The Leftist-Islamic Alliance Against Freedom of Speech

The Leftist-Islamic Alliance Against Freedom of Speech: Robert Spencer, a tireless defender of freedom and the freedom of speech against Islam, was attacked recently in the New York Daily News and charged with having "inspired" Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to go on his killing spree in July 2011. The writer, Nathan Lean, in his July 9th column, "Expose the Islamophobia industry," connects several other counter-jihadist writers with Breivik's actions, and lumps them all together as "untouchables" who ought to be ostracized.

The Islamophobia industry insists that it is not just a fringe minority who distort an otherwise peaceful faith. Instead, they point to the Koran and suggest that terrorists derive their world views from its messages. If that is so, these anti-Muslim agitators are guilty based on the logic of their own argument. After all, Breivik read and interpreted the writings of people like Spencer and [Pamela] Geller. He deciphered their diatribes much like Osama Bin Laden interpreted the Koran. Both men were compelled to act on the messages they digested.

It is doubtful that Lean has cracked open a Koran, or has heard of the Hadith, or The Reliance of the Traveler. For if he had any solid knowledge of Islam and its principal texts, he would grasp that these works do indeed sanction the violence of Muslim terrorists. He would understand that Spencer has every right to be an "Islamophobe," that is, someone who is fearful of Islam and especially of Sharia law. It is interesting to note that while Lean inveighs against Breivik, who murdered dozens of people, he does not mention the thousands of people killed by jihadists in virtually every country on earth. Moreover, he does not suggest that Breivik also was inspired by al-Qaida, in addition to a potpourri of other "Islamophobic" writers. About Spencer and his outspoken co-counter-jihadists, Lean concludes:

Society has a responsibility to counter these individuals with overwhelming overtures of pluralism — and to systematically push the fear-mongers out of public discourse.

Spencer replies:

The claim that I "inspired" the Norway mass murderer Breivik because he cited me in his "manifesto" has become a staple of Leftist and Islamic supremacist polemic against people who are trying to defend freedom against Sharia. But it founders on the facts: never mentioned is the fact that Breivik cited many, many people, including Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson -- who are just three of the many who are never blamed for his murders.

Also swept under the rug is the fact that whether he is sane or not, Breivik's manifesto is actually quite ideologically incoherent -- so far was he from being a doctrinaire counter-jihadist that he wanted to aid Hamas and ally with jihad groups.

It probably has not escaped the notice of the more observant readers that the alliance of the Left and Islam reflects the same agitprop strategies, chief among is that when the Left's or Islam's policies fail, or produce disasters, or cause deaths, or provoke hostility among the electorate, blame for the failure is shifted elsewhere. When Obama's policies produce the opposite of his alleged goals, he blames Bush, when in fact Obama's policies are a continuation of Bush's soft-pedaled socialism. The difference between Bush's socialism and Obama's is that Bush's policies were founded on an ignorance of economics, or of reality; Obama's policies are intended to negate economics and remake reality.

When Muslims murder, torture, rape, go on rampages, or otherwise resort to violence anywhere in the world to enforce conformity to their ideology, their spokesmen in the West blame "extremists." But they never say that the "extremists" are wrong. The ideology is never at fault, only its finger-pointing "misunderstanders."

Thus, as Spencer points out in his Jihad Watch column, anyone who criticizes Islam is a "misunderstander" who spreads "lies" and "fabrications" and so on about the perils of Islam and can be quick-marched to the same camp with actual jihadists. Then a leap of logic is performed and Muslim violence can be blamed on criticism of Islam. The Left and Islamists "abhor" violence, express "regret" when violence occurs, and do not blame the perpetrators, but instead the "instigators" of the violence, that is, those who exercise their freedom of speech by pointing out the evils and fraud of Islam and the consistent violence its ideology encourages and promulgates. They cluck their tongues in public over the violence sanctioned by their ideology, but chastise anyone who says the violence is part and parcel of their ideology.

They must be "pushed out of public discourse." That is, shamed, humiliated, boycotted, mocked, picketed, and ultimately censored. The irony is that there is no "public discourse" about the nature of Islam and the crimes committed in its name. Nor does the Left and Islam wish there to be.

It is six of one, half a dozen of another. The Left and Islam both promote collectivism and universal submission and subjugation to them. Of course they are allies. With the help of its Muslim occupiers, France recently elected a blatant socialist. Has anyone in this country heard a single Muslim speak out against Obamacare? Has any British Muslim spoken out against Britain's welfare state? No? Why not? Because to oppose collectivism one must advocate individual rights. It is individual rights that the Left and Islam wish to extinguish. They say: Control private property, or expropriate it, and it is extinguished.

In the fantasy universe of collectivists, violence is never the fault of the ideology, it is always the fault of anyone who resists submission to the ideology or criticizes it. For secular collectivists (or the Left), as with Islamists, the fundamental means to the end is force.

The correlation between and alliance of the Left and Islam are not contrived, "constructed," coincidental, or accidental. They are fundamental, natural, and inevitable. Marx and Mohammad have gone forth into the world, holding hands, fingering their beards as their feral and predatory intelligences survey the landscape before them. For example, Marxists, socialists, and other leftists wish to collectivize property. If the property is thus "owned" by the state, then no freedom of speech is possible (except illegally underground, or via samizdat) but the "freedom" to extol collectivism. If property is Islamized – that is, owned, or controlled by Muslims in a fully collectivized society governed by Sharia law (that is, Nazified), with nominal private ownership whose purpose and end are dictated by the state, or by the caliphate – then no freedom of speech is possible, either, except the "freedom" to parrot the party line of Mohammad. In either system, an individual who dares question the ideology gets swatted very quickly. That is what Gulags and chopping blocks and bomb detonators are for.

Then there is the "purgatory" or halfway point between the full collectivization by either ideology, a gray world in which freedom of speech is not expressly forbidden by law, but exists at the arbitrary whim or politically correct discretion of politicians or the judiciary. This is the situation in the United States. Brand any criticism of Islam as "Islamophobic" and the critics are conveniently diagnosed with dementia and committed to Antonio Salieri's Vienna loony bin, the papers signed by people like Nathan Lean. Or by Hillary Clinton and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations, or Barack Obama, or by Tony Blair and the Prince of Wales, and The New York Times.

James Bloodworth almost gets it right in The Independent (Britain) in his July 5th column, "It’s time to stop using the term ‘Islamophobia’":

There has, however, been an unfortunate consequence of all of this. It is now possible to shut down almost any contemporary political debate by blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism of Islam and the anti-Muslim prejudice of the far-right. This is perhaps best expressed by the appearance on the scene of terms like “Islamophobic racism” – a further extension of the concept of Islamophobia – which conflate the idea of “race” (the way a person is born) with religion (a set of ideas passed on in the home, the school and the community).

