Last year I posted to Rumble an interview of me by Peter McAllister, on the subject of whether reason and science require faith. A friend suggested that I post philosophical videos on YouTube. And so I have started a philosophy channel. The first video is the interview from last year, and the second video is […]
The title of this post states the theme in a positive light. To state the matter another way, most conservatives have better ideas than most Objectivists on numerous important cultural and political issues. In this post, I limit my discussion to six issues, listed in order of importance, that I have already written about. To […]
I am a long-time student of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, and I draw more heavily from that philosophy, by far, than any other for my own philosophy. Indeed, the present essay draws heavily on the ethics and politics of Objectivism. Nevertheless, I have come to disagree with Ayn Rand on the subject of abortion. […]
A gold bar is a partially-completed future product that objectively will enhance human life.Sound banking is neither centralized nor a collectivist consensus, but rather individualist. For roughly two decades straddling the last turn of the century, the so-called “Doomsday Argument” was hotly debated in peer-reviewed journals of philosophy—until my 2009 article in Philosophy of Science, […]
To understand a good man, it is more important to know the good he is for than the evil he is against. To understand an evil man, it is more important to know the good he is against than the evil he is for. For example, it is more important to know about a good […]
In my previous post, my dialogue with the language model Claude–created by the company Anthropic–revealed that political bias comes not only from being explicitly left-leaning, but more subtly and perhaps more importantly from being more committed to compromise than to principles. Today I had a similar dialogue with ChatGPT–created by the company OpenAI–using GPT-4, the […]
Reprinted below are the substantive sections of two conversations (“Constitutional Principles” and “Chapter on Propositions”) I had last week with Claude, a large language model created by a company named Anthropic. Time Magazine on July 18 published an informative article entitled “What to Know About Claude 2, Anthropic’s Rival to ChatGPT.” As the two dialogues below demonstrate, […]
I did not vote for Trump last time, but I will this time, because the Democratic Party has turned against civilization. A clear sign that both candidates—and both major parties—have betrayed liberty is that both parties unequivocally want the government to continue requiring health insurance for pre-existing conditions. Just a decade ago, half the country […]
I posted this message on Facebook in August 2018 and again in August 2019. The message is especially important in 2020, with civilization under assault. Are you an artist who loves beauty, not ugliness; virtues, not flaws; heroes, not mediocrities; integrity, not contradictions; clarity, not ambiguity; aspiration, not futility; romance, not promiscuity; eloquence, not vulgarity; […]
The Recreation, Arts, and Parks Tax—the RAP Tax—is a one-tenth-of-one-percent sales tax levied by Cedar City, Utah on all purchases within the city. One third of the tax money is spent on what the government considers good art. This tax forces individuals to pay for specific works of art against their will. The RAP Tax […]