I recently posted my first substack post (Available for free at https://substack.com/@harrybinswanger): To combat anti-Israel, anti-Semitic outbreaks on campus, two things are indispensable. 1: Recognize that the cause is the ideas taught by the faculty. The student chanters and rampagers are not intellectually equipped to form independent opinions about anything. They are marching to the
Re: a member’s post of 6/21/24 The reason many people have this perspective — that immigration is not a right — is that they are not conceptualizing “immigration” properly. They package together activities that are rights-violating with activities that are rights-respecting under the concept “immigration,” and then conclude that immigration is sometimes good and sometimes
A member asks why immigration is a right. Another member asks why it isn’t. Who has the burden of proof? Every human action is a right, unless it initiates physical force against another. So, does the act of immigration initiate force? No, not per se. Does it threaten the initiation of force, since the threat
The public voices opposing the campus mayhem are writing only about freedom of speech. They point out that freedom of speech doesn’t include the freedom to occupy a campus or use violence. That’s better than nothing, but it misses two points: on any private property, the free speech right is that of the owner, and
It is the job of a nation’s intellectuals to connect current events to principles and to past events. Rarely is that done. Look at three examples. 1. Wasn’t it just a couple of years ago that we learned that campuses were concerned about students’ need for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” had to be given,
A member asked a few days ago whether anyone really held the event-to-event view of causality. Two unfortunate examples of it appeared the same day (4/4/24) on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. “Ideology, ‘Information’ and the New Censorship” counter-attacked recent attacks on free speech. The author deals with a supreme court Justice’s
Re: Member’s post 104109 of 3/9/24 Member wrote: The difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy is in the charter or constitution that protects the individual’s right to life and liberty against the whims of a majority. Some claim that the U.S. is a Representative Democracy in that the government is elected by citizens. From my
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February 2 was Randsday. As the creator of that holiday, I set up Randsday.com and put the following text on it. February 2nd is the birthday of Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand developed and defended Objectivism, a philosophy that advocates “rational selfishness.” To celebrate Randsday, you do something not done on any
How many years, or how many decades are the Fox newscasters going to refer to the “crisis” on our borders? I guess as long as there’s a fear of foreigners to cater to. There can’t be a “crisis” that goes on for at least 10 years, as this one has (in 2014, a “crisis” was
