Ben Bayer
@BenBayer
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Fellow and Director of Content, the Ayn Rand Institute. Former philosophy prof. Views expressed are my own, I am not authorized to speak for my employer.
Austin, TX
Joined January 2013
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Pinned Tweet
From my latest for New Ideal, part of an ongoing project:
"Once we exorcise morality of these ghostly remnants of religion’s past, we’ll see this leaves more than enough room for new secular moral ideals to flourish."
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@SmugFecundity
It's a great question that tests whether the student actually understands what algebra is. If a student knows that they just need to turn the box into an x and solve for it, they understand the concept of a variable. Otherwise they're only following rules without understanding.
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@emmma_camp_
High school debate went off the rails years ago. Once they started making speed and number of unanswered arguments their standard (an emperor has no clothes situation in which debaters and judges pretend to be following and understanding), all bets were off.
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"As I started to explore [friends'] belief systems, I couldn’t help but think that the only reason I considered myself Catholic was that I’d been raised by Catholic parents, not because I’d done a rational survey of the major religious alternatives. . . ."
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Hard to know how much news of Ukrainian heroism is true. But our reaction to it reveals a desperate need to see someone stand up and fight for a cause. If Western leaders had half the integrity Ukrainians seem to have, villains like Putin would never be so bold as to start wars.
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No, Palestinian children shouldn't be punished for Hamas' crimes. Which is exactly why it's so evil of Hamas to have forced this punishment on them by using their homeland as a staging ground for brutal bloody aggression.
Did the children and elderly of Palestine abduct anyone? Why should they be punished for Hamas' crimes? Collective punishment is a morally obscene doctrine.
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An old trope circulating after Musk’s tweet is that narcissists like Ayn Rand because she affirms their greatness. But narcissists want to be thought great by others, and the whole point of The Fountainhead is that seeking others’ approval is a failure of self-esteem.
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Suffice it to say that the fact that many states will now have outright bans on abortion is a devastating blow for human liberty in America. I blame the evil religious ideology that motivates the anti-abortion movement, and the tepid, bankrupt secular pushback against it.
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The Ayn Rand Institute is the only organization promoting Rand and her ideas that dares to comment on the abortion controversy--the hottest *and most philosophical* controversy in modern America. It's worth thinking about why it's only ARI that's doing this.
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@SamHarrisOrg
@wakingup
If "self" is an illusion, to whom is it an illusion? There's no self to be fooled. And what follows if "it" is fooled? "Should" it abandon its belief in the self? If free will is an illusion, it makes no sense that it should think other than it must.
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This passage from *Atlas Shrugged* has no application to anything being discussed on Twitter today, I’m sure.
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Really proud of my team for this achievement. Special thanks to
@Nikos_17
whose viral video on Israel helped push us over the edge.
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MAJOR new announcement at
#OCON2024
from
@taltsfany
and
@yaronbrook
: plans to build a new physical home for the Ayn Rand Institute and Archives in AUSTIN, TEXAS.
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The Atlas Society openly panders to religion. You might not need much to “appreciate” Objectivism’s political philosophy, but to agree with it and defend it, you must reject religion. Defending the mind against all forms of tyranny means taking reason as an absolute.
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I hope Elon’s fans realize that it was Christianity (“the meek shall inherit the earth”) that laid down this axiom.
It’s why instance, the left embraces Ukraine but not Israel, even when both are morally in the right. And why the right defends rights of “the unborn.”
It’s not
The axiomatic error undermining much of Western Civilization is “weak makes right”.
If someone accepts, explicitly or implicitly, that the oppressed are always the good guys, then the natural conclusion is that the strong are the bad guys.
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Full house tonight for
@yaronbrook
’s talk at UT. Soon we shall see how many are actually here to listen!
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Lex Fridman wants to host a debate on the Israel-Palestine question.
@yaronbrook
is on the list. You know who has my vote:
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ARI has put together a short book with my key essays on abortion rights. Available as a free PDF for a limited time, but also on Kindle and soon in print.
