When 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 More“Calling it progressive to send children of color the message that achievement is white is an irony lost on the woke. “
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. “
Read More“True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand.”
Read MoreI lament the subversion of ideas and policy to the passions of the electorate, but it is hard to escape that reality. The more distant we get from our founding principles, both chronologically and intellectually, the more divisive we become. When you do not know what you believe everything becomes an argument. Without the unity of commonly held ideas we descend into the combat zone of identity politics.
Read MoreThe mark of an intelligent mind is to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head at the same time. The voters said that character matters but not at all costs. They rejected Trump’s character but also rejected the extreme policy elements of his opposition. It became possible to reject Trump and still reject the woke zealotry of the left. A vote against Trump was not a vote for socialistic policies, defunding the police, or acceptance of America as permanently morally scarred by its past.
Read MoreScience begins with guessing and then proceeds to proof.
Scientists is a susceptible to cognitive biases as any human and must work to overcome them.
Separating the cranks from the visionaries requires judgment and patience.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Politics can and often do pollute science.
“Such cases show what happens when our heightened eagerness to take offense meets institutions’ innate desire to avoid trouble. If hearing a contrary opinion feels like a personal assault, then any potentially controversial statement is equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded theater. It’s much easier for a business or a school to avoid trouble, and potential liability, by shutting down discussion altogether.”
Read MoreThere will be no resolution of America’s many social problems if free thought and free speech are no longer upheld in our public sphere. Without them, honest deliberation, mutual learning and the American problem-solving ethic are dead.
Read More“Properly understood, the “1619 Project” isn’t about black history. It’s about today’s racial disparities. It’s about applying current ideologies to past events, in the continuing attempt to blame the past actions of whites for the current problems of blacks.”
Read MoreThe passion for equality and social justice often obscures the best way to achieve it. This is the epitome of virtue signaling; policies and results matter more than intent,
Read More“The Depression and FDR transformed the Democratic Party. It adopted as an article of faith, held to this day by every Democratic presidential candidate, that any tear in the social fabric should be mended with permanent entitlements or subsidies. The competing idea is that subsidies are a poor substitute for finding and holding a job in a vibrant private economy.”
Read More“It’s an understandable temptation, in the sense that changing, say, tax credits is far less daunting than repairing a culture. But then, who are the real materialists, if the answer to a cultural meltdown isn’t to address the human soul but to say, “Don’t worry, we can engineer it all through regulation and the tax code”?
Read More“To the contrary, it’s because they don’t believe politicians recalibrating the tax code in the name of the common good will bring about the moral economy. It’s because they don’t believe technicians redirecting capital investment will work, or that it can be had with no costs or unintended consequences. Above all, it’s because they believe that trusting Washington to give us a new and improved capitalism by repurposing private companies to serve the priorities of the government rather than those of their owners requires a faith far greater than any ever demanded by the Lord.”
Read MoreRelative poverty is a very different problem from absolute poverty. If you were sitting in a room with a 100 executives making a six figure income and Bill Gates walked in, the inequality would skyrocket. Is that a problem?
Read MoreThe big question when Trump won in 2016 was whether his victory was the result of the rejection of the ideology of the left or the rejection of the deeply flawed Hillary Clinton. The question few of us considered was if it was the attractiveness of either the character or policies of Donald Trump.
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