You Tube update: Anne Wortham video back online & cool science-music videos

Dr. Anne Wortham's video is back up on YouTube. You can check it out here and the conversation that ensued last time I brought it up.

Also I ran across these science-themed movie videos which I thought were rather cool and inspiring. Enjoy!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk

On this day...

On this day, we must honor those who have died for our country. On this day, we must honor those who fought and lived, often with lifelong ailments of both mind and body. And how best to honor them? Do the parades and flag-waving actually mean anything anymore? What are we waving the flag for? Who are we saluting? For what are we fighting?

The answer for Americans has been and can only ever be one thing...FREEDOM.

But are we still fighting for it? Or is it something we passively accept? Do we still feel the weighty responsibility of the blood that has been spilled to defend the right to rule one's own life? Or have we surrendered it for the sake of the silken promise of serenity? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government continues to allow torture? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government takes control of businesses? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when we rush to surrender our property and our choice to selected officials? Have we truly forgotten the horrors of the Berlin Wall, the Killing Fields, the Third Reich, the purges and concentration camps, the barbed wire and minefields, the executions and assassinations (public and private)?

Have the young people of today never learned of the horrors that chained whole continents to a destiny of fear and oppression? Have they never learned that these chains were all forged from promises made of an easier life, promises of the right to dispose of the blessings granted others as your own, promises that the blood of today will be the prosperity of the future? But that prosperity never came...only the blood. And true prosperity vanished as a whisper on the wind chasing the fleeting phantasms of its butchered progenitors.

Have you ever wondered why it is that every single country which has tried to earnestly enact the idea of wealth redistribution has had to keep its citizens within its borders at the point of a gun? Have you ever wondered what freedoms you would have left in the world you desire?

If you still remember these things, or if you see the error of fighting for freedom and then turning it over to a populist mob, then perhaps you can honor those who died fighting for the American dream. The American dream? Isn't that supposed to be a house, a white picket fence, 2.3 kids, 1.4 cars and a dog? No. The American dream is anything you want it to be. Therein lies its power. Therein lies its majesty and mystery. If the things you would fight for are nothing more than material objects than you are a fool, destined to find yourself in a gutter lying next to all the other petty criminals and thieves.

But if you would fight for freedom, for the true legacy of the right to decide for yourself, of the right not to support the fallacies and contradictions of your neighbors if you so choose, of the right to make up your own mind and the freedom to act on that choice-if you would fight for these things, then you are truly honoring the brave men and women who lost everything that they had just for the chance, for the shimmering sliver of a dream that freedom could be a reality.

So please, rather than making empty token gestures of patriotism today, go out and protest. Howl, scream, demand, argue, rant and petition for your freedom. Talk about it with your friends, lovers, spouses, co-workers, everybody you can. Post, comment, blog, YouTube it, Facebook it, Twitter it. Today is a day for honoring freedom. Even if it is just at arm's length, go and honor freedom today and the people who died for it.

I leave you with one of the great historical speeches that many of you may have never even heard of before.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MDFX-dNtsM

100th Post at An American Anti-theist Abroad!!

Woohoo!! OK, so I'm feeling a little self-congratulatory. This makes the 100th post on this blog. Just to sum up. Since I started this blog in April 2008, I've had some more active periods than others. (1 post was actually salvaged from an older blog that I never really took anywhere.) But since I started putting this together, I've been able to write about a lot of different subjects of importance not only to me, but also to a number of people around the world. How big a number I'm not quite sure, but given the recent popularity of Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, it seems like the winds may be changing. So, we all have to do our bit to fan the fires.

Anyways,　just to give a status report on how I've been doing, here are some statistics.

Since this blog started officially in April 2008 it has received 5,825 visits from 68 countries.