Bloodworth is one of those leftists (and The Independent is notoriously leftist) who frown on private property but uphold freedom of speech, meaning, for all practical purposes, that one should be free to speak on any subject, so long as it's standing up at the bottom of a public swimming pool (there are no private swimming pools, except in the backyards of the political elite) and one's words have no untoward or deleterious social consequences. Bloodworth is correct to claim that the inclusion of the idea of racism is illegitimate, because Islamophobia has nothing to do with race. It is a "set of ideas," however, he presumably has not examined very closely. He still harbors a distaste for the term, without examining the root meaning of "phobia," either, which means a fear of something.

A phobia can be an unreasoning fear of things like mice or spiders or cigarette smoke or the number thirteen, or it can be a rational response to a nemesis, such as being knifed or stoned or raped or stalked by a fellow wanting to be propelled in a fireball to Paradise and seventy-two virgins. The desire to speak one's peace, or to preserve one's freedom, he insinuates but does not elaborate, is not a form of bigotry.

On the surface, the Left and Islam indulge in and promulgate the reversal of cause and effect. The mobs of Occupy Wall Street go on a rampage because they do not have the wealth of their victims. Muslims murder infidels because they are disrespectful non-Muslims who enjoy more freedom. But the reversal is only superficial. In fact, causality plays no role in the violence sanctioned by the Left and Islam. In criminal law, the causality of crime is not regarded as a legitimate, rational motive. Motives are not on trial. Murder, property theft or destruction, or felonious assault in the name of an ideology, are not admissible as rational norms of behavior. Only actions are deemed worthy of judgment.

Leftists like Nathan Lean say – and they say it often – that one having something a criminal lacks because of "the system" has denied him that thing is the cause of the violence. The wealthy sui generis are the cause of the expropriation of their property. This illogic can be and has been extended to: The bourgeoisie must be eradicated because they are the bourgeoisie. Jews must be exterminated because they are Jews. Muslims say that if infidels don't have "religion" – their religion – then their lives are forfeit and they must be fitted with fetters and assessed for jizya or just gotten out of the way. Infidels must be conquered or killed because they are sui generis infidels.

If you are a blonde, blue-eyed Swedish woman, or a British school girl, or a red-headed German secretary, you deserve to be raped by a gang of ambitious, "morally superior" Muslims who want a taste of Paradise on earth before they turn into bomb-carriers. Islam grants Muslims dispensation for being in a hurry. If you are rich, or just moderately well-off with money in the bank in spite of paying confiscatory taxes wherever you turn, you deserve to be robbed and collectivized in the name of a fantasy society projected by the looters to miraculously evolve some time after your passing. The Left grants its activists in and out of government dispensation on the basis of need and the sui generis sainthood of a "have-not." For the Left and Islam, every action is forgivable, nothing is criminal.

The reversal of cause and effect is not causality at work, but rather the irrational and the anti-reason. Lighting a bonfire beneath a pile of iron ore is not going to produce an ounce of steel. Gagging anyone who speaks out against censorship is not going to acquit one of the crime of censorship, not unless some dhimmi American judge rules that "Islamophobia" does not qualify as "civil" or "public" discourse.

Pushing "Islamophobes" out of the "public discourse" is not going to stop Islamic jihad, stealth or violent. Muslims will only be encouraged to carry more signs saying "Free speech go to hell." Prohibiting the advocates of individual rights from criticizing socialist policies will only encourage wannabe beneficiaries of socialism to smash store windows, occupy private property, and shut or shout down forums on the price of liberty in the name of "freedom of speech."

And that, in a nutshell, is the symbiosis of the Left and Islam. Its fruit is totalitarianism. Ignore it at your peril.

The Undercurrent on Fracking

The Undercurrent on Fracking: Excellent piece at the Undercurrent on fracking and more generally the proper way to evaluate technology. This observation in particular is crucial:

Notice that the emphasis is always on the potential damage, and never on the immense benefit that fracking delivers. Critics are blithely content to advocate banning the practice because it “injects toxic chemicals into our water supply,” without explaining how the chemicals get from the fracked location to the water supply, what harm is supposed to result, or why we can’t mitigate it.

Science vs. Environmentalism, Exhibit 372B

Science vs. Environmentalism, Exhibit 372B:
The UK’s Mail Online reports:

Rings in fossilised pine trees have proven that the world was much warmer than previously thought—and the earth has been slowly COOLING for 2,000 years. Measurements stretching back to 138BC prove that the Earth is slowly cooling due to changes in the distance between the Earth and the sun. The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming.
It is the first time that researchers have been able to accurately measure trends in global temperature over the last two millennia. Over that time, the world has been getting cooler—and previous estimates, used as the basis for current climate science, are wrong. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Read the whole article here.
Whatever these measurements prove or support (and it may be less than the article claims), this is the kind of data that counts toward answering whether changes in global temperature occur irrespective of industrial activity. The findings here integrate with what we already know—that the earth has been both warmer and cooler in the past than it is now. And they leave open the possibility that small temperature changes one way or the other ultimately don’t matter because people can adjust to them.
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Journal for People of ReasonOf course, many so-called scientists who have been beating the “global warming” drums will disregard these new findings, as they do any facts that don’t comport with their goal of anti-industrialization at all costs. At most, this new data will cause them to dream up yet another angle as to why industrial progress must be stopped. In the 1970s it was “global cooling”; then it morphed into “global warming”; now it’s “climate change”; perhaps tomorrow it will be “temperature stagnation.”
Whatever the environmentalists’ pretense and agenda, science proceeds by gaining knowledge of facts, and knowledge of facts is always on the side of those who want to live and prosper.
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Related:

• Keep the Lights On—and Shine ‘Em on Environmentalist Nonsense
• On April 22, Celebrate Exploit-the-Earth Day
• The Assault on Energy Producers
• Interview with Alex Epstein, Founder of Center for Industrial Progress

Prometheus

Prometheus:
I’m a bit late with this post, I know. But, as I often say, better late than never!
Paul and I saw Prometheus in early June. Alas, we were seriously disappointed — as we’ve been with most of the movies we’ve seen in the theater of late. (Even Brave didn’t live up to my expectations: the plot and the theme weren’t well-integrated, and the mother’s change of heart seemed substantially unmotivated.)
The major problem with Prometheus were all the ginormous plot holes, as this hysterical video points out:

However — and here’s my real reason for writing up this post, late though it may be — I strongly recommend that you read this essay if you’ve seen the movie, whether you liked it or not: Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About.
For me, the essay explained so much of what seemed random and incomprehensible in the movie. It didn’t make me like the movie any more, but I could see that the creators of the movie were attempting to push some clear themes. They just didn’t do so in a way that really worked, at the level of plot. Still, the analysis is pretty masterful.

The "Doggy-Dog World" of Government Schools

The "Doggy-Dog World" of Government Schools: Michael Graham of The Boston Herald pens an article that neatly sums up the state of the public school system in terms of results vs. expenditures. The title of this post, borrowed from a phrase actually used by a student in a college composition class, gives you an idea of the results. (But if you don't believe me, also consider the fact that students are complaining that their classes and assignments are too easy.)

Two other things bear mention. First, throwing twice as much looted "public money" per student (adjusted for inflation) at government schools over the decades since 1980 has done nothing to improve things:

We test students all the time, tests like the National Assessment Of Educational Progress (NAEP). And since 1970, these results in math and reading have essentially been flat.

For example, the average 17-year-old's NAEP score in reading back in 1971 was 285. In 2008 it was 286.

Second, although it should come as no surprise, the whole idea that public school teachers are starving to death is a myth perpetuated by the teacher's unions.

When I tell people that, just as an example, the average Boston teacher's salary is around $82,000, they refuse to believe me.

When I tell them that the teacher-student ratio is lower than it's ever been in the modern era, they can't accept it.

The average person believes the "poor me" propaganda in part because the unions spend so much promoting it. Since 2005, the MTA has spent $4 million on lobbying and political activism in Massachusetts alone. People fall for it, politicians react and the cost of mediocre education continues to rise.

Despite the fact that I have long advocated getting the government out of the business of educating our children, articles like this still manage to amaze me with how lousy government schools really are. But then, were politicians and teacher's unions not working overtime to guard this gravy train, more people would know, and perhaps many more would begin to question the wisdom of having the state run such an important enterprise.

-- CAV

Larry Doby, American Hero

Larry Doby, American Hero:
In 1947, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers to become the first American of black African descent to play Major League baseball, breaking professional baseball’s self-imposed “color line.”
The famous Robinson is rightly considered an American hero. But there was another 1947 black hero who, unfortunately, was historically overshadowed by Robinson—but shouldn’t have been—Larry Doby. The same year Robinson broke into the National League, Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck signed Doby, who played his first game on July 5, 1947, breaking the American League’s color barrier.
Longtime sports writer Jerry Izenberg notes:

Historians never really got it. [Doby] was the second African-American to play in the majors, the first in the American League. But after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Dodgers earlier that season, revisionists would have you believe it was all over.
Doby came to Cleveland six weeks after Jackie had come to Brooklyn. But unlike Jackie, he remained alone for a long, long time. The American League, in contravention to its very name, integrated with the speed of a herniated inchworm.

“Doby,” recalls Izenberg, “told me about the moment the manager, Lou Boudreau, who didn’t want him, introduced him to the players who wanted him even less.” As Doby told Izenberg:

“I walked down that line stuck out my hand, and very few hands came back in return. Most of the ones that did were cold-fish handshakes, along with a look that said, ‘You don’t belong here.’
“Now, I couldn’t believe how this was. I put on my uniform, and I went out on the field to warm up, but nobody wanted to warm up with me. I had never been so alone in my life. I stood there alone in front of the dugout for five minutes. Then Joe Gordon, the second baseman who would become my friend, came up to me and asked, ‘Hey, rookie, you gonna just stand there or do you want to throw a little?’”

Thank goodness for Joe Gordon. Apart from that friendship, Izenberg writes, “Doby lived in the kind of dugout Jackie never knew.”
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Journal for People of ReasonFortunately, Doby has recently gotten some well-deserved official recognition, albeit posthumously. On July 5, 2012, which was the 65th anniversary of his breaking the American League color barrier, the Cleveland Indians, along with the city of Cleveland, commemorated Doby by renaming Eagle Avenue, which runs near its major league baseball stadium, “Larry Doby Way.” And the US Postal Service is dedicating a stamp in his honor.
This kind of personal achievement and cultural progress is a testament to the power of courage and reason, and to the ultimate impotence of ignorance and bigotry. All it took to set this change in motion was two rational, courageous individuals—Veeck and Doby—free to act on their judgment. Veeck signed Doby, Doby took the field, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Hats off to Bill Veeck and, especially, to Larry Doby—a true American Hero.
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Related:

• Review: Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 by Adam Fairclough
• ‘Racial Balance’ Programs Are Racist
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2008

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Introduction to DiSC

Introduction to DiSC:
In tomorrow evening’s episode of Philosophy in Action Radio, I’ll discuss DiSC Personality Types with Santiago Valenzuela. Santiago introduced me to DiSC, and I’ve found it hugely useful for understanding my own defaults and preferences, including in communication, as well as that of others. It’s far more useful, I think, than other personality schemes like Meyers-Briggs.
Here, before the broadcast, I want to introduce you to some of the basics of DiSC.
DiSC is a personality inventory focused on predicting behavior, particularly a person’s default behavior. Remember though, personality is not destiny. A person can always choose to act against the grain of his personality.
DiSC has two axes: (1) assertive versus reserved and (2) people-oriented versus task-oriented (or better, thing-oriented). Those two axes yield four personality profiles — Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. People are often blends of multiple types.
Here are the four quadrants, taken from this DiSC Basics PDF from Manager Tools:

Wikipedia summarizes the four types nicely:

Dominance: People who score high in the intensity of the “D” styles factor are very active in dealing with problems and challenges, while low “D” scores are people who want to do more research before committing to a decision. High “D” people are described as demanding, forceful, egocentric, strong willed, driving, determined, ambitious, aggressive, and pioneering. Low D scores describe those who are conservative, low keyed, cooperative, calculating, undemanding, cautious, mild, agreeable, modest and peaceful.
Influence: People with high “I” scores influence others through talking and activity and tend to be emotional. They are described as convincing, magnetic, political, enthusiastic, persuasive, warm, demonstrative, trusting, and optimistic. Those with low “I” scores influence more by data and facts, and not with feelings. They are described as reflective, factual, calculating, skeptical, logical, suspicious, matter of fact, pessimistic, and critical.
Steadiness: People with high “S” styles scores want a steady pace, security, and do not like sudden change. High “S” individuals are calm, relaxed, patient, possessive, predictable, deliberate, stable, consistent, and tend to be unemotional and poker faced. Low “S” intensity scores are those who like change and variety. People with low “S” scores are described as restless, demonstrative, impatient, eager, or even impulsive.
Contentiousness: People with high “C” styles adhere to rules, regulations, and structure. They like to do quality work and do it right the first time. High “C” people are careful, cautious, exacting, neat, systematic, diplomatic, accurate, and tactful. Those with low “C” scores challenge the rules and want independence and are described as self-willed, stubborn, opinionated, unsystematic, arbitrary, and unconcerned with details.

