If you’re into Ayn Rand’s writings and also like rap music … but have always longed for more inspiring lyrics … check out the Rand-influenced hip-hop artist Joe Eros (Atlasphere profile here).
I met Joe on Sunday at an informal Atlasphere get-together in Santa Monica. Great guy, and shares my strong admiration for the newly-assembled We the Living band.
Also at our get-together was Steven Schub of The Fenwicks — surely the best Objectivist “Afro-Celtic Yiddish Ska” band you’ve ever heard. (Despite intense competition!)
Category: The Atlasphere
All things Atlasphere can be found here, columns, podcasts, interesting anecdotes, and more.
Indian Ayn Rand Fan Minal Panchal among Virginia Tech Victims
The article “World Reacts to Tech Shootings” in today’s Guardian mentions briefly that one of the Virginia Tech victims was a fan of Ayn Rand’s work:
India – which lost a lecturer – added a second victim to its toll: Minal Panchal, a 26-year-old master’s student in building sciences, CNN-IBN news said Wednesday. She had been listed as missing before her body was found at Norris Hall.
“She was really passionate about architecture, about buildings and Ayn Rand was one of her favorite authors. She went to the U.S. to study building sciences,” said Chetna Parekh, a friend from Mumbai.
India eNews has a full article about Minal, titled “Minal’s dreams brought her to US varsity — and death” (which too notes her admiration for Ayn Rand’s work).
I can hardly imagine the depths of grief that Ms. Panchal’s family, together with all the families of victims at Virginia Tech, must be experiencing.
Tomorrow we’ll be publishing an excellent op-ed by Jacob Sullum which analyzes the relationship between the Virginia Tech shooting and the so-called “gun-free” policies that make it possible for a lone gunman to kill so many people on a college campus.
UPDATE: Sullum’s article is available here.
Have You Heard of the Peshmerga?
If you are interested in Iraq and haven’t yet read Michael Totten’s recent post on the Peshmerga, the Kurdish army, I recommend it highly. It’s called “An Army, Not a Militia.”
Truly inspiring. …Brought tears to my eyes, actually.
I bet the Kurds would love the movie 300, if they’ve not yet seen it. (I plan to see it soon myself.)
Upgraded Seach Results Functionality
A few of you have written in recent months asking that we improve the way search results are shown at the Atlasphere.
In particular, you mentioned it would be more helpful if the results were divided into a set number of results per page, rather than dumping out all 500+ results on one page if you search for something popular like “chess” or “psychology.”
I finished making this upgrade last night. Now, when you conduct a search, the results are shown 50 per page, and you have a menu for navigating through the results.
Next up: We’ll make it so you can confine your search results to your geographical area — another popular request.
Meantime, take the new functionality for a test drive, if you like, and let us know if you have any additional requests!
UPDATE: Today we also made it so that it’s impossible to view directory profiles that have been suppressed by the user. (Previously, they were simply withheld from being listed in the directory; now they are actually impossible to view, even if you know the correct URL.) The option to suppress one’s directory profile is available only to members with active dating profiles.
Lenders Are Damned If They Lend, and Damned If They Don't
ARI’s David Holcberg has penned a compelling letter to the editor submitted to hundreds of newspapers, radio stations, and web sites:
With 2 million homeowners defaulting on their mortgage payments, we are increasingly hearing denunciations of lenders for having loaned money to people who had no means of paying it back. But these denunciations reveal a disturbing double standard. For years, politicians pressured lenders to not discriminate against those with poor credit history and shaky finances. Now we have the despicable spectacle of politicians accusing lenders of not having discriminated enough and of having made too many risky loans.
Lenders are damned if they lend — and damned if they don’t. Whatever lenders do, politicians seem to always find their practices objectionable, and will take advantage of any excuse to call for more regulations and increased political power over lending. Politicians should leave lenders alone, and instead of damning them, they should acknowledge their crucial role in making home ownership possible for so many people.
"Black Marketing" Scammer Soils Ragnar's Name
A new post on Search Engine Watch points out that one opportunistic Digg scammer is parading around under the name of “Ragnar Danneskjold.”
Unfortunately, this wannabe pirate fails to grasp the difference between stealing from a tyrannical government bureaucracy and stealing from a private company.
Digg has its terms-of-use in place for a reason; it protects the value of their service and the integrity of their company. Whatever you think of Digg’s value and integrity, it’s theirs — not yours — to build or destroy.
Those of us who understand and revere the symbolism of Ragnar Danneskjold’s actions don’t appreciate seeing you slink around under the guise of a “noble capitalist” when you’re nothing of the sort.