THE TOP THREE VIEWING COUNTRIES ARE:

1. USA @ 4948 views
2. Japan @ 529 views
3. UK @ 65 views

THE TOP THREE VIEWING STATES (USA) ARE:

1. California @ 717 views
2. Texas @ 485 views
3. New York @ 395 views

THE TOP THREE VIEWED BLOG POSTS (aside from the main page which registered 1196 views) ARE:

1. Dr. Anne Wortham: Objectivism and the Black Community @ 5010 views
2. Dr. Anne Wortham: Black Victimhood vs. Black Individual Responsibility @ 307 views
3. Happy Science: Religious Cults in Supposedly Atheist Japan @ 142 views

Anyways, I just want to thank all the people who have taken the time to read what I've been posting. Also, more importantly, I want to thank all the people who've taken the time to sincerely think about what I've been talking about here. I'm sure that we can all make a difference. I'm still small fry here, but if I can reach even one person and convince them to look at the world even slightly differently, then I've gotten as much reward as I can reasonably expect. Changing the world is really for all of us. We have to change our morality, the standards of our belief and judgment. The alternative is to horrible to imagine. That's why we have to act. The native state of all systems is entropy. It is only through concerted and consistent human action that we can keep things from sliding into decay, whether that decay is cultural, moral, economic, political, scientific, cognitive, or spiritual.

Finally, I'd like to close with a video from Ron Paul. He's the only prominent figure in politics today who unabashedly supports a rationally integrated world view and truly advocates liberty and justice. Here he is talking about the torture debacle. Republicans and Democrats are both guilty as sin in leading us into such debauchery. For my prior articles on the issue please see these earlier posts:

Sam Harris and the Fallacies of Torture

And this is what happens when thugs get moral license...

Torture: The Madness that Wouldn't Die

Supreme Court Puts Foot Down on Abrogation of Due Process

Not Everything that Parades as a Democracy IS a Democracy

Ashcroft-Torture Bad Call But No Biggie

Enjoy the video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skeom9K8fww

Going Galt on Easter? or Trying to Have One's Cake and Eat it Too...

There is a reason that the Tea Parties will not amount to much. There is a reason why the Libertarian Party will continue to receive only minimal support. There is a reason and it's been staring us in the face for over fifty years. The reason is that we are facing a philosophical crisis, and only a coherent philosophical response will negate our opponents.

Why is the notion of laissez-faire capitalism viewed as a fringe crackpot obsession? It's because the so-called defenders of capitalism are logically incoherent. Greenspan preached free markets while going at them with a pair of pliers and a scalpel. Then, when the patient's dying on the table, he declares that the patient was to blame for being butchered. John McCain, like "W" before him, preached free markets out of one side of his mouth, while running around trying to curry favor with every right-wing Christian messianic institution who could offer to grease his shiny white noggin with. Freedom and theocracy don't mix. Period.

The people who are going to the Tea Parties and bearing signs accusing Obama of being a Muslim are also missing the point entirely. It doesn't matter what religion Obama holds in the confines of his own head. Hell, he could even be an atheist for all we know. The problem with what he is doing is that it is predicated on the assumption that political and economic power should be conjoined. The truth is that combining the two is the fast track to fascism. Perhaps he isn't even fully aware of that. Maybe he is. But it is certainly not an idea started or even driven by Obama. On the contrary, it is an idea that has been espoused by many people both Democrat and Republican and for a very long time. Ultimately, Obama couldn't be able to do what he has been doing unless the people of the country put him there to do it. Bush couldn't have started what Obama is finishing if the people of this country hadn't put him there to do it. So why? Why don't people turn to the Libertarian Party, the only one supposedly advocating freedom? The fundamental reason, as Ayn Rand pointed out a long time ago, was and is that it is philosophically incoherent.

The Libertarian Party stands against government, but what does it stand for? Is a vote for the libertarians a vote for anarchy? Or is it a vote for Objectivism? Is it a vote for an economic policy? But economics is just one province of politics. What can the Libertarian Party be expected to advocate? How can those who advocate armed revolution for the sake of abolishing government entirely stand side by side with those who want to secure the framework of a capitalist society and thus preserve the structure of what civilization has accomplished? The Libertarian Party needs to establish a philosophically coherent alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. There can be no allowance for god in government, just as there can be no allowance for politics in economics. The Republicans fail on the first count. The Democrats fail on the second. But the reason why the Democrats have such power right now is because theirs is the essentially more consistent philosophical stance, whereas the opposition is fractured and inconsistent. Neither is fully coherent, but in this age of "have-it-your-way" ideology, consistency is enough to make a philosophy seem coherent. But a fully coherent, internally consistent political platform would blow away even Obama's cocky smile.

The Democrats fully accept the altruistic doctrine that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They fully accept that the state, i.e. the body politic, has the full right to dictate the lives of its individual constituents, because they fully accept that people do not have individual rights. They view rights as a social privilege to be removed or altered at whim. So, they offer a fully consistent front when attacked on those issues.

