@mergy@philosophy “Books by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman as well as Wollstonecraft, Austen, Woolf, Baldwin, Hurston and Orwell are worthy of introductory collegiate courses for students of all majors.”
Agreed they’re worth studying, but not all worth adopting. The author’s complaints are the result of millennia of Platonism and centuries of its fatal apotheosis in Kant and his successors.
Violent tribalistic #protests as well as disastrous political ideas are the results of irrationality in our culture.
Key to cultivating a more rational culture is improving the quality of #education.
To that end, on May 18 The #AynRand Institute is officially launching the Conceptual Education Program to further promote rational ideas in primary and secondary education.
“In many ways, I actually think the real idea of #OpenSource is for it to allow everybody to be ‘selfish,’ not about trying to get everybody to contribute to some common good.
“In other words, I do not see open source as some big goody-goody ‘let's all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world a better place.’ No, open source only really works if everybody is contributing for their own #selfish reasons.”
Your mind is your fundamental tool for survival as a human. Your individual right to life includes the right to use your mind for productive work and enjoy its results. That is the foundation of your #PropertyRights and of #capitalism.
Run away from anyone who offers you the false dichotomy between solitude and #collectivism. They do not recognize your right to hold them to their agreements.
“Do not hide behind such [altruistic] superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime.”
—#AynRand, from “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”
Most professional philosophers boycott #AynRand and “wish the media would stop referring to her as a #philosopher.” Even when a journal or textbook is not hostile to her arguments, they consistently have little connection with her written texts because of parochial attachment to the frameworks Rand challenges.
This is simple #prejudice, and these professionals have yet to overcome their own biases. Can you?
@GoodAaron@lisamelton “Perceptions of the material world” assumes a “true” but unknowable non-material world (#Kant’s ’noumena’) and a limited delusional perception of the “material world” (Kant’s ‘phenomena’).
The alternative is realizing that existence exists independent of any consciousness, that things have a specific nature or identity, and that consciousness is the faculty for perceiving that.
@bughuntercat “I will ask you to project the look on a child’s face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world—inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride.“
— #AynRand
An OG Classic from #TheNewYorker from a decade ago when we still had operable senses of #humor and the will to use them liberally. This piece, riffing on #AynRand and her forked tongue ostensibly #reviewing kids shows and stories, is forever going to be #hilarious. Noir Mother Goose. Randian p pl
hot take: the FCCs rules around the power and density of licensed FM transmitters are generations behind the technological advances and if they'd license low-power digital fm for community stations without it being a massive investment organizationally and financially our airwaves could flourish.
but there's no money behind a lush radio garden powered by regular people.
@djsundog@foone Hotter take: The “argument from scarcity” was already outdated in the mid-1960s when #AynRand published “The Property Status of Airwaves” (anthologized in ‘#Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal’):
“Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort should be private property—by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort…”