From dancer Maya Plisetskaya’s memoir, I, Maya Plisetskaya. She was a great ballerina, primarily with the Bolshoi in Moscow, her life filled with drama and extremes, both positive and negative — the negative mostly a function of operating as an artist under Soviet socialism, with all of its petty bureaucrats, power-lusters, obstructionists, and other semi-humans. […]

TAS CEO Jennifer Grossman will interview me on Racism/Black Lives Matter/Collectivism and Covid-19/Quarantine/Responsibility issues. Sign up via here.

Nietzsche vs. Rand Join me in this 3-session course “Nietzsche vs. Rand on Altruism and Egoism,” co-organized by thinkspot and Ayn Rand Center Latin America.  * Session 1: June, Saturday 20th, 12-1 pm Central. On Altruism: Both Nietzsche and Rand are vehement opponents of altruism. Why? And in what ways are their critiques similar and different

Foucault’s grandchildren. The Enlightenment created a magnificent civilization, yet three generations of postmodernism have bred a sub-culture of deniers—of facts, objectivity, truth, justice, and progress—and who combine that with vicious rhetoric and physical violence. Such activists’ enemy is reality, so they want and need to shut down anyone who persistently raises facts. Psychologically, such activists

Use the adversity test: “In everyday life, if people intend to reach a true assessment of someone, to decide whether he is bad or good, they do not base the investigation on those periods of his life when he was untroubled by external circumstances; they look at how he behaved when he was afflicted by

Source: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, pages 168-169. The character D-503 is talking to I-330 about the irrepressibility of the human spirit. See also “Zamyatin: Children as bold philosophers.”