John Day

"Morality ends where a gun begins." Once someone initiates force against another, that person has lost his claim to moral authority.

Jennifer Burns will be on "The Daily Show" tonight at 11 talking about "Goddess of the Market." I spent some time with the book today and I'm pleased to see that the book will be promoted to a mainstream audience. I'll post my thoughts on the interview later tonight.

Very well done, Ed. When I saw Moore on Nightline describing capitalism as going against all the "great religions" of the world, I found it to be one of the more remarkably consistent and spot-on statements he has ever made. He is merely the most consistent adherent to a flawed morality.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hUZamhqvPGVrYZpGq_clUpC7dAUg This is a truly unbelievable and outrageous story. The Empire State Building is one of the greatest symbols of American construction and enterprise and it wasn't by accident that Nathaniel Branden would want to have NBI's headquarters there. For it to be used as a propaganda tool of one the brutal regimes in history is abdication of American values.

Glenn Beck has a very strange charisma about him. I watch his show a few times a week for entertainment purposes and while I'm enthralled by Beck's manic personality, I don't think much of him as a serious thinker. He goes into bromides far too often, his War Room scenarios set themselves up for parody and he rarely addresses the country's real deficit problem of Medicare and Social Security. I did find it interesting that he told Katie Couric that he thought McCain would be worse for the country than Obama. I don't agree with him on this, but it at least shows that he's not a Republican hack.

Reason vs. Faith: A Study of Galt's Speech: http://atlasshrugged.com/book/a-study-of-galts-speech.html Enjoy!

Onkar Ghate's lecture series, "A Study of Galt's Speech" is worth listening to. He gets into the philosophic framework of Galt's words and demonstrates how the speech ties itself into the book's plot. I'd also suggest "Reason vs. Faith," a Q&A session he did along with Yaron Brook.

Jonathan Chait of the New Republic, has written a "review" of the two new Ayn Rand biographies that has very little to do with the actual books and is really just a slam on Republicans. (Much like Whitaker Chambers' review of Atlas Shrugged had very little to do with that book and was really just a slam on Rand's atheism) Will Wilkinson provides a takedown of Chait that also addresses some of the problems of Rand's philosophy. This is very worthwhile for any open Objectivist.

It was after the Million Man March in 1995. The NPS estimated an attendance of 400,000 while the organizers claimed it over one million and Louis Farrakhan threaten to sue. Congress prohibited the NPS from making attendance estimates in 1997.

I watched the thirteen episodes of the unfortunately canceled Kings on Hulu. The production values were fantastic ($4 million an episode!) and the concept of a 21st century absolute monarchy was very novel. Since Charlie's Angels was one of Ayn Rand's favorite, I'll probably give that a try.

Will Wilkinson, a libertarian writer I like and respect, recently wrote on his blog about how Marxists are still accepted by the intellectual community despite the overwhelming evidence showing Marxism as a destructive ideology. Unfortunately, Wilkinson fails to mention that it's bad premises that make a bad philosophy and that its victims are only the final result. Here’s another thing Kunkel says: Perhaps the fear of marrying a mayfly, of being a mayfly, explains Kunkel’s enthusiasm for intellectual vintage. Whatever else Marxism may be (”a discipline of deep memory and long anticipation”!), it’s not a mayfly. Like other time-tested creeds, Marxism is safer than having perishable ideas of one’s own. Unlike most other time-tested creeds, it’s not embarrassing in Brooklyn, whether or not it should be. I'll close this with one of my favorite exchanges in We The Living:

Thanks for the responses, everyone. For the time being, I'll probably forgo Kant's works because it doesn't seem worth it to go through hundreds of pages of incompressible dreck just to find a few nuggets of information. Based on I've gone over, his epistemology doesn't seem that bad, but his notions of duty and ethics are a complete mess.

Ayn Rand described the philosophy of Immanuel Kant as "the exact opposite of Objectivism" and bigger evil than Hitler and Stalin because his philosophy set the stage for them. But under that standard, couldn't David Hume be considered a greater evil than all of them because he set the stage for Kant's philosophy? Based on what little I've read, Hume's skepticism and his rejection of the law of causality is more severe than Kant's. Could anyone try to clarify this for me? Also, are Kant's original works worth reading to enhance one's understanding of his philosophy? How technical are his works? I greatly enjoy philosophic works, but for instance, I found Introduction to Objectivism Epistemology difficult to understand. Thanks in advance!

If they were to ever make a re-make of The Fountainhead, Jolie would be the perfect Dominique Francon, a passionately idealistic but irrational character. She's a good enough actress that she could plausibly take on Dagny, but I imaging Dagny as being much less sensual. Laura Linney would be a solid Lillian Rearden.

Thanks for the welcome, everyone! It's hard for me to say how exactly I was introduced to Rand because no one ever recommended her novels to me and Objectivism was certainly never covered in any of my philosophy classes (to be fair, almost no 20th Century philosophy was). The earliest I can remember reading about Ayn Rand was after she was my top choice in a quiz on ethical philosophy. I liked her emphasis on individualism and her like of strong, rational men but at the time I was put off by her atheism. I've had a casual awareness of Ayn Rand for some years, but I wasn't quite motivated to read her novels until fairly recently. In the last few months, I've read The Fountainhead, We The Living and will be starting Atlas Shrugged shortly. What I love about Ayn Rand's philosophy is that it provides a code of morality existing outside of blind faith, breaking free of the false choice of religion vs. subjectivism.

This is my first post, I'm fascinated by Ayn Rand and her philosophy and what to gain further understandings.