Tonight we’ll continue the discussion of “religious freedom” legislation recently passed in Indiana and Arkansas, as well as a number of other stories. See Program Notes, below, for all the stories, etc., we plan to discuss.
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Program Notes
The Left wages total war and then plays victim
Parties Trade Places in Culture Wars Over Rights Measures
Iran Accuses U.S. of Lying About New Nuke Agreement HT Craig
Krauthammer Reveals What He Found to Be the ‘Most Astonishing Thing’ About Iran Framework Agreement HT Azem
Iran’s Leaders Begin Tricky Task of Selling Nuclear Deal at Home
In New York, It’s Parent-Teacher Time (Up to 5 Whole Minutes)
U.S. Economy Gained 126,000 Jobs in March, an Abrupt Slowdown in Hiring
Brown orders California’s first mandatory water restrictions: ‘It’s a different world’
New York City: Two Muslim women inspired by Islamic State arrested for trying to build bomb
Two new polls show Ted Cruz in top tier of 2016 GOP field
The mainstream media has a serious Ted Cruz problem
Gut Check: Confessions of a Self-Conscious Conservative
Poll: Even Jeb Bush Supporters Not ‘Very Enthusiastic’ About Candidacy
Ted Cruz: My First Act As President Will Be to Undo Obama’s Unconstitutional Executive Orders
Don't Let It Go 
Conversations with Tyler:
Peter Thiel on the Future of Innovation
Curiously, the law does allow discrimination. You can discriminate in favor of veterans, senior citizens and government employees (I can get a discount on my cell phone plan because I work for the state).
And I haven’t heard of a left winger saying that discrimination against people having tattoos or engaging in incestuous relationships should be forbidden.
If the world won’t end because the Amish are exempt from Obamacare then I don’t think it will end if a few religious cake bakers don’t have to bake cakes for homosexual marriages.
Entrepreneurship, Austrian Economics, and the Cryptorevolution
Patrick Byrne
Understand what it would mean to defend the “right to refuse service”. It would mean to defend the freedom of association, and in addition the freedom to *disassociate*. Now think what that latter would mean if it were fully implemented. It would mean the total destruction of the anti-discrimination paradigm that has been in place since… when exactly?
Amy, if I’m not mistaken you are a law professor. Yes? What would you say was the most important case that *ended* freedom of association in America? If you said Shelley v. Kraemer then you can go to the head of the class. Ever since that case the Left (with complicity from Conservatives) has totally controlled the culture and everything in it. Americans do not have the ability to associate with whomever they want and disassociate with whomever they want. That means that Americans can no longer live their lives and build their communities according to the values they hold. Yes, understand that when Americans lost the ability to “discriminate” along the lines of race, everything else followed. As Rand would say, the principle was violated.
I don’t think Randians understand what true freedom of association would lead to. It would lead to a massive reorganization of society. Whites would self segregate themselves away from all NAMs in a heartbeat. And most white Conservatives and non-leftists would not want to be around open homosexuality. It disgusts most normal people for a variety of reasons rooted in immutable biology.
My point with all this: I can’t see Objectivists really having the heart to defend freedom of association and the corollary freedom to discriminate. Why? Because at root Objectivists are blank slaters and humans are not blank slate in their psychology. Humans are not just “beings of self-made soul”. That’s Rand’s scientific ignorance at play. Objectivists would never be comfortable with the consequences of total freedom.
In the end, I see Objectivism and indeed libertarianism in general being subsumed by Leftism. To truly challenge egalitarianism would take Objectivism outside its comfort zone (economics) and into the realm of culture which leads to race and heredity. I see no evidence that the Objectivist movement is equipped to deal with Cultural Marxism. Which is why the movement is going nowhere and is nowhere near “capturing the culture”.
It depends what you mean by “blank slate.” If one means that we aren’t born with the knowledge that, say, France is to the north of Spain, then hardly anyone would disagree with Rand. Other than that, the concept doesn’t have much going for it. There is even a sense in which morality is inborn. Much of morality involves the ability to empathize with others. There are parts of the brain that allow empathy and they don’t seem as developed in some people as in others. Murderers often tortured animals when they were young children.
I reread Rand’s 1963 essay “Racism.” It made for sad reading. While it contains some good points, Rand was as pathologically opposed to potential group differences in intelligence and behavior as the late Marxist Stephen Gould. And I think Rand was wrong to equate collectivism and racism. The left is anti-Racist with a vengeance, for example arguing that race is “socially constructed.” Communism has been anti-racist notwithstanding the occasional Soviet persecution of certain groups. It is the left in Europe that supports massive third world immigration even if it destroys what little of Western civilization remains. Hard to say that this is racism, unless hating your own race constitutes racism.
The essay is also something of a package deal. Rand equates racism (which is evil) with any belief that groups have different innate intelligence. It’s all well and good to point out that we should individuals on their own merit, notwithstanding the group they are a member of, but as a practical manner we make decisions all the time based on group differences. And if science says some population groups are more or less intelligent than others, that’s what the science says. And if so, you’ll make decisions on where you live and with whom you associate based on that.
Granted the article was written in 1963, which was before Jensen’s seminal 1969 essay, “How Much Can We Boost IQ And Scholastic Achievement?
but even so, Rand might have considered the evidence for group differences. If certain groups never invented the wheel, writing or math, then its perfectly reasonable to conclude that they didn’t because they lacked the intellectual capacity. Since 1963, we’ve got inbreeding studies, brain scans which correlate brain size and intelligence, the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, and brain glucose metabolism studies. The case for group differences gets stronger by the day. Kant and Plato may have been evil by Objectivist standards, but something tells me they would have knocked any IQ test out of the park. It probably had a lot to do with their genes, ancestors and “body chemistry” as Rand would have called it.
For Rand to dismiss all this as “deterministic” misses the point. Males are more aggressive than females and it obviously has a lot to do with biology. If I had a daughter I wouldn’t let her sleep over a house that had boys. By the standards of “Racism” that would make me a “sexist.” So much better for her and so much worse for the blank slate.
Rand did much of her mature thinking after World War II. This was after the evil of the Nazis and during the high tide of behaviorism. Prior to that time it was taken for granted that there were group differences. Slavery and Nazism were defeated by people whom today we would call racists. The U.S. Constitution was drafted by men we would call racists.