The antidote to anti-American indoctrination is to keep proving, with facts and reason, the unique advantages of American society compared to other past or present civilizations. This will expose the double standard of anti-Americanism, which demonizes democracy’s imperfections but condones oppressive regimes’ crimes against humanity. It would significantly broaden and deepen children’s patriotic instruction in school. In college, instead of Marxist pseudo-science offered with a hefty price-tag, students would benefit from a rigorous training in American history and foundational philosophy contrasted with other political, economical, and social systems since ancient times and across the globe.
Educating people about America’s time-honored virtues as compared to the rest of the world will provide a much-needed frame of reference—a historical and geographical perspective that will give us a 20/20 vision of how good we have it. It will arm us with solid knowledge—with the unshakable realization that we cannot equate the flaws of a free country with the unfathomable atrocities of tyrannical governments. It will pierce the veil of cancel-culture groupthink and uncover its totalitarian core.
Given the expanding role of government and erosion of individual liberty that occurs under both fascism & socialism, and the murderous history of each, why is communism/collectivism so much more palatable than National Socialism?
Professor Peterson makes some extremely important observations & admonitions in this Q&A.
First, the typical left-wing student is more like your neighbor’s 19 year old kid than they are a hardcore Marxist revolutionary. They are more clueless than cause motivated; until they get in with a frenzied mob.
Second, we can’t win a battle of ideas unless there is a debate to be had. And there can’t be a debate when everything is on fire and there’s blood in the streets.
So, our first goal has got to be peace as opposed to winning the argument. Don’t allow the malevolent tendencies that exist within all of us to dominate. That is how things spiral out of control, fast!
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim, speaks to Candace Owens about the dangers of political/theocratic Islam and its incompatibility with the Constitutional Representative Republic form of government in the USA. He discusses the ideological roots of theocratic Islam and it’s alliance with social collectivism and separtist/fascist movements of the 20th Century. He contends that disruption, by speaking truth to power, within the Muslim communities will be the only force effective enough to bring about reforms compatible with western democracy.
Welcome to Friday’s Philosophical Foray beyond Healthcare!
Government bureaus are not needed for mass censorship. You only need people in authority willing to acquiesce to the intimidation tactics of an idea-censoring, anti-free speech mob wielding their social & professional weaponry like pitchforks.
Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.
“The above is a quotation from George Orwell’s preface toAnimal Farm, titled “The Freedom of the Press,” where he discussed the chilling effect the Soviet Union’s influence had on global publishing and debate far beyond the reach of its official censorship laws.
Wait, no it isn’t. The quote is actually an excerpt from theresignation letterofNew York Timesopinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, penned this week, where she blows the whistle on the hostility toward intellectual diversity that now reigns supreme at the country’s most prominent newspaper.”
Jefferson did not define what constitutes “happiness”. Consistent with his vision of individual liberty, he purposefully left this as the responsibility of each person. Individual happiness is not a political matter. It is not something that governments should prescribe, nor is it something that others should define for us. It is a matter of personal conscience and mission. It is precisely the kind of matter that our other social institutions, such as families and churches, should aid each of us in defining without leaning on any political mandate.
Yet despite not defining happiness, and despite excluding it from the domain of government to prescribe or to provide, Jefferson included “the pursuit of happiness” as a linchpin in our national vision. This implies that it has tremendous significance.
It does. Life requires meaning and motivation to serve as a frame of reference for all action, or else there would be no action. Why would anyone do anything at all if there is no purpose? Jefferson knew that dissertations about revolutions, rights, and constitutions are pointless if life itself has no meaning. The Declaration would have been just airy poetry if it wasn’t anchored to something transcendent.
Jefferson did not define what happiness should be for each person, because defining meaning for others is an impossible task and trying to do so violates the very essence of freedom. But his inclusion of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” with the other unalienable rights is a clear assertion that pursuing meaning is as fundamental to humanity as is life and liberty.
Jefferson rightly understood that the political and the metaphysical must at some point intersect, because the meaning of life and the proper structure of government are necessarily entangled. That is why the unusual phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is the Rosetta Stone of the Declaration and the foundation of the concept of America.
The Declaration is not a metaphysical document, except for that one phrase, but that one phrase is more than sufficient to establish the basis for an enduring politics of peace and non-coercion. The phrase does not express a religious truth, but it grants freedom for all spiritual pursuits. It does not express a psychological truth, but it grants freedom for all intellectual pursuits. It does not express a transcendent truth, but it grants freedom for the pursuit of meaning and purpose.
Three months ago, Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University predicted dire social consequences if states enforced social distancing measures to curb a virus scientists didn’t yet understand.
“I feel extremely sad that my predictions were verified,” Ioannidis said in a recent interview with Greek media.
“There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus,” Ioannidis, a Greek-American physician, told Greek Reporter. “Of course none of these studies are perfect, but cumulatively they provide useful composite evidence. A very crude estimate might suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases.”
Ioannidis said medical data suggest the fatality risk is far lower than earlier estimates had led policymakers to believe and “is almost 0%” for individuals under 45 years old. The median fatality rate is roughly 0.25 percent, however, because the risk “escalates substantially” for individuals over 85 and can be as high as 25 percent for debilitated people in nursing homes.
“The death rate in a given country depends a lot on the age-structure, who are the people infected, and how they are managed,” Ioannidis said. “For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%. For 45 to 70, it is probably about 0.05-0.3%. For those above 70, it escalates substantially…”
“Major consequences on the economy, society and mental health” have already occurred. I hope they are reversible, and this depends to a large extent on whether we can avoid prolonging the draconian lockdowns and manage to deal with COVID-19 in a smart, precision-risk targeted approach, rather than blindly shutting down everything…”
There’s little question that the lock-downs have caused widespread economic, social, and emotional carnage. Evidence that US states that locked down fared better than states that did not is hard to find.
Though not yet certain, the COVID-19 pandemic may well turn out to be another example of central planning gone wrong.
As I previously noted, it’s a sad irony that many of the greatest disasters in modern history—from Stalin’s “kolkhoz” collective farming system to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and beyond—are the result of central planners trying to improve the lot of humanity through coercive action.
“This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not,” Hayek wrote in The Use of Knowledge in Society. “It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.”
Our Rights come from God, not government. Physician/ Patient/ Survivor/ Wife/ Mother of 4 daughters/ Small biz owner/ Limited Government/ No Socialized Medicine/ Texan/ President www.AAPSonline.org
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