Philosophy

Liberty, Youth, and Fidelity to Truth in the Open Society

Dr. Pedro Blas González
Dr. Pedro Blas González

10/16/2010 – Pedro Blas González –
Traveling through the world today, I get the vivid impression that a vast number of the people I meet are living with the self-conscious belief that life is a purposeless thing to be occupied with pointless, daily tasks. I encounter this in spontaneous conversations that arise in diverse places, and with many different people. I am never surprised to hear this same complaint from others. I find it important to listen intently to what others have to say in this matter.

I suppose that to some ears this may sound presumptuous on my part. After all, we are living in a time when most people claim the right to be critics. Critics are everyone in our age. This is as comical as it is deplorable. People who have never studied or read history, literature, philosophy or much of anything else of lasting value are more interested in attacking the contemplative character of genuine ideas than they are in learning and incorporating these in their own lives. And, if these critics perceive or imagine that they are in the presence of a morally upright, righteous person, then they intensify their resistance to knowledge, to advice, to the other person before them like beasts of burden who grudgingly anticipate a difficult task. Unfortunately, today cynicism has filled in the vacuum where virtue once ruled. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

The Ideology of Totalitarian Humanism

9/23/2010 – Keith Preston –
Many on the alternative Right are inclined to refer to PC as “cultural Marxism.” In some ways, this is an apt metaphor, as the PC ideology bears a resemblance to the reductionist concept of class antagonism that orthodox Marxism advances. If the dualistic class dichotomy of “proletarians and bourgeoisie” is replaced with a newer dichotomy pitting feminist women, minorities, gays, immigrants, the transgendered and others having been or believed to be oppressed against the “hegemony” of “straight, white, Christian, males,” then similarities between PC and Marxism do indeed emerge.

However, PC could in some ways be compared with totalitarianism from the other end of the political spectrum. If the duality of “Aryans” believed to be oppressed by and in mortal struggle with “the Jews” is replaced with the aforementioned dichotomy advanced by PC, a reductionism of comparable crudity likewise becomes apparent. Yet it would seem to me that such metaphors as “cultural Marxism” or “liberal Nazism” are not really the best characterizations of PC. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

The Curious Logic of Our Governing Elites

9/20/2010 – Randall Hoven –
George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” What follows is my beginning of a list of ideas that some very intelligent people seem to believe.

The air should be taxed. More precisely, what every animal on earth exhales and what every plant on earth inhales can and should be taxed.

President Bush was bad for the economy because he spent too much. President Obama is helping the economy by spending a lot.

A jury is better informed if evidence is withheld from it. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Why the Right Fears Transforming America — and the Left Seeks It

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager

9/7/2010 – Dennis Prager –
The giveaway regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plans for America was his repeated use of the words “fundamentally transform.”

Some of us instinctively reacted negatively — in fact, with horror — at the thought of fundamentally transforming America.

The “us” are conservatives.

One unbridgeable divide between left and right is how each views alternatives to present-day America. Those on the left imagine an ideal society that has never existed, and therefore seek to “fundamentally transform” America. When liberals imagine an America fundamentally transformed, they envision it becoming a nearly utopian society in which there is no greed, no racism, no sexism, no inequality, no poverty and ultimately no unhappiness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, look around at other societies and history and are certain that if America were fundamentally transformed, it would become just like those other societies. America would become a society of far less liberty, of ethically and morally inferior citizens and of much more unhappiness. And cruelty would increase exponentially around the world. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Progressive Death

5/2/2010 – Paul Kengor –
Progressivism is all the rage nowadays, with liberals having jettisoned the “liberal” label for the less maligned tag of “progressive.” In truth, “progressive” is a better name, more accurately describing the movement and its extremely broad, precariously unpredictable direction.

Here is the essence of the problem with progressives and their movement, which is a gigantic problem for all of America: One of the only things we really know about progressives, and that they know about themselves and their ideology, is that they favor constant “change,” “reform,” an ever-shifting, ongoing “evolution,” or, yes, progression. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Obama’s Greatest Deficit Is Wisdom

4/28/2010 – Tom White –

It is often said, by both supporters and detractors, that President Barack Obama is intelligent, smart, well-educated, and even cerebral. However, President Obama is never described as wise. Wisdom is a special quality reserved for a few rare individuals. And wisdom is the most important characteristic which distinguishes ordinary leaders from extraordinary leaders.

Obama’s wisdom deficit is not necessarily a flaw or defect in his character. It is simply a quality that does not yet exist within the man. The old adage “with age comes wisdom” hints that wisdom takes time to acquire, but not all people become wise. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Believe It or Not


First Things | by David B. Hart | 4/2010

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Liberal Narcissism and Anti-Christian Phobia

American Thinker | by Deborah C. Tyler | 4/11/2010

Americans have always expected national television broadcasters to steer clear of degrading epithets. On April 14, 2009, CNN’s Anderson Cooper established a new low in television journalism when he labeled millions of Americans in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term. Other mainstream media journalists and personalities gleefully followed suit. There was no outcry from the “anti-hate community.” Many liberals do not merely tolerate contumelies against conservatives, but they delight in them.

In the years after World War II, psychologists (many of whom were European Jews who had escaped Nazism) intensively studied how fascist and authoritarian states could bring ordinary people to commit extraordinary crimes against minorities. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

But What About the Poor?

American Thinker | by Allen Weingarten | Nov. 2, 2009

The left avers that many Americans are poverty-stricken, that we need to do more to alleviate their plight, and that the primary role of government is to help them. Let us examine these claims.

‘Poverty’ may be viewed as harsh deprivation, such as in Biafra or the Congo. Yet nobody in America starves to death. It is true that the standard of living of illegals from Mexico is far below ours, yet even they are far better off than the inhabitants of third-world countries. Nor do the poor in America suffer as did those during the Great Depression. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Making a Monkey Out of Darwin

CNSNews | Patrick J. Buchanan | June 30, 2009

“You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science,” wrote Thomas Huxley. “Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be.”

As “Darwin’s bulldog,” Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master’s theory gospel truth in Great Britain. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail