Year: 2009

Categories
Objectivism

The Ideas of Ayn Rand

The Ideas of Ayn RandOn my shelf for several years, I recently read Ron Merrill’s book, The Ideas of Ayn Rand. I walked away with one key insight.

Most of the book is a rehash of her history and her philosophical work. It doesn’t hurt to refresh yourself on important ideas, but I don’t feel like I learned much from this part of the book. I’ve read all of non-fiction from her and I’ve read Barbara Branden’s biography. Merrill has a different perspective having been peripheral to the core group in the 1960s.

What I found fascinating was the last part of the book where he analyzes the current state of the “movement” and how it could improve. His advice seems to be a sketch of what Stefan Molyneux is almost over-explaining over at Free Domain Radio. That is, find the people who you agree with on the basics (metaphysics, epistemology, …) and tolerate your differences with the benevolent assumption that one of you errs on the facts not that by corruption. This book was published in 1991. It was a big deal then that David Kelley had been pushed out of the “orthodox” circle of Objectivists. That was a strange experience for me having just recently begun studying Objectivism seriously.

Merrill argues that our focus for change must be cultural not political. I’ve been listening to Molyneux’s work during my commute, and he definitively destroys the notion that “working within the system” is a viable option. Neither through electing like-minded politicians nor through academia can we expect to avert our world’s crash course. The most powerful tool we have is the power over ourselves. If we live morally, we will prosper and by that prosperity inspire others. What I appreciated most from Merrill’s book was the reminder that evil’s power is given by sanction of the victim. I cannot count the times when faced with some frustrating injustice (big or small), I find it started with tolerance for injustice.

I don’t have the context to understand whether Merrill was influential over the ARI, but they certainly have oriented themselves on cultural change, and to great success. At under 200 pages, this book is an enjoyable reminder of that things are better than they were and a fresh reminder to shrug off despair.

Categories
Politics

Obama’s Appeal to Emotionalism

Charles Krauthammer has an editiorial up on RealClearPolitics today titled Deception at Core of Obama’s Plans. He argues that Obama offered up non sequiturs for reasons why our economy is rapidly declining. There are any number of reasonable explanations for the downturn (too much money given out by the Fed, irresponsible lending, etc) but Obama’s reaons are ridiculous (lack of universal health care, global warming, not enough college graduates).

The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

But Krauthammer misses the key principle in action here. Obama is making a fervant plea to our religious emotionalism. We’re paying for past sins? It’s a day of reckoning? This is the type of argument you’d expect from Mike Huckabee, who’s argued that we’re stewards of the earth who shouldn’t wreck something that doesn’t belong to us. Or Pastor John Hagee who claimed the disaster in New Orleans as a result of Hurricaine Katrina was punishment from God for sinful behavior.

Obama leaves it vague as against whom we’ve been so sinful. Let the religious assume it’s God. Let the environmentalists assume it’s nature. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same nihilist rhetoric: you’re inherently evil, you’ve been doing evil things and the universe is trying to crush you.

The only sins we’ve committed are individually against ourselves when we agree to this irrationalism.

Categories
Random Generators

Automatic Album Cover Game

In the past few weeks there was a game/meme going around on Facebook that instructed you to put together an imaginary (record) album cover by randomly selecting text from wikipiedia and images from flickr. Of course, it occurred to me to write a program to do it. But it took Lee Springer nudging me to actually spend the time. Here are some examples from the random album cover generator.

Instead of pulling text from wikipedia, I generate the album name and the artist name using the routines I have already. Luckily flickr has an API and they even tell you which images are OK to use in derivative work. I pull recent “interesting” pictures, scan for the ones with rights that allow me to use them and I layer the text over the top.

At any given time there are mayb 10 – 20 images available, but it changes over time. It’s really just another way to view the random text out of the generator. Sometimes having it in the context of an album cover is surprising enough to make me chuckle.

When I first wrote these generators about 10 years ago, they used to make me laugh a lot. After a while, my brain seemed to automatize the rules behind them and they stopped making me laugh. They are vaguely pleasant to me, but they rarely make me laugh out loud.

Original images for the album covers above are here:

Categories
News

No More Bailouts: Appearance with a Super Genius

John Villarreal captured me on his YouTube show. The topic is the “Porkulus” bill going through the senate right now.

Categories
News Programming

New MySpace Apps: Random Band Names and Random Advice

I now have two apps live on MySpace, Random Advice and Random Band Names. The core functionality is exactly the same as what’s on Leon’s Random Generators. Both of them place content on your MySpace profile. You can see them in action on my profile page, myspace.com/leonatkinson.

It’s somewhat obtuse to get the apps on your own profile. Visit the app’s profile page (linked above). Click the button to add the app. Then, modify your profile and add the “module”. (I’m hand-waving a bit here). I think you must be upgraded to the 2.0 version of profiles.

Despite my bickering about how I was fighting with the approval process last month, I did get the advice generator active. The band names app was approved within hours. So maybe they like to hassle unproven developers. In any event, the advice generator has been live for less than a month and has 116 “active users”. I’m not clear if that means installs, or if people have activated the module in their profile. I can’t find any examples of profiles with it installed.