You can take a free DiSC test. However, in my experience, those results aren’t nearly as accurate as the $27 test from Manager Tools. That test offers a detailed and useful report too. If you like, you can view my DiSC report (PDF). I’m the classic “results-oriented” pattern, meaning high D, lesser I, no S, and a bit of C.
For Wednesday’s broadcast, you might want to print a copy of Manager Tools’ DiSC Cheat Sheet: How to Be Effective with DiSC Every Day (PDF).
Also, I strongly recommend listening to the core Manager Tools Podcasts on DiSC:

• Improve Your Feedback With DiSC
• The “D” in DiSC
• The “I” in DiSC
• The “S” in DiSC
• The “C” in DiSC

You can find more awesome podcasts on DiSC in the full Manager and Career Tools feeds. (Those feeds are available to anyone who registers for free on their web site.)
I’m super-excited to talk about DiSC tomorrow evening — and I hope that you’ll join us! As usual, the live show airs at 6 pm PT / 7 pm MT / 8 pm CT / 9 pm ET. Later that evening, I’ll post the audio on the archive page.

The Latest Ersatz "Right"

The Latest Ersatz "Right": An article arguing for "preglimony", by Katie Roiphe of Slate, would be an uproarious parody were its subject matter not so serious, and our culture so debased that the notion it touts will be taken seriously. The idea behind the neologism is that a woman who wishes to bring a pregnancy to term may force a man to pay for the expenses associated with the pregnancy regardless of his wishes.

Just observe the context-dropping in action in the following series of quotes:

Once you admit that the father is responsible to a woman carrying his fetus, you are halfway, at least in an imaginative sphere, to admitting that the fetus is a "life." ([Shari] Motro chooses her clunky word "preglimony" carefully to avoid any implications of "child support" but the intellectual connection, the implication that there is a child, and not just a cluster of cells, is there.) [bold added]

Well, yes: For the father to have any financial responsibility for the decision of a woman to carry a pregancy to term, it would have to be true (although it isn't) at a minimum that the embryo or fetus is a full-fledged human with individual rights. (And, since a woman has the right to abort, his prior agreement would also be necessary.) Notice the missing modifier -- human -- in the bolded portion of the above. Roiphe is right that arguing to force a father to pay for a pregnancy regardless of his wishes undercuts the argument that a woman has the right to end a pregnancy. But that's not going to stop her!

[Allison Benedikt] wrote: "casually and publicly assigning human attributes to not-yet-human embryos--including an avocado-size embryo in the family portrait--does not seem like the best way to argue against measures that seek to treat that avocado like a member of our collective American family.

To right-thinking liberals this may seem true, but it may also be true that the argument for reproductive rights needs to seek out more modern terms, terms that accommodate the new and emerging technologies and uncomfortable ambiguities of the avocado-sized entity. [bold added]

Roiphe even tells us she wants to have her cake and eat it, too!

I don't actually think it is in the interests of feminism or the pro-choice movement to cling so rigidly to outdated notions of "life." It no longer helps our cause to try to argue that the fetus is not "life."

Notice the now-missing indefinite article.

Apparently, the fetus being "a [human] life" is no longer a relevant criterion. Just being "life" is enough to justify slavery -- I mean "preglimony". (Of course, since human beings don't own each other, even the fact that something is a human life doesn't and can't justify slavery.) Roiphe either fails to notice that this might usher in a whole host of new ethical problems, or she has planned a whole series of columns about the ethical dilemmas of killing cancer cells, which are also "life".

Can we say "embryos" and "fetuses" do represent some form of "life" without conceding a woman's absolute control over the womb that bears them? A person who has had an abortion knows, and in fact has always known, and experienced very intimately this charged ambiguity: An unborn fetus that is wanted is a "baby," and an unborn fetus that is not wanted is a "fetus."

Contrast this blathering to the clarity of the following passage, by Ayn Rand, on abortion:

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right--which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

For the same reason that nobody has the right to force a woman to complete a pregnancy, there is no right to force a man to pay for a woman to do so.

Roiphe, I am sure, enjoys convincing herself that she is a nuanced and sophisticated thinker. However, she is merely sloppy, and obviously wants a fetus to be a fetus when it suits her -- or a baby when it suits her -- the rights of men and (actual) children be damned.

On second thought, Roiphe also undermines the case for a woman's right to have an abortion, and threatens to further erode the rights of men in the process. So I guess I should have said that Roiphe wants whatever she wants, everyone's rights be damned.

-- CAV

Higgs Boson Research: Testament to the Power—or the Crudeness—of the Human Mind?

Higgs Boson Research: Testament to the Power—or the Crudeness—of the Human Mind?:
The recent announcement that scientists found evidence consistent with the existence of the Higgs boson (a type of particle thought to give mass to other particles) is a testament to the efficacy of the human mind to discover the nature of reality. Why, then, do some describe the discovery in the language of mystics or claim it shows the feebleness of human reason?
Physicist Leon Lederman first called the Higgs boson the “God particle,” and now that phrase shows up in practically every media account of the discovery. But the particle, should continuing research demonstrate definitively that it exists, is not some mystical, supernatural force, but rather a part of the natural world, governed by natural laws. People study it, not by praying or receiving mystical “insight,” but by observing reality and drawing logical conclusions based on those observations.
Thankfully, one of the lead scientists behind the work, Fabiola Gianotti, did not thank God for the discovery or pretend the particle is mystical. Instead he said, “Thanks, nature!”
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Journal for People of ReasonBut at least scientists who loosely refer to the Higgs boson as the “God particle” do not really mean it has anything to do with a supernatural man in the sky. When journalist Robert Wright proclaims in The Atlantic that the discovery—because difficult to understand—demonstrates that “the human brain . . . is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty crude instrument,” he means to be taken literally and seriously.
Wright thus ignores the heroic thought and achievement of the thousands of scientists involved in creating the collider and mining the data it offers, and he disparages the human capacity of reason as such.
No doubt the theory behind the Higgs boson is complex and largely beyond the understanding of many laymen, myself included. But that is the case with any new scientific discovery. When Galileo described the earth’s orbit around the sun, when Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek observed microorganisms, when Newton described the nature of the force holding us on the ground and keeping celestial bodies in orbit, when Benjamin Franklin explained the relationship between lightning and electricity, these discoveries too seemed strange and incomprehensible to many laymen. But, far from showing that “the human brain . . . [is] a pretty crude instrument,” these advances demonstrated the glorious power of the human mind. The same can be said of the research revolving around the Higgs boson.
Consider the magnificence of the collider itself (putting aside for now issues of how it was funded). A release from the Weizmann Institute explains:

In the effort to discover the Higgs boson, unify the fundamental forces and understand the origin of mass in the universe, scientists built the world’s largest machine: a particle accelerator nestled in a 27-km-long circular tunnel, 100 meters beneath the border between France and Switzerland, in the European particle physics laboratory, CERN [the European Center for Nuclear Research], near Geneva.
This accelerator, called LHC (Large Hadron Collider), accelerates beams of protons up to 99.999998% the speed of light. According to the theory of relativity, this increases their mass by 7,500 times that of their normal resting mass.
The accelerator aims the beams straight at each other, causing collisions that release so much energy, the protons themselves explode.

