Category Archives

Archive of posts published in the category: Politics

Poetic Disinformation

Even the most educated and credentialed are subject to cognitive biases, and commitment to a preferred narrative over objective facts.

This is especially true for a government run Ministry of Truth, no matter what you decide to call it.

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Liberty is Boring

“Because the hatred of adjacent heretics is more intimate and more intense than the hatred of distant infidels, these rightists end up doing things that would be otherwise inexplicable,”

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Truth Wizards

“Another driving force behind the growth of the fact-checking complex is the necessity of enforcing loyalty to progressive ideas that can’t survive on their own. Stripped of their specialized language and social and bureaucratic context, key articles of Progressive Church faith are repulsive to most ordinary voters, regardless of gender or race.”

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The Contexts of History

History is complicated and not easily reduced to single theory explanations such as the 1619 Project.  We can address our sins without ignoring our redemption. We can learn more from understanding context than by either glorification or demonization.

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Freedom of Mind

“Free speech and freedom of mind, if we understand them properly, should be rooted in intellectual humility. It is possible — it is certain — that some of the things we believe are wrong, be those matters of fact, matters of moral judgment, or estimates of the dangers posed by words and ideas that offend us. “

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When Philosophy Gets Democratized

“We see this wonderful paradox today that democratic intellectuals want more democracy than the American people—who are not intellectuals—want. They speak for the people and ask for reforms that the people themselves haven’t thought of or aren’t demanding or wouldn’t care about really but for their intellectuals, who impose on them.”

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The Truckers’ Spring

“A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. “

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Why The Radicals Devour Their Own

“As every good utopian knows, The Plan cannot fail — The Plan can only be failed. And that is how the people-over-profits socialist humanitarians of the 20th century ended up murdering more than 100 million people in the pursuit of fairness and social justice.”

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Joe Rogan vs The Expert Class

“Like medieval nobles claiming a right to rule based on being a superior breed, and then openly practising inbreeding, our current elites rarely live up to their own hype. Often, the experts are stupid and wrong, sometimes to an almost comical degree. “

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Dignity and Due Process

“Due process is giving legal form to your rights. To have rights is to be dignified.”

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The Guilty Bourgeoisie

“One could charge the white upper middle class of America as committed to a form of ruthless meritocracy in some areas of life and to ruthless egalitarianism in all the others. Debt relief and minimum-lot-size regulations for the households in their neighborhoods. Lawlessness in the name of advancing equality for your neighborhoods.”

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Too Much Democracy Undermines Democracy

“Rule of the people requires that the power of the people be limited, spread out, and qualified, and argued out. “

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Democracy is Vulgar

“He’s more authoritarian, but that’s just what democracy is, when it isn’t made moderate and deliberate by constitutions. So he’s the underside of our system. And he’s the very kind of enemy that we were warned against at the very beginning.”

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Culture and Economics

“So each thinks it’s losing, because it’s losing what it most wants. But if you look at those two things—economics and culture—that just goes back to the two rights in Locke: economics, private property; and culture, toleration. “

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A Liberal Democracy is a Limited Democracy

A liberal democracy is a limited democracy.  Without that immensely important modifier, democracy is ripe for tyranny.

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Private Property and Toleration

“So the intellectuals were no longer allies or friends of businessmen and became enemies. This happens with Rousseau. The whole idea of keeping together these two social currents of liberalism—namely, private property and toleration—gets lost. What we have today are mostly progressive intellectuals.”

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Democratic Headwinds

Their grab for power in suggesting court packing, elimination of the filibuster and federalizing elections clearly suggests they cannot be trusted with centralized power.

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Remembering the Yacht Tax

Progressives think the Constitution is organic and the economy is mechanical; in reality it is the reverse.  Thinking you can tax an isolated segment without affecting others ignores the dispersed nature of knowledge that no central authority can emulate.

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The Source of Rights

The Constitution has two important functions: to protect the republic/ democracy that represents the people and to protect the people’s individual liberty from the abuses of democracy.  Democracy is not the end, it is the means and must be limited.

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Our Liberal Culture

Behind the brilliant design of our Constitution is an accurate understanding about human nature and its permanence.  This is the reason it has endured in spite of the difficult and contentious compromises that birthed it. 

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