to be a purely political ploy, and one intended to appeal to emotions, not minds.

Cynics will say that telling people what they want to hear, what will get them on your side, is necessary in politics today. I still have a naive hope, however, that integrity and principles are not completely irrelevant, at least in my own party.

(Cross-posted to The Shotgun, where Ezra Levant has kindly invited me to participate. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the post below.)

04:05 PM |

20 January 2005  

Ezra Levant for Prime Minister. If his views on media and government are any indication, anyway, he's got my vote. Excerpts from his testimony before a senate committe in November:

Senator Tkachuk: Do you think there is a role for the CRTC?
Mr. Levant: I do not think there is....

Senator Tkachuk: Should it be the role of the Competition Bureau or the CRTC to prevent monopolies in markets, or do we need either?
Mr. Levant: I do not believe we need either. I am hard-pressed to find a single example in history of a monopoly that has managed to keep its monopoly without government support in one way or another. In fact, if you look historically at Canada's greatest monopolies, they did not exist naturally. Some government intervention created them in the first place.

Senator Tkachuk: What role, then, should the CBC have as part of Canada's media family?
Mr. Levant:... I think that the CBC could be liberated from the government and put into private hands.... It may have had a place in the past, but I do not believe that it needs the government support....

Senator Munson: On another subject, you say you do not think there is a role for the CRTC. Reading all the regulatory business with the CRTC and saying there must be certain things — for example, Al-Jazeera cannot do live television and cannot come here, and so on — but you say eliminate the CRTC. Is it just people coming in here and building radio and television stations and newspapers without any regulation of any sort, just a free-for-all with foreign ownership, American stations...?
Mr. Levant: That sounds exciting to me.

10:40 PM |

Compassionate Conservatism: Take Two.The best and the worst in Bush's inauguration speech, according to Michael Hurd.

05:29 PM |

19 January 2005  

This is great news. From Google:

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

09:55 AM |