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Ayn Rand’s philosophy is radical. One sign of this is how many people read Rand who still have difficulty distinguishing it from conventional thinking. Here are two curious examples. 1/
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A bright light in the darkness has suddenly been snuffed out. She’s right of course that atheism by itself has no power against irrational dogma. It is not a positive ideology, just the absence of belief. Atheists beware, there’s more of this to come unless you define a positive
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So
@TuckerCarlson
wanted to get Putin to say he invaded Ukraine because of NATO's nuclear threat, but instead got a lengthy lecture about thousand-year Russian historical claims. Tucker's tribal talking-point snark is no match for the primordial tribal mysticism of Attila.
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Too much moral thinking is infected by improper views of agency and responsibility. People are better at identifying evil than they are at knowing who's to blame for it. This is especially evident in the controversy about innocents in war. Here's how I think about it. 🧵
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Kanye is properly condemned for his remarks on Hitler. But note his stated reason for this position: “I love everyone.” Kanye is crazy enough to take Christianity’s “love thy enemy” idea seriously. No stretch: he regularly mentions Jesus. Condemn Kanye, re-evaluate Christianity.
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The Ukraine crisis is no distraction. It’s a rare moment when the world is focused on an issue that really matters, when people usually at odds with each other politically suddenly realize what’s left of our common ground. It’s sad that it takes such loss to realize it.
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@RokoMijic
What kind of computing power do you need to plan an economy that is already composed of non-centralized interacting and sometimes competing computers? Whatever power the free market computers have, the power needed to predict *them* and the results of ordering them to do
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The thing I love most about watching SpaceX launches is watching the reaction of the team, cheering to the triumphs. It's so clean and jubilant and everything we should have more of.
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@elonmusk
@oldbooksguy
Rand didn’t think envy by itself accounted for totalitarian control. Her truly distinctive idea was that envy motivated philosophical rationalizations (like the Christian and Marxist doctrines of altruism) that had the power to program the thinking of a civilization.
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You may wonder why I decided to write a lot about abortion. As a man the issue doesn't affect me in a directly personal way, though there are women I care about for whom it's important. But my interest is mostly intellectual fascination. 1/
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This socialist magazine admits what too many left-leaning thinkers struggle to evade, that core themes from Marxism are secularized themes from Christianity.
Alasdair MacIntyre argued that far from being hostile to Christianity, Marxism, in fact, “humanized certain central Christian beliefs.”
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Two mistakes about individual rights, one by libertarians and another by conservatives, illustrate a failure to understand the relationship between rights and morality and their ultimate philosophical roots. 1/
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In college I knew a guy who didn’t spend much time studying and had more time for fun, but still got good grades. For a time I despised him: why should I have to work harder for the same result? It wasn’t fair!! This was nascent hatred of the good, the worst kind of envy.
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Nothing “good” is achieved by a Cuban education or health care system which teaches people to read at the expense of forbidding them from reading anything but propaganda, or which gives them trips to the doctor at the expense of having to live in fear of trips to a prison camp.
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Yes, the New Atheists failed because they had no positive code of values to offer in place of religion. But it's disingenuous to suggest that the "new religion" of wokeism was the result of a value vacuum. It's a new religion because its obsession with sacrifice for victims is
There is a crisis of meaning and purpose in our post-Christian world. I wonder if the four horsemen of New Atheism who I still so admire would have been quite as keen for tear down religion if they had seen where it would take us in advance?
My take on the Atheism Delusion:
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Here’s St. Augustine, a founding father of Christianity, beating Karl Marx to his famous thesis by almost 1,500 years (City of God, Book V, Ch. 18). This does neither any credit.
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A popular view, communicated of late by
@holland_tom
is that Christianity and its values played a decisive role in the abolition of slavery. In my view this has now been decisively refuted by Matthew Stewart's new book, An Emancipation of The Mind. The popular view is a myth.
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Who wants to take up McConaughey's challenge with a video about choices you've made for the sake of your long-term future? (Perhaps mention why these are investments, not sacrifices.)
what choices can you make? Post your video and tag me
@mcconaughey
+
#choicechallenge
to be retweeted
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The allied bombing of France would surely be rejected as genocide by today's standards. This piece is sensitive to the connection to current debates about Gaza, but doesn't have the guts to make explicit that the Nazis would still be in power if the Allies were held to the
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@PublishersWkly
Good. Everyone commenting on this thread takes it as axiomatic that piracy is fine and that publishers have no rights. They don’t even bother to defend their claims. Copyright theft is wrong. Information “wants” to be paid for—to the people who do the work to create and spread
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Getting closer to something important here
@elonmusk
. The next question is: if strong doesn’t make you bad, and weak doesn’t make you good, what are the absolute standards by which we judge actions? And for reasons you sense, the answer can’t be: “that which serves the weak.”