So go read Atlas Shrugged again, punk — it’s not an endorsement of anarchy.
UPDATE (7:14 p.m.): Since I wrote this post, “Ragnar” (who appears to consider himself a libertarian, politically) has contacted me and provided additional information about his service.
Naturally, he takes issue with my characterization that his company is stealing from Digg. I am still mulling over the relevant issues; in the interim, it’s probably best to quote from what he wrote to me, and let that speak for itself.
I understand and agree with the moral foundation of capitalism. I do not think that Digg is party to this transaction. The transaction to analyze is the sale of an advertisement. Digg could easily do this themselves, just as StumbleUpon and Netscape do. Digg does not own their users’ actions any more than we do, so we are simply competing with Digg for their users’ activity on Digg.
Your argument [that my business model is like stealing from a store] is akin to a competing store arguing that your store is violating their rights by attracting customers to your store, away from theirs. I’ll modify this analogy to say that the competitor store and the customer signed a contract saying the customer couldn’t buy from your store. You attracting those customers, for you, has nothing to do with the contract the customers signed with the other store.
Yes, we are encouraging users to violate Digg’s terms of service. However, we never signed that contract. Their is no moral imperative to respect a contract that two people unrelated to you have signed, only contracts that you freely enter yourself. Also, Digg’s terms of service specify the consequences of violating the contract: termination of the Digg account. It is Digg’s prerogative to terminate an account, no one is preventing them from doing so.
[…] We aren’t stealing services. The only service Digg provides is a medium for communication between users, and this is free anyway. Placement on Digg’s front page is not the service Digg claims to offer. We offer that service.
In answer to the charge that even PayPal, their payment processor, will likely disapprove of their business model:
We are not violating Digg’s terms of use. We do not accept money to Digg things, which is the clause in question. Paypal will make money on our transactions, so why would they shut us down? PayPal has no moral agenda besides making money… same with our company. Even if PayPal blocked us we could find a different medium, or make our own.
[…] In general, remember that we have not signed any contract with Digg. Also, we are not trying to ruin public trust in them. Again, if less people use Digg, the value of our service goes down. We aim to be able to mask our gaming activity, as the top users have, so that Digg continues to appear clean.
Thanks for the scrutiny. Feel free to publish any of the things I have said to you, but please do not release my name.
These points certainly make the issue more refined (and interesting) than I had concluded from my own original and brief analysis of their business.
I continue to find something unsavory about paying people to violate their own contract with another company — particularly when those payments could sharply compromise the perceived value and integrity of Digg’s service. If I were Digg, I’d definitely be calling my legal team.
It seems analogous to paying people to shill bid on your items (or your clients’ items) on eBay, no?
IMDB: Atlas Movie Script 'Almost Complete'
The Atlas Shrugged movie now not only has its own page in the Internet Movie Database (which has probably been the case for a while), but their IMDB page also offers this update, as of 30 Jan 2007, on the movie’s status:
Status: Announced
Comments: The screenplay is nearly complete, and production is scheduled to begin this year (2007).
Status Updated: 30 January 2007
Note: Since this project is categorized as being in production, the data is subject to change; some data could be removed completely.
Hope springs eternal. 😉
I also see that Randall Wallace, of Braveheart and Pearl Harbor fame, is now listed as the screenwriter — rather than the previously-cited James Hart.
Site under Reconstruction
As you no doubt noticed if you tried accessing the Atlasphere this evening [it’s 12:27 a.m.], we’ve been making a lot of upgrades to the site.
Our first step was implementing the new design you see before you. We actually had to close the site for about five hours this evening while we made the transition. (We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. This should be the only time we have to actually take the site offline.)
Next, we’ll be ironing out any bugs associated with this new design, and making some small improvements in how errors are handled, etc. Finally, we’ll be adding some cool new features over the coming weeks!
There are likely to be plenty of small bugs during the next couple days. If you encounter any big problems, however, or are just feeling particularly helpful, send us a note and we’ll try to fix it ASAP!
Britain's Impotence over Hostage Sailors
Did you know that the British sailors recently abducted by Iran were under the protection of an escorting ship from the British Royal Navy — but it was ordered to “stand down” rather than defend the sailors?
From historian Arthur Herman’s article on the subject in today’s New York Post:
The latest report is that the Britons were ready to fight off their abductors. Certainly their escorting ship, HMS Cornwall, could have blown the Iranian naval vessel out of the water. However, at the last minute the British Ministry of Defense ordered the Cornwall not to fire, and her captain and crew were forced to watch their shipmates led away into captivity.
