Tag Archives: steve simpson

global warming

Podcast Roundup April 24 – Ayn Rand, Hope and more

podcastThis week’s podcast round up includes great shows from Yaron Brook, Steve Simpson and Amy Peikoff covering a host of topics including Trump and the DIM Hypothesis, Ayn Rand, the climate change inquisition, hope and more.

Peikoff.com Podcast Episode 406 w/Yaron Brook

It was Yaron’s turn on Leonard Peikoff’s podcast this week and he answered the following great questions:

  • What were your objective criteria that led you move to the United States and settle in California? This was an interesting answer as it applied the contextual nature of value judgments based on your hierarchy of values. For example, while Singapore has more economic freedom than the United States, he wouldn’t move there because he doesn’t want to live in a small city-state.
  • Since Objectivists vote on a candidate’s basic political principles but not necessarily on the candidate’s whole philosophy, do you think Senator Ted Cruz is closer to the former and worthy of my vote? The answer to this question gave a good, if necessarily brief, look at Cruz as a candidate with reasons why Yaron isn’t enthusiastic about Cruz.
  • Where does Donald Trump fit in on Leonard Peikoff’s DIM Hypothesis? (If you haven’t read this book, you certainly should.) An interesting point in the answer to this question is Yaron’s statement that what is scary about Trump is not the man himself, but that people love him.
  • Given today’s philosophical culture, is it advisable to get behind the science of genetic alteration? If we can’t get freedom right, should I be worried about what the intellectual community is doing to my food and medicine? We need to be pro-science. Yaron views science, as Eric Daniels pointed out in an OCON 2015 talk, as vitally important because it teaches us to think.

Yaron’s AM560 Rewind: Who is Ayn Rand?

Ayn RandEach week Yaron does a one hour radio program on AM560 in Chicago, also now broadcast in Miami. This week’s show took a look at someone he read more

[Video] Free Speech Under Siege

Recently Steve Simpson, Director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute, gave a talk at Clemson University about free speech and the threats to it. He discusses not only the obvious attacks on free speech such as the attack on Charlie Hebdo but the less obvious, and to my mind more dangerous, threat posed by the failure to properly defend free speech in the wake of such attacks.

He brings special attention to what those that Salman Rushdie calls the “but brigade,” those people who read more

Republicans and Net Neutrality

Net neutrality violates the property rights of the ISPs.

Image from www.wired.com

According to the Wall Street Journal, Congressional Republicans have drafted a bill that “is designed to protect net neutrality—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally—without applying the part of telecommunications law that regulates common carriers.”