You asked for it, brothers!

It passed--with some last minute finagling.

The next few weeks are going to be interesting. This will only get uglier. This is the flashpoint--the moment when, looking back, many will say we turned the corner and found ourselves falling off a cliff. They will be wrong though--we turned that corner two centuries ago. This is just a particularly large boulder we've hit on the way down.

Atrocities like ObamaCare are symptoms, kids. Symptoms of a larger cultural disease. Do not act surprised when this culture practices what it preaches (no matter how convoluted the preaching). Our intellectual and political leaders, our teachers and parents, have been telling us for our whole lives that altruism is the good, that sacrifice is the moral, that the misery of others is a Sword of Damocles hanging over your head by a thread to be cut by the faintest whimper of their discomfort.

Get your armor on. The line is drawn. It has been drawn for centuries. The battle only got a little bloodier.


-M.

IOC killjoys

Oh, for Christ's sake:

IOC investigates Canadian women's hockey team for celebration.

Let them have their bloody celebration, will ya? I was pulling hard for the US women's team the whole game and I don't really give a shit if Canada celebrates a little raucously with a few good stogies and nice chardonnay (or whatever the hell they were drinking). Give me a damn break.


-M.

Hayek vs. Keynes

Okay, this is awesome.

Don't say Grace...

...say Justice.

I am busy and have nothing to say that Craig Biddle hasn't already said pretty damn well.

The religious tradition of saying grace before meals becomes especially popular around the holidays, when we all are reminded of how fortunate we are to have an abundance of life-sustaining goods and services at our disposal. But there is a grave injustice involved in this tradition. It is the injustice of thanking an alleged God for the productive accomplishments of actual men.

Go read the rest.

Happy Thanksgiving.

-M.

Ugh...

I'd like to issue a retraction.

-M.

Freddie Mac (still) Hemorrhaging Money

Freddie Mac lost $6.8 billion in the third quarter of this fiscal year. They consider themselves in decent shape because, for the second straight quarter, they've lost billions of dollars but not so many billions of dollars that they needed a "federal cash infusion" (read: stolen tax dollars). They've already received $51 billion since September 2008. Fannie Mae asked for another $15 billion a couple of days ago. Both of these entities own or guarantee half of the mortgages in this country.

Sometimes I feel like Francis Dolarhyde: "Do you see? DO YOU SEE?!" Are people really that blind to the crucial intersection of morality and economics? Tragically (though not surprisingly), all evidence points to "yes".

Brace yourselves, kids. It is still early. And it will get uglier.

-M.

This battle has just begun

I spend a lot of time on the internet. I get almost all of my news there (aside from the occasional edition of the Wall Street Journal purchased outside my favorite diner and the occasional bored venture onto primetime news networks), my blog rounds include upwards of 150 blogs ranging from current events to politics to economics to news analysis to philosophy to sports. I have to know what's going on in the world and in my fields (philosophy and history), so I try to keep up. But sometimes some of the sites usually on my regular rounds fall by the wayside (this happens to The New Clarion all the time--I don't know why I keep spacing them out). One of those that has fallen out of my regular rotation lately is Brian Leiter's blog. It happens.

For those of you who don't know, Leiter's blog is predominantly reporting news about the academic profession of philosophy: who left where to teach where, who died, etc., with a bit of reporting on the intellectual culture in general thrown in. Leiter is a philosopher and legal scholar at the University of Chicago and also is the editor of The Philosophical Gourmet Report, a ranking (often controversial) of philosophy graduate schools in the English-speaking world. 

Well, I stopped by Leitner's place again today and saw this. If you don't know who Donald Hubin is, don't worry. His contribution to philosophy is 30-odd years of poorly reasoned and wholly uninfluential articles on justice, paternity, rights, values and sundry other topics in ethics. 

These are the people young Objectivists (especially philosophy majors) will encounter in universities. Someone who thinks of his job not as teaching young people how to think rationally about philosophical issues, but as disabusing the poor little lemmings of their nonsense dogmas. And that's if you're lucky. Many of them are openly hostile. Trust me, I've seen them all.

And to include Rothbard in the same category as Rand, or even someone like Nozick, is just insulting. I'm sorry, but libertarians are going to have realize that Rothbard was a piss-poor thinker. 

Look, I've dealt with these cats for five years. I'm in it for the long haul: PhD. Don't let them break you down. And they will try to break you down like you're an alcoholic at an intervention. Stand your ground, be respectful (as long as they deserve it) and, above all, know your material. Know it backwards and forwards. Not only Objectivism but whoever you are studying. If you have to know Schopenhauer's opinion of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, know it thoroughly. If you have to know Schumpeter's criticism of Keynes' "general theory", know it thoroughly. If you have to know the influence of classical teachings on the Founding Fathers, know it thoroughly. 

If you know your material, know how to rationally integrate that knowledge and can articulate it eloquently, they have nothing on you.

-M.

5-0

It's looking more and more like I may owe Josh McDaniels an apology.

-M.

Don't act surprised.

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.

This was going to happen at some point during his presidency. Might as well get it out of the way now, when he is merely promising universal prosperity and world peace, then when his nonsense collapses all around him.

I'll say nothing else except to point you to the list of recipients of this Oslo trinket and ask whether you think it should really be such an honor to be in that company.

-M.

An Astonishing Panorama of the Endtimes

Do I really need to say anything else?

-M.