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Daily Blogs for 6/2008
by Christopher Chantrill
Conservatives Obtuse on '60s Civil Rights | 06/30/08
Why was it that Sen. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act? A ...
Heller and "Select Militias" | 06/27/08
The big takeaway for me on the Second Amendment case of ...
Heller Doesn't End It | 06/26/08
Today the United States Supreme Court in ...
Are You Sure, Dems? | 06/25/08
If you scratch a Democrat this year, you will probably find someone who feels like ...
What's So Depressing? | 06/24/08
Women are twice as likely to be depressed as men, writes ...
Wright Was Almost Right | 06/23/08
Everyone understands that messages often get garbled in transmission. Teachers ...
The Age of Anti-Heroes and Anti-Modesty | 06/20/08
At the beginning of his remarkable book Honor: A ...
The GOP Energy Raid | 06/19/08
For years the liberals have been telling us that we needed to end our addiction to ...
Free the Subprime Six! | 06/18/08
So what if Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) got sweetheart mortgages ...
The Gay Marriage Question | 06/17/08
Now that the California Supreme Court has spoken about gay marriage, it’s time ...
Who Gives and Who Takes? | 06/16/08
Who knew? Back in 2006 Arthur C. Brooks published ...
Liberal Lawyers Notch Another One | 06/13/08
To conservatives the decision of the US Supreme Court to give the detainees at ...
McCain Clueless on Energy | 06/12/08
Is John McCain really clueless on energy? Or is he just pretending?
He talked ...
The D'Oh-bama Factor | 06/11/08
You have to wonder, as Barack Obama stumbles from one gaffe to another. Is he really ...
Liberals are Different From You and Me... | 06/10/08
It’s like the old saying: “The rich are different from you and me. They ...
Left Doesn't Like Free Speech | 06/09/08
Everyone is properly outraged at the quasi-legal proceedings of the British Columbia ...
Labor Market Turmoil | 06/06/08
The equity markets are off sharply today and you can see why.
No, it’s not ...
Obama's Vision for America | 06/05/08
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) gave a speech on Tuesday obviously intended to be a ...
Obama We Hardly Know Ye | 06/04/08
As Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) becomes the presumptive presidential nominee of the ...
MSM: What Took You So Long? | 06/03/08
Conservatives are having a grand old time this election season watching the Clintons ...
"The Metrics Pointed to Failure" | 06/02/08
One of the key things to understand about human conflict (and that means human life in ...
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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