Defense of Truth

It's well known that Ben Franklin was not the straightest moral shooter among the Founding Fathers, but there's a sort of cult of personality around some of the others who are respected not just for the founding philosophies and love of freedom, but also for virtue.   So a cockamamie history professor, named  Thaddeus Russell, gets almost 10 minutes of prime John Stossel show coverage on Fox this week, talking about his new book a Renegade’s History of the United States .  His basic idea is to go through the facts and show examples of debauchery, even among the Founders who most put on a morality pedestal.  While I don’t dispute many of his facts, his interpretations are almost all undergirded by the fallacious logic that the existence of immorality among influential people proves that immorality causes liberty.  The following is my comments debate with a number of passionate believers in freedom over responsibility. Me: Talk about a professor who know...

Mother Jones, ultra-liberal blog/mag was cited in a link by a Facebook friend today, who found it simply "scary". The article, entitled " It's the inequality, stupid " parroted the famous Clinton electioneering slogan, and claimed, in a series of charts with very little explanatory text, to nevertheless somehow explain "everything that's wrong with America". Of course the entire premise of the article is complete and rather childish nonsense, but I DO give full credit to the co-authors, Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot for posting source links to their distorted leftist eye-candy tripe.To the poster, I kept it civil and succinct: I honestly don't understand what's scary about somebody making more money than me. Seriously, that doesn't hurt me personally, and it's generally a good thing for the public too, because they have more to donate, more to invest, more reasons to hire people, and more to tax. If anyone would like to discuss it...

My liberal Facebook friend's post referencing NYT article here : Don't get why deficit reduction means cutting Americorps and the CPB (Mr. Rogers anyone?), and taking money from programs to hire police, to create efficient and clean energy, and build high-speed trains is preferable to eliminating tax cuts for people who make over $250,000. Can anyone explain it to simple little me? My response: I can try! Americorps is great, but could be better if funded and run privately, Public broadcasting should be able to compete in the non-govt funded market. The feds are constitutionally bound to leave certain policing programs to the state and local level Clean efficient energy would pay off big-time to anyone who can pull it off, why fund it if the profits would be their own reward High-speed trains are a known boondoggle everywhere they've been tried in the US People who make piles of cash don't horde it, they use it, usually in a way that makes the money circulate to someone...

The mainstream media is having a little fun affirming its own role as thought-police with a ridiculous statement made on the floor of the House by Tennessee Democrat Representative comparing the tactics Republicans have used to (properly!) criticize the Obamacare bill to those used by Nazi propaganda mastermind Paul Joseph Goebbels. Here are his words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG2hWFPLmZ4 Of course, even bringing up the Nazis has become so politically taboo that immediately Talk Radio condemned Rep. Cohen for comparing Republicans to Nazis. This he did NOT do. And in defending himself on CNN with Anderson Cooper, Cohen was quite right to insist that he wasn't comparing the morally repugnant Nazis with his political opponents the Republicans. Instead he attempted to be careful--and his logic is flawless in this--about re-affirming that it was the (in his mind) dishonest propaganda tactic he was condemning, not the politicians. Here's his interview on CNN: http://www.th...

Quote from Facebook friend: Although marriage has now become something based on romantic love and friendship, compatibility, etc., a legal criterion for valid marriage is still penis-vagina sex (e.g. you can annul a marriage if it's not consummated). If we really followed what we think marriage is now (friend, lover, companion, possible parenting partner) then it wouldn't matter at all what the sex/gender of the couple is. Duh. Duh? There's two movements of logical sleight-of-hand going on for this kind of statement to appear coherent as an argument. 1. We = state. Talk of legal criterion has to do with the state, but the "we" here is in reference to society at large. The two are not really equal. Society has a different stake in marriages and the relationship they solemnify than does the state. The state's interest is to define its tax-paying and benefits-receiving units, and to identify its citizens, who all derive from familial roots. Society's in...

The right has been mercilessly hammering home the evilness of this infamous Rahm Emanuel quote over the last few days, and with good reason. The essential meaning Emanuel, Barack Obama's former chief of staff and longtime Clinton iron-fist, was trying to convey, was that the masses are too stupid to understand the political system that's in their best interest. Therefore, it was up to leftist politicians to "capitalize", despite the irony of the term, on the emotional high only a crisis can provide--only a sustained media-hyped public event can provide--to shame principled opposition into permitting compromises on free-market, limited-government solutions. Now to be sure, stifling debate by choosing an unassailable victim as your voice is a preferred trick of the left, and is deplorable for what it is. Whether it's the ideology they're trying to advance, or their own personal political gain, a politician who trots out a victim can quickly chill his principl...

Italy has a new emerging Leftist superstar they're calling the Italian Obama. He's gay, he's Catholic, and he's the governor of the southern region of Puglia. Despite all this, Nichola Vendola only caught my attention because of a short quote the BBC captured to give a sense of the flavor of his popular appeal: "Today we have a globalisation of oligarchic and financial interests, but no globalisation of human rights and social rights. "We have to fight for a globalisation of the people." Of course, anyone with any sense of the history of human rights and social rights would find this statement completely ludicrous. Since the beginning of the American experiment of limited government where all are equal under the law, slavery has been abolished, almost all of the world's states have moved to democratic models for the selection of leaders, and the standard of living of even the poor in industrialized countries has been immeasurably advanced. Italy ...