Articles

Welcome to the Winter 2021 issue of The Objective Standard. The articles in this, the sixty-fourth issue of the journal for people of reason, address a rich tapestry of ideas, values, heroes, and villains.

Reason or mysticism: These are our basic alternatives. One leads to knowledge, production, trade, prosperity, and social harmony. The other leads to ignorance, destruction, plunder, poverty, and unspeakable cruelty.

Many Leroy Anderson compositions, written more than half a century ago, have become an enduring part of both American concert and popular music. His works are joyful and have a distinctive American flavor.

Where in Rand’s corpus should a curious reader begin? As someone who’s read it all, I would say that, for most people, there’s no better place to start than with one of Rand’s major works of fiction—Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living, or Anthem—and I suspect Rand would agree.

Including works by Berton Braley, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Louis Stephenson, John Gillespie Magee, Li Po, Robert Frost, and John Masefield.

During October 2021, environmentalist “protesters” affiliated with the “Insulate Britain” movement twice blocked the M25, Britain’s busiest motorway. These show the anti-human morality that underlies the environmentalist movement.

One reason critics often ignored Elmer Kelton was that his novels celebrate the virtues of integrity, honor, hard work, and bravery, with none of the nihilism or mournfulness that mark other Western authors. “Critics don’t read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter,” Kelton once said.

If you like a romantic story with heartwarming friendships, thought-provoking questions, and a side of dark comedy, check out Lucifer. You might just become possessed by the devil himself.

I am delighted to announce that Yeonmi Park and Wolf von Laer will speak at TOS-Con 2022: Philosophy for Freedom and Flourishing.

Part of the university administration’s job is to determine who speaks on campus. But to deplatform speakers based on unrelated political views is spineless and contrary to the mission of a university: to seek and share knowledge. Universities ought to stand up to the nonsense of Twitter mobs, not bow to it.

Ai-Da is not the kind of tool that aids an artist in selectively re-creating reality. Rather, it’s a tool for randomizing output and removing value-based selectivity—the essence of art—from the process and the outcome.

When parents are free to vote with their feet and their dollars, they will flock to the schools that best satisfy their standards. Schools that don’t will, instead of teaching, be taught a valuable lesson: Satisfy customers or close your doors.

The COVID vaccines currently available are marvels of human ingenuity. But the decision to get vaccinated or not is one every individual morally must be left free to make for himself.

I invite you to join TOS, OSI, and hundreds of other life-loving people in Colorado, June 22–25, for TOS-Con 2022: Philosophy for Freedom and Flourishing. Also, join us for more awesomeness after the conference in Ouray, CO—the inspiration for “Galt’s Gulch” in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Despite some of Hamilton’s surprising errors, such as his support for mercantilism, his programs prevented the new republic from floundering, as Dianne Durante has shown. Hamilton is worthy of our admiration, and so is Dr. Durante for having done such a fine job of bringing Hamilton and his policies to life.