What is crude here: Is it the brains capable of conceiving and producing such a machine, or is it the brains that refuse to recognize the power of the human mind on display in such advances?
We who recognize the awesome power of the human mind can add a second, and more important, word of thanks to join that of Gianotti: “Thanks, men of the mind!”
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:

• The Curious Life of Richard Feynman
• Herman Boerhaave: The Nearly Forgotten Father of Modern Medicine

Image: CERN

Gutenberg the Geek and “Patron Saint of Silicon Valley”

Gutenberg the Geek and “Patron Saint of Silicon Valley”:
Most children, notes Jeff Jarvis at the start of Gutenberg the Geek, learn of Johannes Gutenberg as “the hero who brought them the miracle of the book.” But is this an accurate depiction of the man and his work?
In this short, twenty-page Kindle Single, Jarvis provides readers with all the information they need to answer that question and to integrate this knowledge of the past with observations in the present.
For example, Jarvis sees Gutenberg as “the world’s first technology entrepreneur,” who “faced similar challenges [to today’s startups] and grappled with apparently timeless business dynamics.” He says that Gutenberg “operated in a climate of disruption and, like his entrepreneurial descendants, caused profound change of his own.” And, because of all this, writes Jarvis, Gutenberg should “be seen as the patron saint of Silicon Valley, for he used technology to create an industry—perhaps the genesis of industrialization itself—and to improve his world.”
Jarvis regards Gutenberg as a hero and often compares him to Steve Jobs. Why does he admire these men? Because, he says, they “accomplished greatness through trial and error, vision, and determination.”
Jarvis notes that “Gutenberg’s key invention . . . was the development of his adjustable, handheld mold made of iron and wood, which allowed his type foundry to quickly and efficiently make letters of exact measurements so they would form lines of text that were even and consistent in three dimensions.” He also notes Gutenberg’s attention to minute details in his pursuit of excellence and profit. For example:

• He discovered the appropriate thickness of paper “so it could take an imprint on both sides” and then ensured the paper was soft enough to accept ink “by wetting alternate sheets and pressing them together for a few days—not too long or the paper would fall apart.”
• He adapted his press so that it could hold the paper in place, use ink formulated for lasting and rich darkness, and “exert pressure only vertically, not horizontally, so as not to smear the ink.”
• He tested putting more lines on a single page, and by adding just one more, was able to save “5 percent in paper costs.”

On the basis of such facts, and contrary to what many of us were taught, Jarvis concludes that Gutenberg’s achievement was no miracle and “no overnight invention.” Rather, explains Jarvis employing a quote from Albert Kapr, Gutenberg’s achievement was “a creative process which lasted from about 1437 to 1455, a process which had its setbacks, periods of stagnation and a succession of fresh problems to solve.”
Unfortunately, Jarvis includes in this otherwise gem of an ebook an appeal to keep the internet “free”—by which he means free not only “from the control of governments” but also from the alleged “control” of “corporations.” Fortunately, he spends only three paragraphs on this control-of-corporations nonsense, so it doesn’t detract too terribly from the main value of Gutenberg the Geek.
If you enjoy seeing a true hero at work, not just as an inventor but also as an entrepreneur—and being granted great respect on that eminently worthy basis alone—download this ebook and bask in the good.
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:

• The Patience of Jobs
• Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet

A Little-Known Fact About Seppuku

A Little-Known Fact About Seppuku:

A Japanese nobleman prepares to kill himself. Why? Because he’d rather die than try to make sense of Japanese history using conventional sources!

The answer is Powell History’s “First History” method!  The first lecture of my new course on the  First History of Japan for Adults will be available FREE as a podcast, exclusively on Facebook, as of this Saturday!
Please join me at:  http://www.facebook.com/AFirstHistoryForAdults for the solution!

More on Central Purpose

More on Central Purpose:
In the June 24th episode of Philosophy in Action Radio, I answered a question on parenting as a central purpose. In my answer, I suggested that Objectivists seem to have misunderstood what Ayn Rand meant by “central purpose.” In part, I suggested that based on Ayn Rand’s comments in “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness:

The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics–the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life–are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work–pride is the result.

That was her only comment on “central purpose” in her novels or anthologies. It doesn’t seem to imply that a person needs to have a central purpose in the sense of an overriding theme of his life, as many people seem to think.
Shortly after the broadcast, someone pointed out that Ayn Rand discussed “central purpose” briefly in her interview in Playboy. Here’s the relevant passage:

PLAYBOY: Weren’t Hitler and Stalin, to name two tyrants, in control of their own lives, and didn’t they have a clear purpose?
RAND: Certainly not. Observe that both of them ended as literal psychotics. They were men who lacked self-esteem and, therefore, hated all of existence. Their psychology, in effect, is summarized in Atlas Shrugged by the character of James Taggart. The man who has no purpose, but has to act, acts to destroy others. That is not the same thing as a productive or creative purpose.
PLAYBOY: If a person organizes his life around a single, neatly defined purpose, isn’t he in danger of becoming extremely narrow in his horizons?
RAND: Quite the contrary. A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value which he will never find.

Ayn Rand’s analysis of the life of the man without a purpose is correct: such a life would be terribly disintegrated. However, I’m doubtful that a person must have one single dominant purpose — a theme of his life that trumps all other concerns — in order to live a rational, integrated, and purposeful life. Instead, my thought is that a person’s ultimate integrating purpose is his own life and happiness. Often, that ultimate purpose will be pursued via three to five major values, such as a career, a spouse, children, and a hobby.
Those major values might not be strongly connected to each other. My passion for horse training and skiing has little to do with my love of philosophy. Paul doesn’t join me in those hobbies either, but he’s hugely important to me.
Those major values will come into conflict periodically. A parent, for example, faces constant choices between spending more time at work versus spending more time with his kids. Sometimes, those choices might be painfully difficult, such as during a major crunch time at work.
Even if a person’s career is most important to him, in the grand scheme of his life, that doesn’t mean that his career will always trump his other major values. I could work more hours, for example, but I choose to spend some of that time riding my horses instead. If my horse Lila were injured, my plans for work for that day would be instantly discarded.
A person might forgo certain career opportunities in order to enhance or preserve the other major values. I wouldn’t ever move to New York City — even if doing so would hugely advance my career — because doing so would preclude my pursuit of too many other values. (Hence, I would be miserable in very short order.)
Ultimately, what should matter most to a person is his own life and happiness: that’s the ultimate purpose that properly integrates all his actions. Beyond that, a person needs to cultivate and identify the major values by which he pursues that life and happiness. He needs to know their relative order of importance to him, in the grand scheme of things. He needs to be sensitive to changes in those major values over time.
To go beyond that — to attempt to intertwine all the disparate threads of one’s life into a neat and tidy bow known as a “central purpose” — seems likely to be unhelpful and perhaps even unrealistic for many people. For them, the result of the attempt is not greater clarity or purpose, but only guilt, worry, and sacrifice of values. Obviously, that’s not good.
Ultimately, the goal should not be to force oneself to think and act in terms of a single unifying central purpose of life. The goal should be to live a rational, integrated, and purposeful life — and I see many ways to do that.

