Category Archives: Education

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Stop Trivializing Naziism

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Thoughts from David Harsanyi:

It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.

Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Climate Wars

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The (rare) voices of reason:

10. Can we put the polarization genie back in the bottle, on climate or anything else? I really don’t know. But I do wonder how those advocating further radicalization of climate advocacy imagine any of this ends.

11. Making ever more radical demands might be a fine strategy were there someone to negotiate with. But by the reckoning of most prominent climate hawks, there isn’t.

12. Nor does it appear that a more inclusive climate coalition is likely to bring larger congressional majorities. Any Democrat-only climate strategy has to be predicated on not only winning but holding purple/red districts over multiple elections.

13. These are precisely the districts that radicalized climate rhetoric alienates culturally and the green policy agenda punishes economically. Since the failure of cap and trade in 2010, climate activists have taken rhetoric to 11, and what it got them was Trump.

And it will continue to.

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Remembering Bobby Kennedy

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I remember waking up on a school day to hear that he’d been shot out in California. That was a rough couple months, between it and the earlier MLK assassination. Fifty years on, a useful reminder that much of the history has been rewritten, and that both he and JFK were highly overrated. Teddy was scum, but apparently some Americans have need for royalty.

More thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

Business, Economics, Education, History, Law, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

America The Weird

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Victor Davis Hanson on the appeal of the West:

America remains the exceptional Western nation, whose influence and stature transcend the size of its economy and population, and its vast land mass of rich natural resources. Its cocktail of property rights, unfettered oil and gas development, muscular national defense, gun rights, religiosity, free-market economics, limited government, philanthropy, and great private universities is, again, unlike anything in the West.

Likewise, its excesses that arise from the marriage of free-market affluence and constitutionally protected unfettered expression, in the eyes of the world, appear often as license and indulgence. Certainly, the First and Second Amendments, the National Football League, rap music, the U.S. Marine Corps, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, or 24/7 cable news could not originate elsewhere.

The result is that America exists both as the world’s refuge and its beacon, the sole place where individuals can find a safe harbor. Only in America can the individual remain free and able to live his life under the assumption that the major decisions of his life are his own and not predicated on state approval. Only in the United States does the rags to riches story still exist, given that neither regulation, the deep state, nor an entrenched aristocracy can fully suppress entrepreneurs or aspiring capitalists.

A key goal of my Outer Space Treaty project is to extend this to the solar system. Speaking of which, Michael Listner has an analysis of the latest U.S. legislation along these lines.