Category Archives: Links

Mainly just a link or links with minimal comment.

Podcasts and More for March 13

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Better late than never….

I really like the change in my posting schedule for my podcast, and more, round up. I feel like I have more time to ponder each of the podcasts I listen to and even listen to them again to sort of distill down what information was presented and my opinion on it. We’ll see how it goes.

Podcasts

Don’t Let it Go … Unheard (You can find read more

Podcasts and More for March 5

Weekly podcastsI am trying out a bit of a change in my posting schedule and moving my podcast round-up to the end of the week to hopefully free up the early part of the week for posts I want to spend more time writing on over my weekend. It also gives me time to catch up on the podcasts I am not able to listen to live using the Player FM app for my Android devices.

Podcasts

Don’t Let it read more

King v. Burwell – What is it about?

Golden Lady Justice, Bruges, Belgium

The American Spectator recently published a great article by David Catron titled “King v. Burwell Is Much Bigger than Obamacare” in which he lays out what is really at stake here. This case is not about “killing health care,” states’ rights or even killing Obamacare, although a ruling in favor of King et al would certainly have effects in all those areas. Rather read more

Podcasts and More for February 23

Weekly podcastsThis week’s podcasts cover a wide range of topics from should people be forced to govern, the true nature of Christmas, ISIS, vaccinations and much more.

Podcasts

Don’t Let it Go … Unheard: Comparing the Language of Creators and Destroyers – As Amy Peikoff described it at the start, the integrating idea for this week’s show is the choice of language read more

Social Principle of Ethics – Quotation of the Day

I just finished up this week’s “homework” for Yaron Brook’s podcast, reading, or rather re-reading in my case, the first chapter of Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness. (The podcast is presented live on Mondays at 11:00am EST. You can find it here.) The first chapter is titled The Objectivist Ethics and presents “the barest essentials” of Ayn Rand’s system of ethics.

I had read this essay, indeed the entire book, a couple of years ago, so I was a read more

[Video] Introduction to Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff

In this short video, approximately 45 minutes of introductory lecture and 30 minutes of Q&A, Leonard Peikoff provides a great, if brief, introduction to the fundamentals of Objectivism. He discusses the 5 branches of philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and esthetics – and how they form an integrated whole.

Dr. Peikoff presents a more complete discussion of Objectivism in a 32 hour lecture series, which can be found on the read more

Podcasts and More for February 17

Weekly podcastsThis week’s podcasts covered topics from egoism vs altruism to fossil fuels to whether spouses should always share activities, and more!

Don’t Let it Go…Unheard – This week hosts Amy Peikoff interviews Center for Industrial Progress’ founder Alex Epstein about his new, excellent I might add, book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.  They discussed:

  • Alex being threatened if he were to appear at a Divestment Day event
  • The story about temperature records being “adjusted”. Alex had an interesting take on this issue, seeing it as non-essential. The essential fact is that fossil fuels are moral in that they enhance the human environment.
  • Keystone pipeline
  • Fracking and earthquakes

After the 30 minute interview with Alex, Bosch Fawstin joined Amy and they discussed a plethora of stories, including:

  • Chapel Hill shootings
  • France can know block suspected terrorism websites without a court order – so much for the free speech everyone was marching for after the Charlie Hebdo attack.
  • The government announces that they have been wrong on their cholesterol recommendations for 40 years. I should note that the man, Ancel Keys, who first proposed the hypothesis about cholesterol was correlated with heart disease knew that dietary cholesterol had little or no effect on blood cholesterol.
  • And a lot more.

read more

Altruism – Quotation of the Day

altruism egoism virtue of selfishnessOn his new weekly podcast, Yaron Brook has started giving listeners “homework” to help build a foundation for the issues he we be discussing on the show. For this week’s show he asked that everyone read the introduction to Ayn Rand‘s The Virtue of Selfishness. I had read this a couple of years ago, but a previously un-highlighted paragraph jumped out at me.

The Evil of Altruism

The context of this quotation is a discussion of the difference between egoism and altruism. The most essential read more

[Videos] Inequality – A Debate Between Yaron Brook and Paul Vaaler

I’ve gathered here the four videos that have been posted from the debate on Inequality between Yaron Brook and Paul Vaaler, hosted by the Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business on February 7, 2015. This was an interesting debate that covers a fair number of topics within the general idea of inequality. I think I have the videos linked in proper order, though I am not sure it makes too much difference if they are read more

Podcasts and More for February 9

Weekly podcastsHere is the latest roundup of the podcasts I try to listen to each week. I am pretty excited this week as one of the shows, Philosophy in Action, answered a question I submitted.

Last Week’s Podcasts and Shows:

Philosophy in Action – Each week Dr. Diana Hsieh and Greg Perkins apply rational principles to questions submitted by their listeners. Most weeks the answers are quite lengthy and in-depth. This weeks questions included:

  • Are egoism and altruism mutually exclusive? This was a very interesting question that went into the difference between what the terms egoism and altruism actually mean, they define who is the proper beneficiary of your actions, and the muddled way in which most people understand them, e.g. that egoism involves predation.
  • Is it immoral or unwise to accept a better job soon after starting a different one? I thought this one was a good application of the virtue of honesty which in brief says you should not seek to gain a value by faking reality. In this case, it is not moral to obtain a job by saying you will stay for 3 years when you have no intention of doing so.
  • Is it moral to advocate for the boycott of businesses?  This is a question I submitted to the queue. They broke it down into three parts: 1) rights and morality, 2) does a boycott violate the rights of a business, and 3) is calling for a boycott immoral. Having it broken down step by step in this way helped clarify my own thinking, which was the point of my asking the question. I liked Paul Hsieh’s comment in the chat during the show about film reviewers.

Don’t Let it Go…Unheard read more