Jim Crow? Really? Are you too lazy to actually read the bill or too intellectually bankrupt to get beyond pejorative fundraising slogans?
Read MoreBig ideas have big consequences: when you eat like an elephant, you shit like an elephant. This is true in the corporate world where the price of failure is very high. It is far more dangerous in politics when these ideas are enacted by people with no skin in the game and very little accountability.
Read More“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
Read More“While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society. “
Read More“This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.”
Read More“In such an environment, being “wrong” isn’t just wrong in some factual or analytical sense. It’s sacrilegious. “
Read More“Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us.”
Read MoreWhen you have delegitimized the opposition so severely, and when you are think your power is permanent you create powers that will easily be used against you. Burning the Reichstag was not an act of fascism, the reaction of squelching freedom of the press and other civil liberties clearly was.
Read MoreThe success of the American experiment is largely due IMO to the fortunate combination of dispersed political power being elegantly synchronous to the dispersed knowledge of the free market.
Read More“But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America. “
Read More“Calling it progressive to send children of color the message that achievement is white is an irony lost on the woke. “
Read More“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.”
Read More“Fascism took root in Europe only in nations where democratic government was relatively new, often scarcely older than the peace treaty that ended WWI. But where democracies had deeper roots and could count on popular legitimacy — as in England and France — fascist movements never emerged from the fringe.”
Read More“Conservatives have long understood that our choice is not between a bundle of prejudices and enlightened scientific management but between a bundle of prejudices and a different bundle of prejudices.”
Read More“The first is that all personal problems and all moral or intellectual matters have become political; that there is no human misfortune not amenable to political solution. The second is that, since everything can be known and changed, there is a perfect fit between action, knowledge, and morality.”
Read More“..we still cannot cut down the rules that protect the Devil without cutting down the rules that protect the saints.”
Read More“For the politician, jobs are not a means to some end — Cadillacs, bales of cotton, iPhones — but an end in and of themselves.”
Read MoreOur government attempted to bring the best features of a monarchy, and aristocracy and and democracy together without the faults; an ambitious project. Our representatives are not just reflections of a majority will; but executors of judgment with an eye towards more that the next election. This means that sometimes they must say “no” to the populist majority. The Constitution makes this easy on some issues but not all.
Read More“Fear instead of reason—fear of losing a job in the next Twitter eruption, fear of being knifed by ideologically obsessed colleagues—determines what you can see, hear or be taught in certain of our institutions. “
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