In the wake of the earthquake, a number of countries – including the u.s., France, and the Dominican Republic – are calling a temporary halt to the deportation of Haitian immigrants.
While this falls far short of the freeing-up of the borders that justice and compassion alike demand, it represents a little bit of very welcome decency.
Has anyone noticed before that the names in Anthem are all in the format of old-style telephone exchanges?
Also, Directive 10-289 from Atlas can be converted to the same format just by shifting the hyphen.
Now all we need is a song titled “Union 7-5309.”
A lot of Randians seem to think that the phrase and concept “floating abstraction” is specific to Rand; but in fact the term “floating abstraction” (or, more commonly, “free-floating abstraction”), often (though not always) meaning something actually fairly close to what Rand meant by it, is quite common in Continental and leftist thought, showing up in Marxist, feminist, phenomenological, and postmodernist discourse.
I don’t know whether this is a coincidence or whether there was influence – or, if so, in which direction. It would be interesting to know which came first, but I’m not sure how old either version is. The oldest use I could find online for “free-floating abstraction” was from Kathleen Nott in 1969 (but I didn’t search at much length); Rand was already using “floating abstraction” at least as early as 1961 (in For the New Intellectual) and probably earlier. (It’s also in Branden’s Principles lectures (as transcribed in The Vision of Ayn Rand), the earliest version of which was recorded in 1958, but I don’t know which year the text in Vision comes from; and Atlas Shrugged seems to be working toward the concept in Galt’s reference to “the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream.”)