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. “In the poem ‘Human’ (1903), Gorky says of the new man that he is lost ‘among the desserts of the universe . . . on the little piece of the earth’. Yet, ‘he is going bravely ahead! and higher! On the way to victories over all the secrets of the earth and sky’. . . . “‘There was a cold wind outside, and an empty stretch of land under an empty sky” (Rand 1957, 15). The train encapsulates all the problems of a society that is living---and dying---due to the principles of collectivism. . . . The desert is the symbol of a hostile world in the novel: it is made obvious in the scene depicting the crash of the train at the Arizona desert [1160-61]. . . . “. . . In ‘Human’, Gorky glorified the new type of human, who is a creator and whose major impulse is Thought. . . . . . . “But there is a great difference between Gorky’s Human and Rand’s ‘new human’. . . .” JARS 18(2):326-27) --From the paper in that Winter 2018 issue of JARS: “Ayn Rand’s ‘Integrated Man’ and Russian Nietzscheanism” by Anastasiya Vasilievna Grigorovskaya, who has a number of publications on Ayn Rand, in Russian, and who is working on the first doctoral thesis about Rand in Russia (Tyumen).

I'm glad to hear that at least one Supreme Court justice can't believe that he is having to consider whether the Bill of Rights applies to state law enforcement: Image via Wikipedia. The court has formally held that most of the Bill of Rights applies to states as well as the federal government, but it has not done so on the Eighth Amendment's excessive-fines ban. Justice Neil Gorsuch was incredulous that Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher was urging the justices to rule that states should not be held to the same standard. "Here we are in 2018 still litigating incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Really? Come on, general," Gorsuch said to Fisher, using the term for holding that constitutional provisions apply to the states. Justice Stephen Breyer said under Fisher's reading police could take the car of a driver caught going 5 mph (8 kph) above the speed limit.The case, Timbs v. Indiana, concerns a man whose $40,000 Land Rover was confiscated when he was arrested for a $400 drug deal. After reading the article, I think the argument that the fine is excessive is a good one. Interested readers can read a post at the Institute for Justice for legal background, including a timeline of the case. The post reads in part: The case shines a spotlight on the excessive fines and fees often imposed by governments, and showcases yet another example of the inevitable abuse of power that results when government employs civil forfeiture, a process through which police and prosecutors seize someone's property and keep the proceeds for themselves, thus giving law enforcement an incentive to maximize profits rather than seek the neutral administration of justice. The case has attracted amicus briefs from a diverse coalition of groups calling on the Court to hold that the Excessive Fines Clause applies nationwide. These groups include the Cato Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP, Constitutional Accountability Center, and Pacific Legal Foundation. All of the amicus briefs can be downloaded from the Supreme Court's website. [link in original]We should know the Court's answer by June, according to the report. -- CAV Link to Original

Here is my new painting "An Active Mind". I have larger detail images at www.vanoostromfineart.com

That may be fine, but let me be clear on what my argument is. I'm saying transcendent and universal in form of argument, not transcendent and universal in geographic scope of its conclusion. We have already seen Hazony's favored nationalism³ requires deontic-like claims. It may be that for his nationalism², he is searching for some formal property of "liberalism" that will lead him to "we must have multiple states, and not one world government." But, as my argument above stresses, liberalism is a specific kind of solution ("basic, negative individual rights and private property") to a specific kind of problem ("what is government and why do men need it?" or more abstractly the problem of human community.) Thus, someone working from an inductive and largely Aristotelian-in-spirit framework doesn't require one truth to rule them all, or for norms that are deontic, or transcendent, or universal/universalizable, or that solve all political problems. We work in terms of principles where the fitness of said principles is determined by (a) what in reality gave rise to the need for them and (b) how well they solve those problems. Liberalism is one solution to one set of problems. Not-having-a-world-government (Hazony's nationalism²) is another (questions of centralization-decentralization in scope and structure.) For this reason we are not bothered by Hazony's "liberalism cannot justify dividing that function up over different parcels of land" problem.

More needs to be said of the political philosophy of the so-called alt-right*. This is one of the most revealing things I've ever seen: What are the logical consequences of a philosophy that takes a "negative view of human nature" (a malevolent people premise)? The first thing to go will be individual rights. A negative view of human nature implies that there's no real basis for holding the non-aggression principle: that one ought to deal with others on the basis of consent. Here is a great article by Andrea Castillo discussing the alt-right neoreactionaries: https://theumlaut.com/2014/07/29/a-gentle-introduction-to-neoreaction-for-libertarians/ Remind you of someone? The political philosophy of the alt-right is monarchist. If that seems weird or obscure to you, think of it in these terms: what they desire is an authoritarian strong-man to oppose the Establishment Left. That should not be an obscure idea at all, at this point. What's interesting is the origin of this political philosophy; quoting from Mencius Moldbug, the father of neoreactionary political philosophy: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html This is not an oddball political movement that's come out of nowhere - the predecessor of this political philosophy is none other than the quintessentially D2 anarchocapitalism of Rothbardian libertarianism. Think about it - what is the next logical step down the path of D2 politics? It's the disintegration of the non-aggression principle itself on the basis of a malevolent view of human nature. Continuing from Castillo's article: The "Cathedral" that Moldbug discusses in his writing is the new secular "religion" that inhabits the media, Hollywood, academia, big government leftists, etc., that propound postmodernism, feminism, egalitarianism, democracy, etc. Note how this fits with the narrative of how the election is "rigged" against Trump, "a public-private partnership" which includes at its forefront "the media". Neoreactionaries see themselves as explicitly "enlightened", and "beyond libertarianism": One last thing I'll point out from this article, quoting from the "Dark Enlightenment" writer Nick Land: Well what we see right now is reactionary political philosophy becoming a popular movement in the Trump campaign. The threat is real, and we've been warned: its few slender threads of civility will not hold back the beast for long. Dismissing these people as "trolls" and attempting to silence them is extremely foolish; you are cutting yourselves off from the very people you need to be persuading. As Peikoff identified in DIM, we've been on a "distintegrating" (D-type) trend in our society for quite some time, and this is the next logical evolution of D-type political philosophy. I think in light of the apparent size and popularity of this mass movement as we see in the Trump campaign, we need to be re-evaluating what was already a very dubious prediction at the end of his book, that society will devolve into the previous, unmixed "stable state" of the M2-type. On the contrary, what we are seeing right now is the progression of the D-type trend into the unmixed "stable state" of the D2-type. That is a much more credible prediction of where society is going now, and we need to be ready for it. * the article quoted above identifies the original meaning of the term "alt-right"; it's an umbrella term that included the "manosphere", "neoreactionaries", HBD (human bio-diversity), the "orthosphere", the "Dark Enlightenment", etc.