We often joke that each new Free Radical magazine is the best one yet. This latest issue really is the best one yet. Issue 74 of The Free Rad tackles all the popular delusions that threaten life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and gives you the ammunition to defend yourself against the purveyors of misery who promote them.

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“It is not very inspiring to fight for the freedom of the purveyors of pornography or their customers. But in the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners. In this case, the disgusting nature of the practitioners makes it a good test of one’s loyalty to a principle.”

-—Ayn Rand, Censorship: Local and Express.

For “purveyors of pornography,” substitute “advocates of hate-killing.”

On Monday, I wrote “Death to Islam,” describing Islam as “murderous maggotry” and calling for a philosophical crusade by decent, rational men and women everywhere to shame it into oblivion.

Daily Linz 23: Dining with the Enemy - Lunch with a Bishop!

by Lindsay Perigo

One of the (mostly) nice things about being a broadcaster is that it enables one to rub shoulders with the rich, the famous, the powerful and the influential. One of the nice things about being an Objectivist broadcaster is that it enables one to judge them unawed by their status, unblinkered by conventional bromides.

Recently I had lunch with a bishop. A Catholic bishop. Not a small-fry New Zealand Catholic bishop, but a Catholic bishop from overseas. A bishop who, if he has anything to do with it, will end up a cardinal. “No one deserves a biretta [cardinal's red cap],” he observed as we dined. “Except me. I’m working on it.”

Daily Linz 22 - Death to Islam! by Lindsay Perigo

No, this is not a call to genocide. I leave that to the Islamo-fascist filth who yearn to perpetrate it: “Death to Israel!” “Death to America!” “Death to the Infidel!” and so on.

Two months on and things are shaping up nicely. SOLOPassion began without the advantage of incumbency, with a relocation that had to start from scratch. Duncan and Julian have done superlatively well in creating a new home for SOLO that, with ongoing tweakings, will more than hold its own against all-comers. Most importantly, the unique SOLO vision, articulated in the Credo remains intact—and as urgently salutary as ever. I never tire of quoting this crucial excerpt:

"SOLO seeks to galvanise all Objectivists who recognise that Objectivism is a tool for living, and who repudiate any reason/passion dichotomy. We seek to be a magnet and a home for those who are exuberantly rational and rationally exuberant, who aspire to the 'total passion for the total height,' intellectually and emotionally, simultaneously and harmoniously. We aspire to a culture of sincerity and integrity, where mind-games, deceit and posturing—and having to read between the lines—in one's dealings with others, are a thing of the past; where Shakespeare's 'This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. ...' is second nature. ... SOLO is for those who want reason and logic to be liberated from the Mr. Spock straitjacket and impregnated with KASS—'the kick-ass' factor."

John-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) is one of the most important and insightful thinkers in the history of economic science. Say was a major proponent of Adam Smith’s self-directing economic system of competition, natural liberty, and limited government. He frequently praised the Scotsman’s work, publicized it, and described his own work as mainly an elaboration of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. In fact, however, the economic doctrines and analysis of this “French Adam Smith” went further than, and departed from, Smith’s ideas on some important points. For example, he stated that Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was without a method; was obtuse, unclear, and unconnected; and included far too many digressions and divergences.

Multiculturalism sounds like a great idea, right? Let's learn from all cultures. After all, all cultures have some good attributes. American Indians made beautiful blankets—and didn't waste any part of the buffalo, as the cliché goes. African tribes lived together in harmony. Ancient Chinese built the Great Wall and gave us tea and silk. The Mayans had a good calendar, and so forth. So let's not be ethnocentric—a term reserved almost exclusively for Westerners who think their culture of reason, liberty, the free market, and science is superior to, say, New Guinea head hunters, Taliban zealots, Indian tribes with witch doctors, and totalitarian governments of the twentieth century.