The Republicans have presented only the most convoluted and tired excuses for capitalism. The reason is because they, too, want to cling to the old moral premises of altruism. However the Democratic ideology is more consistent with altruistic premises then capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally opposite to altruism in every conceivable way. Therefore, to try and justify capitalism on altruistic grounds is destined only to make advocates of capitalism look foolish, irrational, and illogical.

The Libertarians present a good economic argument for capitalism based largely on the work of Mises and some libertarians even credit Rand. However, the Libertarian Party still does not have a lucid image of what government should be. They only have an image, albeit an accurate one, of what it should not be. And while their arguments against intrusive government are convincing, arguments for total anarchy are fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a significant anarchistic/nihilistic influence in the Libertarian Party it cannot present a coherent alternative to either of the others.

It is time for the champions of liberty to recognize that Objectivism is the only philosophical system which both secures human rights, provides a rationale for freedom and capitalism, and delineates the proper constraints of government influence in a coherent, fully consistent model. Stop apologizing for Rand, we need to embrace her ideas. We need to embrace her arguments. We need to embrace her morality, the only morality which declares that "your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." You cannot have capitalism and Pat Robertson. You cannot have McVeigh and freedom. You cannot have anarchy and prosperity. Until we have accepted and embraced a unifying, cohesive, and fully functional philosophical moral standard behind which to campaign we will not be able to stand up to a unified front of gentle, smiling socialists. We will continue to be internally divided and discredited by our own hypocrisy.

However Objectivism is not a philosophy that can be taken piecemeal. The whole point is that for political actions to be morally validated that they must be integrated into the whole of our objective knowledge of the universe. Of what it means to live, and to die. Of what truly is the nature of human beings. How do they come to know things? And what does such knowledge mean for their survival. A contradiction cannot be allowed, it is sufficient to invalidate any moral claim, or political initiative. Under Objectivist thought, unless a law can be demonstrated to be coherently integrated with human knowledge and the morality that knowledge entails, then that law should not be adopted. Conversely, if a law can be shown to be inconsistent with our knowledge of the human condition, or immoral in light of what we know, then that law should be removed. Taxation, global policing, government involvement in private lives...these are all things which are inconsistent with what we already know about the nature of human freedom and which systems optimize human happiness. This is why the enemies of freedom wish to pervert the meaning of the words freedom, human rights, and liberty. They want to coopt freedom to mean freedom to claim the property of others to establish equality. They want to distort human rights to mean an unqualififed claim to a doctor's or a teacher's labor. They want to claim that liberty means mob rule.

These stances are rife with contradictions, but until and unless we call their bluff and declare that the emperor has no clothes, until we do this, they will maintain the appearance of holding the high ground. Especially to the college professors responsible for training our teachers who are responsible for educating our children. Along this chain it ultimately starts in the colleges. And unilateral cries for freedom for freedom's sake will be powerless to stand against a consistent logical set of views.　The highly educated demand that there be at least a seemingly logically consistent philosophy behind their political agendas, and they devote a great deal of time and effort in picking holes in rival theories. Unfortunately the libertarian movement is so varied that it is relatively easy to demonstrate the lack of cohesive thought. And as long as we try to attack them for acting on principles explicitly which we continue to hold implicitly, we are bound to make them look like they are on the firmer ideological ground. If we want to be free, we must be prepared to demonstrate how and why freedom is superior. We cannot state that it just is.

The notion of going Galt, as an intentional withdrawal of sanction from the current social system, in our present age is premature and a practical impossibility. There are several reasons for this. One is that the government claims the legal right to tax almost everything, property, interest, etc. This means that to go off the grid, so to speak would be impossible. One could withdraw all their assets, buy gold and go live somewhere. But unless they continued to pay taxes on the capital gains of those assetts, taxes on the very land they live, and sales taxes for what they purchase the government would eventually come to collect. And as long as they have to pay those taxes to keep the guns off their porch, then they're supporting the current government. This is the fundamental immorality of any involuntary tax system. Namely, that it forces us to support those we oppose. Of course, cooperation under coercion cannot be said to mean sanction. We can be confident that we are morally pure in this, because the government has left us no alternative. Pay or die. Sacrifice your whole life, or pay a percentage. A choice made at the end of a gun is not a free choice.　But regardless of guilt, the end result is the same...the government is still supported by our labor.

