Mark Gardner

@mjgardner.bsky.social

97 Followers 110 Following

Just another desperate #Objectivist #Perl hacker. Follow me on main: @phoenixtrap.com Blog: https://phoenixtrap.com

Oil painting of Reverend Josephine Thorne standing in the doorway of a frontier church. She wears a bonnet and dust-stainedxdress, holds a worn Bible to her chest, and looks at the viewer with pale grey eyes. Behind her, a candlelit church interior; below, the muddy boomtown of Perdition Creek with tents and miners.
A large, castle-like prison building with the sign "The Beautiful Prison" on the front, under a pink and orange sunset sky.
A man in front of a Delta H Con wall bandaged from head to toe, wearing a dark olive turtleneck, overcoat, dark cargo pants, high jackboots, and black goggles. There is a blue glow emanating from his chest and he is wearing a convention badge lanyard.
person in purple transforming robot costume with laser gun arm
sketch of a fully bandaged-up man wearing dark goggles, coat, turtleneck, fingerless gloves, tactical pants and jackboots
There’s no filling the void left behind when your morality demands that you deny yourself…
meme of Nedry to Dodgson in Jurassic Park: "Evil! Evil! We’ve got an evil guy here! See? Nobody cares."
> It is only the legacy of mysticism that permits men to imagine that they are still speaking meaningfully when they declare that one can seek one’s happiness in the renunciation of one’s happiness. > > The basic fallacy in the “everyone is selfish” argument consists of an extraordinarily crude equivocation. It is a psychological truism—a tautology—that all purposeful behavior is motivated. But to equate “*motivated* behavior” with “*selfish* behavior” is to blank out the distinction between an elementary fact of human psychology and the phenomenon of *ethical choice*. It is to evade the central problem of ethics, namely: by *what* is man to be motivated? Branden, N. “Isn’t Everyone Selfish?” September 1962. Collected in Rand, A. [_The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism_.](https://a.co/8vpZsjK) Signet, November 1964.
The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized… The Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle. —Ayn Rand, December 1976
I’m Bluesky user number 4,795,442. Let’s hear it for surrogate database keys!
watercolor illustration of the character Fagin from Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” painted by “Kyd” a/k/a Joseph Clayton Clarke (1857-1937)
a crocheted chicken wearing a small red, white, and blue hat
A hand holding a smartphone displaying the ChatGPT logo with the phrase, “I’m all you need”
“Do not explain capitalism to me” from DoNotReply.cards