Broken Beakers

Broken Beakers: The Washington Post recently put out a story about the fact that there are too many scientists in America, an unfortunate consequence of the state's central planning of that vital component of the economy:

A glut of new biomedical scientists ... entered the field when the economy was healthier. From 1998 to 2003, the budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled to $30 billion per year. That boost -- much of which flows to universities -- drew in new, young scientists. The number of new PhDs in the medical and life sciences boomed, nearly doubling from 2003 to 2007, according to the NSF.

But that boom is about to go bust, because an equal number of permanent jobs failed to follow. One big factor: Since 2004, federal research spending across all agencies has stagnated relative to inflation, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Although the injection of $10 billion in federal stimulus funds to the NIH from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 "created or retained" 50,000 science jobs, according to the NIH, that money is running dry, putting those positions at risk.

The lack of permanent jobs leaves many PhD scientists doing routine laboratory work in low-wage positions known as "post-docs," or postdoctoral fellowships. Post-docs used to last a year or two, but now it's not unusual to find scientists toiling away for six, seven, even 10 years.

The fact that so many scientists find themselves in long holding patterns is bad enough, but for many, the nature of the work makes it worse than merely frustrating. Speaking about his postdoctoral work, one interviewee notes that "I couldn't answer the question of how this was any different from undergraduate work."

But even that's not the whole story by a long shot, as Frederic Bastiat made clear over a century and a half ago. What might our economy be like now, with so many hard-working, talented individuals performing more productive work? What might it have been like had these individuals, better-informed about what the market would reward, specialized in something else a decade or more earlier? And how much better might their individual careers have been had they not been led down a blind alley by the pied piper of government-funding of science?

-- CAV

Fighting Back Against Colorado’s Campaign Finance Laws

Fighting Back Against Colorado’s Campaign Finance Laws:
I have some exciting news to share — and I’m particularly delighted to share it with you on Independence Day!
My fight against Colorado’s onerous campaign finance laws has been taken to a whole new level, thanks to the Center for Competitive Politics. They’re representing my organization, the Coalition for Secular Government, in a federal lawsuit challenging the application of Colorado’s campaign finance law to Ari Armstrong’s and my policy paper in defense of abortion rights. CCP is arguing that the onerous campaign finance regulations violate our First Amendment rights.
I couldn’t be more excited for this opportunity protect the right to speak freely on politics in Colorado.
Here’s CCP’s press release. You can expect more details to be posted on here on NoodleFood in upcoming weeks.
Colorado Group Files First Amendment Lawsuit
DATELINE: Monday, July 2, 2012
CONTACT: Sarah Lee, Communications Director, Center for Competitive Politics, 770.598.7961
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Center for Competitive Politics (CCP) legal team, led by Legal Director Allen Dickerson, today filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado on behalf of the Coalition for Secular Government (CSG). The question raised by the First Amendment lawsuit is whether Colorado can force small educational groups to register with the state before expressing an opinion on or publishing an analysis of a ballot question.
Colorado resident Diana Hsieh, a doctor of philosophy, organized the non-profit CSG together with her friend Ari ArmB in order to promote a secular understanding of individual rights, including freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. Because of unconstitutionally vague state laws, confusion as to what constitutes political speech and what is covered under a press exemption, and a refusal by the state to abide by a federal court order, Hsieh and CSG have found it nearly impossible to carry out the activities of a small non-profit group without fear of running afoul of complex Colorado campaign finance laws.
“Ari and I simply wanted to discuss a Colorado ballot measure as a small part of our effort to educate people about our philosophy. Our goal has never been to defeat such measures; they would have lost just as badly without our policy papers,” Hsieh notes. “It’s frustrating that even our modest efforts are hampered by the Colorado campaign finance system. To avoid the risk of costly lawsuits and hefty fines, we must report minor purchases of office supplies and the names and addresses of small-dollar donors. Our experiences with Colorado’s system have been confusing and dispiriting. We’ve not abandoned our efforts, as most people would have done, but we’ve definitely scaled back our efforts. We shouldn’t have to register and file these meaningless reports with the State to speak on moral and political topics of public concern.”
Dickerson and the CCP legal team filed a complaint alleging that, even though Diana and CSG plan to raise no more than $3,500, nearly all of which will go toward updating and disseminating an expanded and updated copy of their public policy paper, the state of Colorado appears to demand that CSG register as an issue committee, with all the paperwork burdens and restrictions that status entails. Dickerson notes that this is unconstitutional under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and burdensome, particularly for a small group seeking only to exercise their right to speak.
“No group that spends very little money, and whose principal product is a policy white paper, should need the state’s permission to speak,” said Dickerson. “Despite good intentions, Colorado’s voters approved laws with that unreasonable and unconstitutional result. We hope this suit will give the federal courts an opportunity to protect CSG and other vulnerable, grassroots speakers.”
The suit asks for a declaratory judgment and requests that the court hear CSG’s claims on an expedited basis.
A background paper on the lawsuit can be viewed here.
A copy of the complaint filed in the lawsuit can be viewed here.
The Center for Competitive Politics promotes and defends the First Amendment’s protection of political rights of speech, assembly, and petition. It is the only organization dedicated solely to protecting First Amendment political rights.

A Welcome Development

A Welcome Development: The more I see of Governor Scott Walker, the more I like him.  Here's his approach to addressing the so-called higher education bubble.

The real solution, of course is to privatize the whole educational system, but compared to what any other governor (that I'm aware of) is doing, I think this is a real positive..

A Clash of Supremacies over Obamacare

A Clash of Supremacies over Obamacare: Before Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion upholding the alleged constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (on one hand, denying its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause, but, on the other, sanctioning the individual mandate as a tax Congress has the power to impose), otherwise known as Obamacare (ADA), several states had announced that they would refuse to implement the law or conform to its specific provisions. At last count there were four, from the original twenty-seven, led by Florida.

Such opposition may move Congress to repeal Obamacare in part or in its entirety, instead of fighting the states (provided Republicans retain control the House and win control of the Senate); it may cause it to "replace" Obamacare with something less onerous (but no less unconstitutional); or it may cause another Constitutional crisis in which the states invoke the Tenth Amendment and are answered by the federal government overriding the states' supposed right to resort to that strategy.