Herman explains how this decision reflects a larger pattern of pacifism by the British, including recent (steep) cuts to the budget for the Royal Navy.
Soon, all Britain will have left, with which to defend its sailors, is Tony Blair’s withering consternation.
"Why Did You Publish that Column?"
Questions about why we published this-or-that column come up not infrequently at the Atlasphere. Below is a letter I wrote to a new Atlasphere member who had questions about how we decide what to publish, in general, and about Jessica Bennett’s most recent column, “Rationally Green,” in particular. Perhaps others will be interested to hear this information.
* * *
In general, we strive to publish lively, stimulating content of likely interest to fans of Ayn Rand’s novels (who may or may not consider themselves Objectivists). Feel free to peruse our writers guidelines, if you’re curious.
Occasionally one of our authors skirts the lines of what we find philosophically acceptable and we definitely try to keep things relatively Objectivist-ish, in that regard. At the same time, we don’t devote a lot of time to enforcing intellectual “purity.” We trust and encourage our readers to think for themselves, and we’re more interested in providing stimulating material than in providing philosophically exact content.
To provide an analogy, within the Rand-admiring community, we strive to be more of an Atlantic Monthly than, obviously, an academic journal. If you’re looking for scholarly or philosophically scrubbed material, there are others that do this much better than us. If, on the other hand, you are interested in casual worldly discussions of this-and-that, we seem to be a good place to go.
At least, that’s the conclusion I reach from the number of people who’ve signed up for our columns announcements. We’ve had well over 4,000 members sign up to receive an e-mail notification each time we publish a new column, and every day more people ask to be added.
Fewer than 5% of those who request the announcements have ever turned them off — meaning they happily keep receiving three new column announcements from us every week — which never ceases to amaze me, personally. I truly never thought our columns would be quite so popular, but they seem to be meeting some kind of need, out there.
Regarding Jessica’s most recent column in particular, I think Jessica is advocating more of the “conservationist” position, which was the old name for environmentalism, before it became a political cause and a religion for some people. Conservationists were people who loved nature and wanted to help protect it. You can kind of sense that Jessica’s groping toward a free market solution to the problem of how to protect nature. I don’t think this is hard to see.
I actually didn’t see this particular column before it was published. Our editor, Carol Brass, handles all that, for which I am eternally grateful. She and I both have full schedules, and the Atlasphere actually doesn’t get paid for the time she and I invest in these columns. On the contrary, I pay our editor and writers a small amount of money to create this content, and I receive no direct compensation in return.
So if, in the rush of day-to-day life, something slips by that one of us regrets for some reason — I don’t see it as a big deal, usually. If it is a big deal, I’ll edit or pull the column post-publication, and send the writer an explanation. But I’m disinclined to do that for this particular column, because I think it’s just a matter of whether readers are willing to entertain a position that’s fairly understandable, all things considered.
You probably wouldn’t know this, but Jessica is actually one of our more popular columnists; she has her own following at the Atlasphere. Usually she doesn’t write about topics with a strong political charge. Something about her thoughtful (“poetic” as you called it) style of writing resonates with many readers — including me, I should say.
She’s stylistically different than our other writers, and she’s got a gift. She really does make you want to think things over, which I think is great. You might be interested to browse the archives (on the search page you can enter an author’s name to view all their columns) and read some of her earlier columns, if her style appeals to you.
You asked how you could submit a reply to her column. If you’re a paid Atlasphere subscriber and you’d like to reply to her personally, you can send her an e-mail via her Atlasphere profile (linked from the bottom of any of her articles). Or, if you’re interested in publishing a column on the subject, we do welcome submissions that present alternate perspectives on a subject as long as they don’t read like a response to an earlier column. Any column you submit should stand well enough on its own, without needing to quote-and-reply to earlier content.
I should also mention that we have published other columns, like this one by Walter Williams, taking a firm stance against environmentalism. So I don’t think there’s any reasonable way to infer that the Atlasphere is endorsing environmentalism per se by publishing what Jessica wrote. Ultimately, I think, Jessica is expressing an understandable tension between her own natural pro-nature sentiments and the wacky global-warming environmentalist Kool Aid that so many people seem to be selling these days.
I hope that answers your questions. I welcome your thoughts.
UPDATE (Mar 23): As it would happen, Thomas Sowell just penned a new column called “Global Warming Swindle” (his review of the excellent British documentary with a similar title) which we are happy to be able to publish. We look forward to covering the topics of environmentalism and global warming further, as the public debate over global warming continues to heat up and more excellent material is written.