If you teach that “weak makes right”, then the perceived stronger party – in this case, Israel – is wrong.
Morals should be taught in the absolute, meaning that it is possible for either the strong or weak to be morally good, depending on their actions.
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Watch ARI's latest game-changing splash, the first in a series of Dave Rubin-hosted interviews with our top intellectuals. My colleague Onkar Ghate and UT Austin philosopher Tara Smith have a lively conversation on a topic Rand had a lot to say about: the morality of selfishness.
Exciting news! ARI has partnered with Dave Rubin for a special series of The Rubin Report, titled “Objectivism on Happiness.” The series launches today, February 27. Watch the first four videos here:
@RubinReport
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It’s crucial that critics of the mass campus protests take the moral high ground on free speech. These protests are *anti-free speech.* Free speech means the right to say anything to anyone else who wishes to hear it. It doesn’t mean the right to *force* someone to listen.
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Hey Mr. Historian,
@harari_yuval
, you know what else has no biological reality, because you don't find it when you cut up and look inside a human being? Their history. You can't see history, it's in the past. I guess history is just a fictional story that we've made up too.
Klaus’s top adviser tells us where things are headed.
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ARI's YouTube channel is🔥. This brand new video caught on faster than anything we've ever posted:
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From my latest:
“The right to self-defense is an unconditional right, not a permission doled out only under comfortable conditions. [Your] right to life … is not compromised by the fact that someone threatening to kill you has also taken a hostage who might be hurt.”
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Protests in Russia against the war and the draft, and protests in Iran against the theocracy. It’s false that all people long to be free. But some brave ones do.
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What are the odds that half of the people in America are basically deluded and vicious, while the other half are basically well-informed and well-intentioned? (1/12)
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Glad to finally have recordings of all of Ayn Rand's statements on this subject together in one place finally:
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Rights are neither morally neutral nor do they enforce morality. They protect the possibility of moral action in a social context. 4/4
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Fascinating to see arbitrary claims in action. You’d think Navalny’s death might sober Tucker fans who pretend to love freedom of speech even as he platforms Putin. But no, they invent the idea that the CIA killed Navalny. With an inventive imagination you can insulate any belief
I didn’t think the CIA took out Nalvalny until just now.
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@MarkRPellegrino
The Hyde Amendment already prevents federal funding for abortion, so I doubt this is the reason so many are opposed to abortion. It’s deeper than that. It’s resentment of other people’s courage to pursue their happiness, when one was afraid to oneself.
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The best counterprotest against pro-Hamas occupiers and their supporters is to drop out of schools that tolerate these protests and take tuition $ elsewhere--or not to apply in the first place. But I fear too many students/parents care about admissions "prestige" to do this.
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I hope Israel finally takes this opportunity to END Hamas as an entity in Gaza. All expected calls for restraint from the morally decadent Biden administration, be damned.
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ARI's Onkar Ghate has a letter to the editor in the NYT in response to Krugman's smear. And with a link to his white paper on the proper government approach to the pandemic, as well!:
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This is a really good question. But I suspect that there's not really a double standard. The left roots for Ukraine because they're the David, and not for Israel because they're the Goliath. This is the logic of altruism, which encourages worship of need and inability.
If you think there should be a cease-fire in the Middle East now because of the “cycle of violence” & “war never solves political problems” & “enough have died already”, would you say that about Ukraine? Should we call on Ukraine to lay down its arms & see it from Putin’s POV?
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On Twitter, wisdom demands knowing when not to respond to comments, even when you know they’re wrong, because you also know the commenter isn’t arguing in good faith. Some stay up late just to get in the last snarky word. Let them win their meaningless, unproductive game.
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It's shocking that people who consider themselves individualists take an essentially collectivist approach to the analysis of politics, treating a political movement like "the left" as a monolith by which anyone associated with it is guilty of the same crimes as anyone else.
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Don’t drive if you’re not ready to get into an accident without going to a hospital.
