Articles, Ayn Rand & Objectivism, Capitalism, Culture

Bitcoin and the Ayn Rand Imagination

April 24, 2014 Laurie Rice Leave a comment

This article was originally published at The Atlas Society.

The Atlas Shrugged movie is now accepting Bitcoin to join their web forum, called Galt’s Gulch Online. Limited content is available for free to all visitors of Galt’s Gulch Online, but premium content, such as the new Atlas Shrugged Part 3 teaser trailer, is available only to “producers” who pay a fee. And that fee can now be paid in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a digital money sweeping the world and offering some degree of freedom from government currencies. It imitates the scarcity of a material currency (e.g. gold) by means of an algorithm, which places a limit on the amount of bitcoin that can be “mined” from its source by those who maintain the transaction ledger. As Rob Wile puts it, “It’s like a giant interactive spreadsheet everyone has access to and updates.” Continue reading Bitcoin and the Ayn Rand Imagination →

Culture, Feminism

Why The Government Shouldn’t Regulate Photoshopping

April 14, 2014 Laurie Rice Leave a comment

A recent post by the show Julie Mastrine responded to a post by Miss Representation’s account on Facebook. Miss Representation is a documentary about the portrayal of women in media. It’s a valuable film with many insights, but it falls into the error that much of liberal feminism does, which is to call on government regulation as a solution. Their Facebook post was a link to Change.org, petitioning the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “to develop a regulatory framework for ads that materially change the faces and bodies of the people in them, in order to reduce the damage this type of advertising does to our children.”

I responded with a few comments, and many other libertarian feminists did as well.

Julie Mastrine did a longer write up on her own blog, with screenshots of my comments and others.

Philosophy, Politics

approaching anarchy

April 12, 2014 Laurie Rice 1 Comment

I’m really drawn to the individualist, market, and existentialist descriptions on this fantastic chart I found. Evolving from a starting point of classical liberal — basically I intellectually inherited minarchy as a default of Rand’s Objectivism, and hadn’t questioned it much until more recently.

Now I mostly just hold on to a vague minarchist position out of

lingering skepticism about the development of gang warfare and “a market of force,”
wide-eyed, beagle-like trust in the power of written laws to manifest justice,
general reluctance to change my mind too easily, and
the fun of annoying anarchists.