Barry Wood
During one of Yaron Brook’s radio shows earlier this year, a listener in the chat linked to a lecture series by Barry Wood titled “The Battle over Reason in the Islamic World (and How it Was Lost).” I have finally had time to listen to the series, and it is quite fascinating, especially as I have been trying to learn a bit more about Islam since the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Mr. Wood begins the series by pointing out that Islam had some positive elements that set it apart from
I have written a fair amount regarding property rights on this blog. For more than the last 100 years, the progressives and others on the political left have been whittling away at the very of idea of property rights. Today, far from having the freedom to use your property in ways that do not violate the rights of others, property owners often have to beg permission from some government
Source: Wikipedia
Over the weekend I listened to Ayn Rand’s lecture Censorship: Local and Express (you can find this talk embedded below) and later read the text version of it which is included in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It. What first caught my attention was a quote that helped me get a handle on a post I am working on about Senator Bernie Sanders. Today, in light of the attack on the Draw Mohammad event in Garland, Texas on Sunday, I selected one dealing with the First Amendment and free speech.
The
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
The other day I came across an article by Allen B. West titled “The dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore.” The article discusses the protests and violence in Baltimore sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. Mr. West makes a good case that it is progressive policies that have caused the bulk of the problems facing
At a news conference in the wake of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray-related protests turning destructive Saturday, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said that she instructed police to give people who “wished to destroy” space to do so.
Source: Baltimore Mayor: ‘We… Gave Those Who Wished To Destroy Space To Do That’
[Updated 2:02pm, 04/28/15]
If there is one thing that I have learned over the time I have been actually paying attention to and studying politics it is
Yaron Brook talks capitalism in Warsaw.
Dr. Yaron Brook has been on something of a whirlwind speaking tour over the last week in Europe. One of the seven talks he gave over a six-day period was his Morality of Capitalism delivered in a beautiful venue in Warsaw, Poland to about 200 people.
For those who have watched Yaron’s talks in the past, this one covers familiar ground although I find that each time I listen to the material I notice something different that makes my understanding clearer and a bit more complete. As always,
Dr. Curry testifying on the President’s UN Climate Pledge. From the blog What’s Up With That.
Last week What’s Up With That, a great website for those who are skeptical about the alarmist claims about catastrophic man-made climate change, posted a story about the testimony of Dr. Judith Curry before the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology as part of their hearing on the President’s UN climate pledge.
One of the ideas that struck me early on when I started studying Objectivism was the position Ayn Rand took in regards to the “public interest,” a concept she found to be invalid. She saw that there is no such entity as “the public,” there are only individuals. To claim that there is some public interest which we must consider ahead of an individual’s interest is to say that some individuals have a right to sacrifice the interests of others to their own. I find
One fact of today’s world that I see all around me is that government intervention, force, leads to more and more government intervention, more force. The government creates a program to protect the prices a farmer receives for his goods, forcing people to pay above market prices for the goods. This program has the effect of raising food prices which necessitates a program to help those who can no longer afford the more expensive food, forcing people to pay more in taxes so that money can