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The undying trope of the left, that police removal of an illegal protest is "violence." Unlawful occupation of a thoroughfare is the first act of force, no matter how "politely" it's initiated. Doing it in support of a murderous dictatorship just makes it more obvious.
I was shocked how police provoked violence in what was peaceful student protest. Police ran into crowd of students, pushed & arrested students. Violence was from police.
@UTAustin
@TxDPS
@JCHartzell
@SharonLWood
@ALTERforATX
@KUT
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At last night's ARI fundraising gala, a bright student testified to how he thought he knew everything about Objectivism before he began studying with us. After a few lectures he realized there was so much more to learn. It's a common experience, one I had myself 25 years ago.
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Many are calling Biden’s remarks about Putin a “gaffe.” But he was RIGHT to say that Putin must not stay in power. The only fault here is that he and other American presidents should have said this years ago, and should have acted on it.
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Once you allow a mass protest subject to no rules, the situation is inherently unpredictable & threatening. Counter-protesters show up. Clashes ensue. How does it not end with cops in riot gear shooting rubber bullets? It’s why these things should never be permitted to begin.
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Here's a recording of Ayn Rand's actual statement on why government properly has the power to quarantine infected individuals for the sake of protecting the freedom of the uninfected:
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I'm very happy to be published again in
@Quillette
on the subject of the real plagiarism scandal in higher ed. "Students who profess to care about justice but not about the truth will end up with neither."
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For those unaware, my upcoming talk at this summer's Objectivist conference in Anaheim is "The Revolutionary, Secular Concept of Individual Rights." I'm currently immersed in the studying the history of the theory of rights--and have learned a ton. Looking forward to sharing it.
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She really gets it like almost no one else does. Evil succeeds because of the sanction of the good. And the West continues to empower Iranian evil through its continued diplomatic appeasement of the mullahs.
To the politicians who appeased the Islamic Republic for decades, it is time for you to realize what you have done has brought nothing to Iranians except more bloodshed in the streets. This regime is not reformable. Support the people of Iran now...
#Mahsa_Amini
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Moral nihilism isn't neutrality. He criticizes Israel and Palestine for not recognizing the right of the other side to exist. In January he also said "human rights are . . . just a fictional story that we've invented." Now he exploits this "story" to equalize murderers & victims.
In the present historical circumstances, the best way to ensure the individual and collective rights of Palestinians and Jews is to maintain two related but separate states, in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
#peace
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Apropos of nothing in particular: you can’t deduce anything about the validity of someone’s position from their willingness or unwillingness to debate it.
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The ideas behind environmentalism’s opposition to fossil fuel energy are essentially the same as those behind the opposition to abortion rights. Both suppose that natural causal processes constitute a normative standard; both hold human agency as a sin against this standard. 1/
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Lots of people responding to this by saying Ayn Rand. Seems we are past the ignoring and laughing phases and on to the fighting. Real progress.
What is a piece of writing that you generally disagree with, but that you also think people should read?
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April 17th: mark your calendar. I will do a debate at the University of Texas, Austin about secular vs. religious morality (I’m for the first!).
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Dawkins is right that the culture/ethos of Christian countries exceeds that of Muslim ones. But this tells us little about Christianity. Why did the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the abolition of slavery start in the West, not the Christian East (Russia)?
"If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I'd choose Christianity every single time."
Self-proclaimed 'cultural Christian', ＠RichardDawkins, tells
@RachelSJohnson
he's 'slightly horrified' to hear Ramadan lights were hung on Oxford Street rather than Easter lights.
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Our latest release from the archives. Searing commentary from a real defender of individual and critic of communism, about another who merely posed as such.
@jordanbpeterson
take note.
We often hear praise for Alexander
#Solzhenitsyn
for "whistle-blowing" on the Soviet gulags. But is he a man we should uphold as a defender of the West?
@AynRandOrg
makes her case.
Watch on YouTube:
#russia
#nationalism
#putin
#russiannationalism
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A reminder that Roe *was* wrongly decided. “Viability” is an arbitrary standard that made it open to criticism. But that’s because it didn’t go far enough.
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On stage at OCON
@yaronbrook
is taking on
@jordanbpeterson
’s shameful praise of Vladimir Putin as culture warrior. After seeing these comments it’s a lot harder still to see Peterson as a serious critic of authoritarianism.
