Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, December 23, 2022
Notable Commentary
This will be my last post for 2022 due to my yearly blogging break. I plan to return on January 9, 2023.
I hope you have a merry Christmas, and a prosperous, happy new year.
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"Faith in 'impersonal value' generates a very real threat to the values of real people: the value of a home or a college education or energy to a California resident -- and that of a young woman's right to live her life without fear of an enforced pregnancy." -- Ben Bayer, in "The Dark Roots of the Texas Abortion Ban's Vigilantism" (Medium, 2021)
"[I]f we are injured in an accident, nobody says: you chose to drive and consented to the risks, so you have to live with the consequences and not treat your wounds." -- Ben Bayer, in "If You Value Personal Responsibility, Rethink Abortion" (The Austin American-Statesman)
"[B]y letting Qatar host the World Cup in November, FIFA is helping the regime fund the oppression and torture of its victims." -- Agustina Vergara Cid, in "Qatar's Hosting of the FIFA World Cup Is a Bigger Problem Than You Think" (The Orange County Register)
"Is the question of whether your negotiating partner is, or is not, a thug who quashes dissent by brutal murder something you can just agree to disagree about?" -- Agustina Vergara Cid, in "Saudi Oil Isn't Worth the Betrayal of American Values" (The Orange County Register)
"We should all stand up and defend this great man and our Founders, even the slaveholding ones, who changed history." -- Charlotte Cushman, in "Monticello Goes Woke" (The American Thinker)
"It is very alarming that [Association Montessori International/USA] is succumbing to the ideology that Maria Montessori ran away from during WWII." -- Charlotte Cushman, in "Montessori Organization Debunks Thanksgiving Story" (The American Thinker)
"I would much rather ten physicians be left free to express questionable opinions, rather than unjustly punish one physician for speaking a currently-unpopular truth." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Should We Punish Physicians Who Spread Covid-19 'Misinformation'?" (Forbes)
"There is a separate broader question of the proper role of regulatory agencies in making such policies mandatory that is beyond the scope of this piece." -- Paul Hsieh, in "You Have the Right to Your Radiology Test Results: What You Need to Know" (Forbes)
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| Image by Mandichondria, via Wikipedia Commons, license. |
"[T]his is a move in the right direction towards reducing government regulatory barriers for health products and services." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Small But Positive Steps Towards Health Deregulation" (Forbes)
"When we turn to Rand's purported nihilism, Weinacht is even worse, for Rand is not a different kind of nihilist, rather she saw herself as combating the growing nihilism in Western culture." -- Robert Mayhew, in Review of Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America, by Aaron Weinacht (J Russ Amer Studies 6.1, pp. 163-166, PDF)
"The patents (and other IP rights) that have served as the basis for creating the complex global commercial and information-sharing infrastructure in the modern biopharmaceutical sector ... incentivize[d] research and development ... [and] ... served as the basis for many commercial agreements to expand manufacturing capacity..." -- Adam Mossoff and Amesh Adalja, in "Patents as a Driver of the Unprecedented Biomedical Response to COVID-19" (Inquiry, 59, pp.1-8, PDF)
"In a particularly poignant demonstration of the chilling effect rent control has on new construction, new building permits have collapsed by 82 percent in St. Paul while its twin city of Minneapolis, which has not yet imposed rent control, saw a 68 percent increase in permits for new construction." -- Raymond Niles, in "The Lottery Life: Creating Lucky Housing Winners at the Expense of Everyone Else" (The American Institute for Economic Research)
"Prices only work when they reflect the voluntary assessments of each market participant." -- Raymond Niles, in "End the Gasoline Crisis: Try Motivation by Love, Not Fear" (The American Institute for Economic Research)
"One should never think of gold as going up or down." -- Keith Weiner, in "Buy Gold Because..." (SNB & CHF)
-- CAV
2 comments:
Yo, Gus, interesting review of the Chernyshevsky article. I think I had read somewhere years ago that Rand mentioned hating Chernyshevsky, which is about right--and if so, it wouldn't surprise me if Atlas Shrugged was in part a response to the guy. What is to be Done? is of purely historical interest, certainly not esthetic: It was written in response to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (because Turgenev didn't make the nihilists out to be superhuman supermen, Chernyshevsky was really really irked and set the record straight, in his view), and that book in turn was a major inspiration for Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, which was in part a direct satire of Chernyshevsky. And the other important thing is that the book is utterly unreadable--a close Russian friend referred to it as "anti-art in all caps" (as she noted and I nodded at, the closest he comes to characterization in any of it is that the heroine likes shoes!)--but Lenin was so enthralled by it that he read it five times in one summer and named his famous essay after it, which tells you all you need to know about both of them.
As for egoism, he used that in the book a couple of times, stating quite forthrightly that socialism equalled true egoism or something like that. (And one other note is that in grad school I had a cat that chewed up three of my books over the time I had him. One was Bridges of Madison County--I was reading it after a wonderfully vicious satire of it, Ditches of Edison County, that I still get chuckles from--the second I forget, and the third What is to be Done? He was a cat of consummate taste and breeding.) In sum: The slam of Rand as a strident, artless, humorless, doctrinaire producer of propaganda? That's actually Chernyshevsky, but as Chernyshevsky was a socialist and nihilist, he's given a pass by the critter-rottie despite his entire book being nothing but the esthetic sins they accuse Rand of. (And a last humorous story is that another friend visited me once and say my copies of Herzen's Who is to Blame? and Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? next to Tolstoy's What is Art? on my bookcase and said, "God, don't you have any books with answers?")
In other news, in case you haven't heard, RIP Terry Hall, the lead singer of The Specials (the white one, anyway).
A book-eating cat? And I thought my photograph-licking one took the cake.
Shame to hear about Terry Hall...
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