Strike up a few more lives to the death toll reaped by religion this century. Another 40,000 plus, whose philosophy of "God will protect us" failed, dismally, despite an all-pervading religious state, temples pointing in the right direction, week-long sessions of chanting, fasting, self-flagellation. One can safely assume that in Iran, that haven of Islamic correctness, whatever the wise script-readers interpreted as being his Almighty's preferred form of suffering has been preached, tested, implemented. And yet ... still, he chose to direct the full brunt of his anger at the very source of his most fervent faithful.

1) That wisdom resides in Academia.

2) That modern "intellectuals" are not Lenin's "useful idiots," driven by vanity and besotted by flattery.

3) That an MBA graduate has a brain; that an MBA degree has something to do with entrepreneurialism.

4) That flow charts and spread sheets are a substitute for kicking ass.

5) That pedantic, nit-picking clever-dick smart-asses who ejaculate to arcane masturbations about the meaning of the word "meaning" are authentic philosophers.

6) That wisdom's face cannot be joyous, or angry, or anything other than impassive.

7) That the world owes one - and pedantic, nit-picking clever-dick smart-asses - a living.

[Listen to this interview] Prodos (an Australian radio presenter & Objectivist radical) interviews Lindsay Perigo ...

[Reprised from SOLOHQ]

Waiting for the Pope to die has been a salutary experience. We Objectivists, and secularists generally, tend to think of the Catholic Church, wishfully, as being in as terminal a condition as its "Holy Father" over the past few years—the domain of fetid old moral despots and contemptible child-molesters. The events surrounding the death of John Paul II have given this Objectivist, at least, a rude reawakening.

Old and terminal? I have watched a succession of young acolytes, good-looking, articulate and vibrant, speaking eloquently of their love for their standard-bearer and for their faith. I watched one new priest in particular, Father John Bartunek, an atheist-turned Catholic, enthusing about the direction this Pope had inspired him to take. As I type this very homily, another young priest is spiritedly arguing the toss with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about Catholicism’s teachings on celibacy and the role of women in the church. I have heard for the first time of such groups as Legionnaires for Christ, Catholic cells that are alive with missionary zeal. I have seen magnificent cathedrals around the world … spilling over with followers of all colours and nationalities. I have observed the teeming thousands in St. Peter’s Square standing throughout the night in silent, candle-lit reverence for their dying leader.

[Listen to this announcement]

A few reflections after the first few days of SOLO's new incarnation here at SOLOPassion.com:

There was some debate prior to the rebirth as to the legitimacy of "entertainment" as a value on a site like this. For me there is no debate. If SOLOPassion is not entertaining, it is falling down on part of its job—to educate and inform in an entertaining way. There is no entertainment/education dichotomy here. "Entertaining" doesn't necessarily mean "creating a laugh a minute," though humour is decidedly a value here also—it does mean educating and informing in a way that is stimulating and arresting, rather than in a cold monotone more suited to academia or people who have no sense of life-and-death urgency about the material they are purveying. The writers we have assembled here are all skilled in telling their story in a captivating way because they are passionate about it, and that's the way it'll stay. So yes, this is, unashamedly, an entertainment site—but of course, it's not just an entertainment site. Sassy, saucy, sizzling ... and salutary. That's SOLO.

The twentieth century has seen many philosophers pay a great deal of attention to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is especially his philosophy of language—i.e., his concern with the fundamental features and functions of our forms of awareness and communication—that has inspired much discussion. It is by way of an examination of language that Wittgenstein developed his theory of knowledge (although, granted, the idea that Wittgenstein had a theory of knowledge is itself controversial).

Yet Wittgenstein's approach is not to be confused with the content of his thinking. After all, hardly any philosopher could avoid an examination of language in the process of offering an account of human knowledge. Language would appear to be the only tangible and thus easily accessible feature of knowledge, though surely not its only feature. And the content of Wittgenstein's thinking, in the Philosophical Investigations [1] and On Certainty [2] testifies to the fact that he was not a crude behaviorist of the sort we might call someone whose epistemology focuses exclusively on language.

“He who fights for the future lives in it today.”

—Ayn Rand

[Listen to this announcement] When I founded SOLO™ it was with a view to finding kindred spirits who had eluded me thus far in the Objectivist world.