5/ And he says the Russians think they have a duty to fight off this degeneracy, and they're right!
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Hey
@YeonmiParkNK
, you're playing with dangerous ideas here. Ayn Rand is another refugee from communism who had no such sympathy for Solzhenitsyn:
“At the root of the West’s troubles, Solzhenitsyn believed, was the view that man is the measure of all things, that social problems of all kinds can be managed away, that evil is not embedded in human nature, and that the ultimate purpose of life is happiness.
To which
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If people still think Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard have anything important in common, I’d say the events of the last week should especially bring out why not.
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The news out of China is stunning, and it’s increasingly obvious to the media that anti-lockdown protestors are in the right, in the same category as the protestors in Iran and Russia.
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To those who reject Covid vaccines as products of Big Everything conspiracy, remember that the innovators behind them were opposed by the academic and medical establishment for decades. Congratulations to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for the Nobel.
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Democrats’ “National Service” Plans Immoral, Un-American: “If we want to raise happy children, it’s senseless to teach them that they must sacrifice their happiness to repay some debt they owe to no one in particular.”
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Salman Rushdie attacked on stage. We don't know the perpetrator. But THIS is what a real threat to life, liberty, and free speech looks like. Physical intimidation against free thought cannot be tolerated.
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Today should be a national holiday but not for the reason you’d think. 158 years ago Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. Those who support union and liberty—especially those of us who live south of the Mason-Dixon—should celebrate.
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Today I’m going back to high school. Six live classroom talks in a row. Great to be back in a classroom with real students!!
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Judging by how many obvious bot followers I regularly remove, I have no sympathy for those who complain about sudden rapid follower count reductions. It's not persecution, your followers weren't real to begin with. And the rate of bot followers has really picked up.
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#AynRand
is trending because someone thinks it's a warning sign when guys have Ayn Rand book on their shelves. Here's a piece with the warning signs that someone should have picked up on back when I was younger:
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If you think it’s a scandal that the illogic of men becoming women is being recognized by someone on Easter, wait until you hear about the ones who say a perfect infinite spiritual god is identical with a finite physical human being, begotten but not made by him, from eternity.
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Here's a reaction video I did vs. a terrible bit of unthinking propaganda recently released by
@prageru
.
We're told that we're in a civilizational crisis and that many young people suffer from anxiety. Religious conservatives tell us that the solution is fear of God.
@BenBayer
responds to a Prager U video to explain why this doesn't even begin to make sense.
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Here's the real scandal: moral philosophers don't know how to explain what's wrong with plagiarism, or even think there is anything wrong with it. Quick comments below, to be elaborated in greater detail later.
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Attention
@CharacterGap
,
@AgnesCallard
,
@Docstockk
,
@realchrisrufo
: the real problem with plagiarism in academia isn't that people are plagiarizing, it's that nobody really thinks there's anything wrong with it.
Students who profess to care about justice but not about the truth will end up with neither, writes
@BenBayer
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This thread is a good opportunity not for arguing with people’s evaluations of Rand’s ideas, but to show how little many of them know about what her ideas actually are.
Ayn Rand is useful because she’s one of the few thinkers who is the completely wrong. You don’t have to spend time separating wheat from chaff. Just go in thinking “the opposite of this is correct” and you can gain some real insights.
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Watch the whole clip, it's even better than the text. Especially: "Here I have a message for Biden administration: . . . Throw out all the Iranian diplomats. . . . . Kick them out, if you don't, believe me, they're going to come out of more American citizens."
'Go to hell'
My message to Iranian government after a man with loaded AK-47 was arrested near my home.
You have guns and bullets but my voice is stronger than your weapon.
I call on US administration to to be tough on terror.
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This Ford Hall Forum talk by Ayn Rand has been available previously on our site, but with the last 20 minutes or so of Q&A missing. We’ve recently found the missing minutes and made the whole talk with full Q&A available.
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Tara Smith at
#OCON2024
on the psychology of egoism: "While rational egoism is not whim worship--it doesn't install desires as sovereign--it is emphatically stoked by desires. . . . Desires are not tools of cognition but they are vital to motivate action and enjoyment of life."
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@IAmMichaelSweet
States shouldn’t have the right to make a decision to violate rights. Same reason states shouldn’t have been allowed to sanction slavery.
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