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Ontological Realism and Creating the One Real Future – The Rational Argumentator
Author: Gennady Stolyarov II An ongoing debate in ontology concerns the question of whether ideas or the physical reality have primacy. In my view, the physical reality is clearly ontologically primary, because it makes possible the thinking and idea-generation which exist only as very sophisticated emergent processes depending on multiple levels of physical structures (atoms, cells, tissues, organs, organisms of sufficient complexity – and then a sufficiently rich history of sensory experience to make the formation of interesting ideas supportable). One of my favorite contemporary philosophers is David Kelley – an Objectivist but one very open to philosophical innovation – without the dogmatic taint that characterized the later years of…
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Military Conscription Shows the Evil of Ukraine’s Government
Author: Gennady Stolyarov II I have, in the past, expressed ambivalence regarding the government of Oleksandr Turchynov and Arseniy Yatseniuk in Ukraine, but that government’s decision on May 1, 2014, to impose military conscription for men aged 18 to 25 clearly reveals it to be evil and unworthy of even verbal support, not to mention the material assistance and economic bailouts currently lavished on it by Western governments and the International Monetary Fund. As I wrote in 2008 in “Why Freedom is Free and Rights Are Right: The Case Against Conscription, Compulsion, and Confiscation”, conscription is murder by lottery: “By fielding an army of conscripts, a government necessarily guarantees that…



