In NI Weekly, we gather together all the articles and videos published over the previous week. All you need to do is read the short summaries and decide what interests you. Here’s what we featured between September 26 and October 2. Enjoy!

• An episode of ARI Bookshelf, our book review and discussion series, analyzes The Mattering Instinct by philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Greg Salmieri, Ben Bayer, Mike Mazza and Sam Weaver discuss Goldstein’s account of why questions of meaning and purpose are so important in people’s lives, and her method of evaluating answers to such questions by how they help us fight “entropy.” They also correct the book’s brief but imprecise mention of Ayn Rand view of heroic people.

• A short report on our recent student conference, AynRandCon-US, in Austin, Texas, surveys the program and spotlights feedback from students and faculty. Senior fellow and speaker Ben Bayer characterized the conference as “probably the most exciting student-oriented Objectivist conference I’ve attended.”

• An article by Robertas Bakula defends the “Most Hated Company in America.” Bakula argues that the moral and economic accusations against Live Nation Entertainment about “gouging” concertgoers are smears that scapegoat a competent, successful company.

• An interview with Greg Salmieri was featured on the Texas Talks podcast about Rand’s ideas and their relation to other philosophies and political movements. Among others, Salmieri discussed Aristotle, Marx, and “libertarians.” He also discussed his own work and interest in philosophy.

• An article by Ben Bayer was published as the cover story for Free Inquiry, a secular magazine published by the Center for Inquiry, one of the leading atheist-agnostic organizations in the U.S. Bayer reviewed Bart Ehrman’s book Love Thy Stranger, which traces today’s dominant morality of self-sacrificial altruism to the teachings of Jesus. Bayer argues that Ehrman’s scholarship should cause skeptics of religion to doubt the rationality of altruism.

Here, I comment on the viral news story about the Last Ditch Bar in Massachusetts: why does crap like this happen to progressives, and how does it demonstrate the unworkability of their worldview?

1. Background

This story was first covered by the Blocked and Reported podcast. Last Ditch is a lesbian bar that opened in Greenfield, Massachusetts in 2025, with some very progressive ideas. They determined that no one should be turned away from the venue due to inability to pay; hence, patrons who (allegedly) could not afford the cover charge were admitted anyway. The homeless were welcome, though police were not.

They had mask mandates through September 2026. Then, in the face of unsurprising financial struggles, four years after the rest of the country gave up mask mandates, the bar decided to go mask-optional on just one night a week, Saturday. That’s when the bar’s patrons went utterly insane. Or rather—because they were doubtless already insane—began to manifest their insanity at the bar’s owners. Comments on social media included:

The bar posted an apology for their insensitivity, to which the critics reacted with further outrage, noting that the apology was posted as an image without alternate text for the visually impaired, thus further demonstrating their virulent ableism.

In the photo below, the three owners pose maskless, thus demonstrating their genocidal agenda, if you still had any doubt.

The bar then organized a struggle session in which community members could air their grievances. Woke critics showed up to talk about the harm they were suffering and the racism, ableism, etc., of Last Ditch. They had a licensed therapist serve as mediator. One patron worried about whether, because she was a licensed therapist, the mediator was thereby in effect an agent of the state who could have attendees involuntarily committed for things that they said during the struggle session. They called the presence of this therapist “wildly unsafe.”

Read more

Marian Halcombe, “Jacob Rees-Mogg: Conservatism as a Costume,” Libertarian Alliance (3 October, 2026).

I have no time for watching videos. But I will read their transcripts when made available. Therefore, if I did not watch it, I have read Tucker Carlson’s interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, published on the 2^nd October 2026. The most revealing part of the interview with comes towards the end. After nearly an hour discussing Russia, deterrence, the world wars and the international order, the conversation reaches the freedom of British people to speak in their own country. Rees-Mogg supplies this extraordinary reassurance:

“They’re not oppressing anything that I’ve tried to say…” — 58:04

He immediately seeks to qualify it. Nevertheless, the instinct is revealing. Here is a former senior minister, confronted with the suppression of other people’s opinions, reaching first for the fact that his own opinions remain comfortably expressible.