The other alternative would be to simply stop doing anything, dismantle and dispose of all one's assets and go on the social dole. However this would have a psychological consequence on those who would attempt this. Not to mention, I think it wouldn't take the governement long to notice if people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were all applying for welfare. No, that won't work either. There's a reason why in Atlas Shrugged, there had to be a place for people to go to where government couldn't find them. It's because without such a place, they couldn't effectively withdraw. We can't withdraw if we have no place to go. As long as we are forced to be active participants in the system, the only tangible net effect of our withdrawing from social life, is to remove what little resistance we offered to begin with.

No, the only alternative is to increase our activity. To target it. To forge our resistance into a blade of reason--honed with our arguments and tempered by our convictions. We must take the leadership roles in the industries in which we work. Or we must support the most capable and efficient in those roles. We must become skilled debaters. We must actively seek out discussions where our views are freely under attack and we must defeat our opponents using polished rational arguments that leave them no where to stand but to resort to petty insults. We must drive the statists out of the public discourse, not by force, but with the inherent superiority of our policies. But just as impurities in the metal will cause a sword to break, so will inconsistencies and contradictions in the philosophical basis of our resitance cause us to falter when our mettle is tested.

Yes, we must organize. Yes, we must demonstrate our unified resolve. But until our resolve is in fact unified, all we demonstrate by organizing is how much lack of unity there really is. The unifying philosophical element is Objectivism. It is the only philosophy to organize the current social crisis into a coherent and comprehensible framework of ideas while still advocating the very things we claim to be pursuing. What we need to stand up to the politics of Obama and the politics of McCain is not a party against government in general, but a party for an Objectivist government, organized under objective priniciples, and motivated by the Objectivist ethics.

Dr. Anne Wortham: Black Victimhood vs. Black Individual Responsibility

Well, with Obama sworn in and gearing up to charge headlong into a socialist rampage that will flush the remaining fractured remnants of our economy down the toilet, it seems that the issue of the day still seems to be race. I've recently been getting some negative feedback for supporting Anne Wortham a while back in this post here.

Anyways, it inspired me to look up more of her work, and as since the video I originally linked to was removed, I was really glad to find this article posted on the internet. It says much better than I ever could exactly what is wrong with the culture of victimization that has infected what the civil rights movement has unfortunately become.

It can be read at this link here: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin092.pdf

Also, if you're interested, here is a very well written op-ed she wrote about Lord Obama:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/wortham1.html

Best premises,

American Antitheist

Dr. Anne Wortham: Objectivism and the Black Community

I stumbled across this interview with Dr. Anne Wortham and I have to say I'm impressed. I remember vividly that when I was in college I would propose that people should be judged by their merits rather than by their race, creed, or religious beliefs. At such times, I would be labeled as racist or intolerant. I could never grasp the reason. How can the assertion that race simply just NOT be a factor in our decisions--how can that be racist?

The assertion seemed to be that minorities deserve guarantees of jobs, guarantees of opportunities whereas those who aren't privileged enough to be a member of that group deserve no guarantees. What I felt then, and what I've come to know now, is that these guarantees must come from somewhere. Somebody must be sacrificed for the sake of them. If the job goes to somebody based on race, that means that somebody else is not getting the job, also based on race. This is pure racism. If somebody gets the job because they are the most qualified, then the reason why somebody else doesn't get the job is because they aren't qualified. This is only fair. The goal, I think is to remove race as a consideration in our evaluation of people rather than to emphasize it and thereby create unnecessary divisions among our human kin.

It is for this reason that I found Dr. Wortham's comments in this interview particularly refreshing. Only by replacing the culture of entitlement with the culture of self-empowerment can any minority hope to better its people. I hope you find her comments as enlightening as I did.


11/8/2008: I apologize but it's been brought to my attention that the video was removed from YouTube for a terms of use violation. The original interview was entitled "Another View of the Civil Rights Movement: Anne Wortham" and was part of a series called "A World of Ideas" featuring Bill Moyers. I couldn't find it at amazon, but a google search will bring up places where it can be purchased online. I highly recommend it.

12/5/2009: The video is back on YouTube! I don't know for how long, so check it out while you can!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpWEM2Z9yn8



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS1qhBxiIQY