The last major defiance of federal policy by the states on the basis of states' rights precipitated the Civil War.

The questions are: Can the states successfully resist the federal government on this issue? Can they unite in their opposition? Would the federal government back off, or offer a compromise, such as was reached during the Nullification Crisis of the 1830's? Can the federal government override their opposition? Will the federal government threaten to punish states that refuse to comply with Obamacare, e.g., by withholding federal highway funds or Medicaid funds, or by devising another strategy to induce compliance? And if the states champion noncompliance with any facet of Obamacare, on what moral grounds?

Three features of the Constitution will come into play in this pending conflict:

The Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people.

The Supremacy Clause of Article VI, Section 2, which states that the Constitution, and the Laws of the United States…shall be the supreme Law of the Land. This clause applies solely to the enumerated powers granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, and to no other laws, assumed or imagined. This clause by inference also exempts the federal government from complying with state laws.

The Necessary and Proper Clauseof Article I, Section 8, which reads: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. This is the last of eighteen enumerated powers.

The Tenth Amendment, or the "states' rights or sovereignty" Amendment, has a dubious history. It has been invoked by states in the past to impose or legitimate the denial of individual rights to blacks or to sanction the statist mischief or criminal behavior of a state legislature. The Amendment has never been invoked to protect individual rights.

Furthermore, in the 20th century, the argument from state sovereignty or from "reserved rights" lost credibility when states began to accept federal money for various highway, welfare, and other federal programs. By accepting those funds, the states lost a great portion of their vaunted sovereignty. They could claim arm-twisting by the federal government, but once they submitted, the wind went out of their claims to state sovereignty. They became addicted to and dependent on the subsidies in terms of their own budgets and expenditures. They complemented the growth of federal power with the growth of their own powers. It may be too late to reassert their sovereignty now. States maintain that they can pick and choose which powers they reserve (in the name of "the people"). This they might do, but the federal government has in many instances adopted a policy of "benign neglect" in respect to allowing states to assert their own prerogatives.

The Supremacy Clause has been virtually ignored by Congress, because Congress has passed thousands of laws not enumerated in the Constitution ("implied" powers), but whose enactment has been rationalized by Article I, Section 8, whose first clause reads, The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

The Necessary and Proper Clause has been as troublesome as the first clause, because it corrals together both legitimate and illegitimate functions of the federal government, in addition to all those "implied" or unenumerated powers. The first three clauses, together with the fifth, sixth and seventh, grant Congress powers it should never have been granted, and which have allowed the inevitable expansion of federal power. Proponents of the ADA based much of their sanctioning on the Commerce clause ("among the several States"), interpreting the term regulate to suit their own agenda, and ignoring its original meaning, which was to impose some kind of legal structure on the chaos in trade and commerce between states. The term did not sanction statist controls over commerce. (No kidding, Nancy!)

Naturally, statists counter with, "That was then. This is now. We are not as narrow-minded as the Founders and Framers. We have a broader and superior understanding of the term. Conditions have changed. Society is more complex. We are more enlightened. We have responsibilities the Framers never dreamed of."

Oh, they dreamed of them, all right. Or rather, had nightmares about such powers, which most of them never wanted to delegate or bestow. Those dreams and nightmares are discussed in The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers.

The states cannot oppose Obamcare with a straight face. Their own tax-and-spend-and-regulate programs lift chump change from their citizens' pockets, while Obamacare and other federal programs raid whole bank accounts across the country in what could be called the federal "interstate commerce" in robbery, fraud, and extortion. The states cannot cock a snook at the Supremacy Clause because it contains all the vices and villainy they practice, as well. Virtually the only things the states cannot emulate is to print their own money and run their own postal service.

The aforesaid powers are, from the perspective of recognizing and upholding individual rights, improper and wholly unnecessary. If the states wish to nullify Obamacare, they should understand that their own statist powers ought to be nullified, as well.

The states cannot challenge the Necessary and Proper Claus, either, because they have adopted their own unenumerated powers. For virtually every mammoth federal bureaucracy, in every state there is a Mini Me clone.

The states are the pot proposing to call gang-leader Kate "Ma" Barker black. One could view the conundrum from this perspective: The federal government is Ma Barker, obese, sly, and accustomed to having fancy and expensive things got through her sons' criminal activities; the states are her dependent, obedient, fiscally-challenged offspring. This criminal association creates an image it will be hard for the states to shake, or reconcile with their "principled" opposition to Obamacare, or even deny. You can bet that the federals will remind them of this and their friends in the mainstream will make a lot of noise about it.

The leftist mainstream media have served the federal government for decades now in a triple role: press agent, shill, and graffiti artist. You can count on the MSM to contribute their own confusion, ignorance, and collectivist biases to the fight the conservative governors and legislatures are spoiling for.

Forgotten, however, in all the chatter, lawsuits, and braggadocio over which governments claim prerogative supremacy over clashing legislation – the federal or the states – is the supremacy of the individual who owns his own life and the necessary and proper primacy of his liberty. Denied the recognition that he owns his own life, and seeing the primacy of his liberty negotiated away or simply erased from law, man becomes a part-time or full-time indentured serf.

There is not a single state in the Union that has not enacted its own à la carte nullification of freedom. So, on what grounds can the state credibly oppose the lavish, cannibalistic banquet of Obamacare? All the states can do, in opposition to Obamacare, is clam first "rights" to impose their own statist imperatives.

Put another way: Whose supremacy is it, anyway? Whose supremacy ought to be the issue – the State's, or the individual's?

Prometheus and the Black Goo of Altruism

Prometheus and the Black Goo of Altruism:
Although Ridley Scott’s film Prometheus is an incoherent mess, it does feature an obvious theme. It glorifies altruism, selfless sacrifice to others.
Children’s author and blogger Adrian Bott explains what’s going on in the opening of the film:

Let’s begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise and benevolent entity who created mankind in the first place, forming the first humans from clay. The Gods were more or less okay with that, until Prometheus gave them fire. This was a big no-no, as fire was supposed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. As punishment, Prometheus was chained to a rock and condemned to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle. . . .
The ethos of the titan Prometheus is one of willing and necessary sacrifice for life’s sake. . . .
Now, consider the opening sequence of Prometheus. We fly over a spectacular vista. . . . A lone Engineer at the top of a waterfall goes through a strange ritual, drinking from a cup of black goo that causes his body to disintegrate into the building blocks of life. We see the fragments of his body falling into the river, twirling and spiralling into DNA helices.

Scott himself explains the significance of this scene:

All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the plant life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself. If you parallel that idea with other sacrificial elements in history—which are clearly illustrated with the Mayans and the Incas—he would live for one year as a prince, and at the end of that year, he would be taken and donated to the gods in hopes of improving what might happen next year, be it with crops or weather, et cetera.