Carlson interrupts:

“That’s not how free speech works.”

Quite. A political order cannot be judged by how pleasantly it treats Jacob Rees-Mogg.

The interview ranges widely. Rees-Mogg argues that military preparedness deters Russia, that the integrity of nation states is essential to international order, and that Britain has an interest in supporting Ukraine. Carlson repeatedly asks what these commitments cost, how they benefit British people, and whether Britain’s rulers are more attentive to distant frontiers than to the condition of their own country. They dispute the justification for the world wars, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, immigration, sovereignty and the policing of speech.

But the central political revelation is much simpler. Rees-Mogg can recognise failure. He can describe it. He can occasionally deplore it in language strong enough to satisfy a conservative audience. What he does not provide is a convincing account of why anyone should entrust the remedy to the political class that presided over it.

That is what makes him, in my judgment, a City spiv masquerading as a gentleman. The phrase describes a political performance: the cultivation of reassuring manners and traditional associations while selling another instalment of the same exhausted Conservative promise. His career in finance and his role in establishing Somerset Capital Management are matters of public record. So are his appointments as Leader of the Commons, minister for government efficiency and Business Secretary. This was a man inside government, with access and influence, not an eccentric spectator watching events from a country drawing room.

Read more>>

Apple Developer News, in a post titled “Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS”:

We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems — including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history — without users’ full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.

They don’t name names, but clearly this is in response to Meta Muse (cf. Jason Aten’s misadventure with Muse accessing Aten’s iMessages), Grok Bot, Claude, Dots, and the rest. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I really worry about just how much Apple is going to lock Full Disk Access down. I use it with several apps that couldn’t function properly without it, and would be severely hampered if I needed to authorize it manually every time they do something.

But before we Mac power users riot in Cupertino, we should note that we have no idea how many unsophisticated Mac users are calling Apple and queuing up at the retail store Genius Bars to complain about Muse and these other agents having run amok on their Macs, against their desires, after convincing these users to grant them access. It is a legitimate frustration for the highest-functioning users among us that the Mac has, for years, already seemed “too locked down”. But there are now around 150 million Mac users worldwide. Most of them are unsophisticated technically — a majority of them, profoundly so. Many of them have technical needs that cannot be met by the baby computer OS that is iPadOS. For a lot of them it might just be the ability to run the real version of Google’s Chrome web browser — or even the desktop version of Safari. So there are tens of millions of people who need to use a Mac to do things that cannot be done on an iPad, but who have zero understanding of what it means, say, to grant Muse permission for Full Disk Access. And then they think it is Apple’s fault that Muse is suddenly able to read their private iMessage conversations.

(Anyone out there who, say, works at an Apple retail store and can confirm whether this is an escalating support issue — one way or the other — I’d love to hear from you, confidentially.)

On iOS (and its tablet variant, iPadOS), you can say OK to every single thing an app like Muse asks for and Muse still won’t be able to read your email or end-to-end encrypted messages from iMessage or WhatsApp. There is no level of permission that grants third-party apps permission for such things. (The EU wants to force Apple to allow that under the DMA.) MacOS isn’t like that. You still need to grant apps permission for such things, but if you say OK to everything an app like Muse asks for on the Mac, you’re granting that app access to, effectively, almost everything on your startup drive. There are still some things it can’t see, but not many. A lot of non-technical Mac users do not understand this and cannot be expected to understand this. They just think, wrongly, that Apple protects them from allowing anything truly dangerous, because that’s how their iPhone (and/or iPad) works. So they just click OK to every access request from Muse and presume they’re still largely protected.

Hopefully Apple has in mind a solution to this situation that will still enable knowledgeable power users to confirm agreement to a sufficiently scary warning and put their Macs in a state similar to what we have today. I worry. What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is. Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do not — and don’t realize they’re using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly (literal) face.