…is anti-human. Not news, but it’s always useful to remind people.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Human-Robot Relations
Nice to see Clara doing other than space stuff.
In Defense Of Alex Baldwin
Really. He has a fundamental constitutional right to be a racially bigoted rear orifice. The notion of “hate crimes” is a politically correct abomination, and one that I hope the SCOTUS will resolve at some point.
Obama Infantilizes Voters
Rubio sees their strengths:
Their convictions are sincere, the product of each man’s upbringing and early life experience. Mr. Obama’s formative years spent as a community organizer inspired him to consider the poor or unemployed as abused by businesses that shuttered plants or raised rents – victims of an indifferent society. His decision to “organize black folks” as he explains in “Dreams from My Father,” was fed by a need to find his place in the civil rights movement, to prove himself “not alone in my particular struggles.”
Those struggles include uneasiness with being black. When in Kenya, he finally experiences the “freedom that comes from not feeling watched…here the world was black, and so you…could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.” His views of the United States and of Europe are tinged by antipathy to white colonialism. During his visit to Kenya he decides the white tourists are “an encroachment”; he resents that they exhibit “a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.” Obama carries baggage.
Rubio grew up listening to his polio-stricken grandfather extol the virtues and values of the United States. Rubio recalls that like so many proud immigrants, the old man impressed upon his grandson that “there was no limit to how far I could go, because I was an American.” While Obama’s upbringing causes him to focus on America’s “darker periods,” Rubio’s relationship with his native land is celebratory. Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama declines to proclaim America’s exceptionalism while Rubio shouts it from the rooftops.
Not to mention Obama being raised by communists.
The Intrinsic Violence Of The Left
Andrew Klavan, with some thoughts on the invisible (and voluntary) versus the very visible hand of the Left, as most recently demonstrated by L’Affaire Chris Dorner:
The left has never bought into the central revelation of the Enlightenment: things are made to work perfectly fine without much control from above. This Enlightenment insight was inspired by the earlier work of Isaac Newton who discovered that God didn’t have to move the stars around in the sky or cause the apple to fall to earth. The Big Dude had cleverly put machinery in place that worked pretty much on its own. The economist Adam Smith translated this insight into economics when he pointed out that individuals working in their own interest frequently promote the interest of everyone as if by an invisible hand. The founders translated the idea into politics by creating a system in which individuals could act without too much government interference. These geniuses didn’t trust in individual goodness, not at all. They trusted in the handiwork of the Creator — that is, they trusted the overall human system was built to work without kings and aristocrats — or a democratic mob — forcing people to do what they wanted.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the founding saint of modern leftism, rejected that Enlightenment wisdom. He hated the modern world and thought humanity had been better off in a state of noble savagery. In that state, Rousseau believed, men were truly free because their laws naturally followed the general will. If people in the corrupt modern age violated the general will, they had to be “forced to be free.”
The logic of Rousseau led to the guillotine.
As it led to the deaths of tens of millions over the past century. And of course, it is one of the reasons (but of course by no means the only one) that they don’t want us to have guns. They assume that they are as willing to kill for their ideology as they are, and we (or rather, they) can’t have that.
[Monday morning update]
More Huffpo readers who support mass murder. See, he’s got a grievance, so it’s perfectly understandable why he’d kill innocent people.
A Worthy Cause
Go help out the Sun News. Richard Warman is one of the most vile, illiberal people in the west.
Not that I want you to not care about my lawsuit, but this one is even more important that my foofaraw with the disgustingly litigious Michael Mann. Warman is at war with the enlightenment itself.
The Virtual Presidency
The inaugural address.
[Update a few minutes later]
It strikes me that Bill is the anti-Obama. That is, his complete antithesis.
Karl Rove
…is no conservative. Well, duh. Neither is George W. Bush (or his father).
One point he missed — Bush’s flouting of the Constitution in signing McCain-Feingold while declaring it unconstitutional. The House should have threatened him (appropriately) with impeachment for that. It was a blatant violation of his oath of office.
If you have a half an hour, you might also want to listen to Mark Levin’s righteous rant on this topic.
Libertarianism
The top ten ways to talk about it:
5. At Tom Palmer’s urging, I created a speech, or at least a speech opening, around the theme that “Libertarianism is the application of science and reason to the study of politics and public policy.” That is, libertarians deal in reality, not magic. We know that government doesn’t have magical powers to ignore the laws of economics and human nature.
4. Inspired by Robert Fulghum’s bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, I like to tell people that you learn the essence of libertarianism — which is also the essence of civilization — in kindergarten:
Don’t hit other people.
Don’t take their stuff.
Keep your promises.
I never fail to be amused by the pretension of the Left that they’re the “reality-based community.”
NASA’s Mission Is Not Safety
My column, on the tenth anniversary of the Columbia loss, at USA Today.