Bott notices that the film explicitly invokes Christian history and imagery. Scott verifies this connection in answering the question, “Did we do something to make the Engineers hate us?” (The Engineers are the creators of life who, in the end, try to destroy Earth.)

We definitely did. . . . if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Let’s send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.” Guess what? They crucified him.

Prometheus, then, contrasts the sacrificial life-givers (the Engineers and Jesus) with the sacrificing life-takers (the Romans who crucified Jesus). In the film, the character who epitomizes the sacrificer of others is Peter Weyland, who, as Bott explains, endangers all of humanity in his quest for eternal life via the Engineers’ black goo. But the black goo “evidently models its behaviour on the user’s mental state,” Bott notes, and so, posits the film, human selfishness corrupts it.
First notice that the altruism of the life-creating Engineers “works” only because of an inexplicable concoction of magical black goo—something that in reality doesn’t exist and thus has no bearing on human life. It is telling that Scott compares the action of the black goo to the ancient “donation” of princes to the gods—that is, human sacrifice in the form of brutal murder.
Next, notice that Prometheus sees the two basic alternatives as self-sacrificial, life-giving selflessness, and other-sacrificing, life-harming selfishness. This ignores the possibility of a rationally self-interested person who (as Ayn Rand formulates the matter) neither sacrifices himself to others nor others to himself.
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Journal for People of ReasonRational selfishness rejects human sacrifice in all its forms, and it is what truly sustains human life. Unlike the Engineers, human parents do not normally die giving birth—thankfully, doctors in our industrial age have radically reduced the rate of mortality during birth. Instead, normal parents love their children dearly and hold them as supremely high values. Yes, loving parents will give up some things (including some restful nights and some money) for something they value more—their children’s well-being—but such actions are not sacrifices; they are trading what the parents value less for what the parents value more. As adults, humans survive and thrive in a social context to the extent that they interact with others on a voluntary basis, trading value for value.
Ayn Rand too drew on the legend of Prometheus for her novelette Anthem, first published in 1938. The hero, who escapes a collectivist society with his beloved, chooses for himself the name Prometheus, in honor of the legend: “He took the light of the gods and he brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deeds as all bearers of light must suffer.”
Rand’s point, though, is not that suffering is inherent in life-giving actions, but that, historically, light-bearers have been unjustly tormented. The goal of the new Prometheus is to free mankind from such sacrifice:

Gaea is pregnant with my child. Our son will be raised as a man. He will be taught to say “I” and to bear the pride of it. He will be taught to walk straight and on his own feet. He will be taught reverence for his own spirit. . . .
At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him. . . .
And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the cities of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

Those of us who love life must reject the false choice of self-sacrifice or other-sacrifice, and embrace Rand’s vision of a Prometheus who repudiates human sacrifice in all its forms, calling for rights-respecting, rational selfishness.
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:

• Hunger Games a Worthy Addition to Dystopian Corpus
• Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand’s Morality of Egoism

Image via Wikipedia

China’s One-Child Policy Illustrates Rights-Violating Horror of Collectivism

China’s One-Child Policy Illustrates Rights-Violating Horror of Collectivism:
NPR reports that Chinese officials forcibly abducted a 23-year old woman who was carrying a seven-month old fetus. The officials demanded that the woman’s husband pay some $6,000 in “fines” (i.e., extortion money) in order for the government to free his pregnant wife. When he didn’t pay, the officials forcibly gave the woman an injection that killed her fetus.
This dreadful story has encouraged many Chinese to step up their opposition to the obscene, rights-violating one-child policy.
In a just society, anyone who acted as those officials did would be prosecuted for kidnapping, extortion, assault, and a long list of other crimes, then, upon conviction, sentenced with appropriate severity.
But of course we are not discussing a just society, we are discussing China, a nation that, while inching toward some economic freedom in limited respects, remains rooted in the murderous ideology of communism. Unfortunately, the one-child rule is but one of many rights-violating policies enforced by this communist regime.
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Journal for People of ReasonCommunism sacrifices individuals and their liberties for the alleged benefit of “society.” An individualist society, by contrast, protects the rights of each individual to pursue his own life, liberty, and happiness in accordance with his own judgment, provided that he does not violate the rights of others. In an individualist society, couples are free to have children, or not, at their discretion, and how many children they have is none of the government’s business.
Thankfully, America is rooted in individualism, though in many ways the nation has strayed from individualist principles. Let us fight to keep America the land of individualism, and let us condemn all those who sacrifice individuals or their rights—or call for such sacrifice—whatever their pretext.
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:

• Why Marxism? Evil Laid Bare
• Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice
• The Assault on Abortion Rights Undermines All Our Liberties

Image: Creative Commons by Steve Evans

Education Tax Credits Are Not Government Subsidies

Education Tax Credits Are Not Government Subsidies:
In criticizing his state’s proposed tax credit-based school voucher program, called the “Opportunity Scholarship Act,” former New Jersey governor James J. Florio writes: “You don’t have to be an economist to understand that [education] tax credits are tax expenditures and, thus, revenues lost to be made up by someone else.”
Is Florio correct in implying that education tax credits are essentially an indirect government subsidy? No, because he evades a crucial fact: The Act would not take money from the government; rather, it would enable citizens to keep their own money—money the government never had in its possession.
Further, the Act “would provide matching tax credits to corporations that contribute to a scholarship program for students to attend outside schools” (my emphasis). If the reduction in money the government seizes from citizens is offset by a reduction in the number of children the state pays to “educate” in government-run schools, then the “revenues lost” do not have “to be made up by someone else.”
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Journal for People of ReasonIf concepts have meaning, the government cannot “expend” money it never took possession of. (For more on this, see my reply in TOS’s Summer 2011 “Letters and Replies.”) In a properly structured program, education tax credits enable individuals to spend their own money, on whom they please, according to their own standards and values, at no cost whatsoever to government or anyone.
While there are good reasons for free market advocates to oppose the Opportunity Scholarship Act, the tax credit funding mechanism is not one of them. Why can’t—or won’t—politicians see that government can’t lose that which it never had?
Like this post? Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.
Related:

• The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools
• Toward a Free Market in Education: School Vouchers or Tax Credits?

Image: New Jersey Department of the Treasury

Phrygian Cap

Phrygian Cap:

This is a Phyrgian cap. I'm surprised I only just learned about its symbolism.



It once symbolized freedom. This association comes from Roman times. It was even banned around the French revolution.















It might have adorned the statue on top of the U.S. Capitol, except that Jefferson Davis objected. The cap did make it on to the seals of the U.S. Senate and the state of Iowa. It also figures on  the coat of arms of various South American countries.



I think its interesting... and cute.