I wonder how many times you will be able to get in this program and have your records expunged if it doesn’t work the first time?
Tag Archives: Obama administration
Voters don’t care Hillary Clinton is dishonest and immoral
Based on the last comment in this post — As wise French philosopher and diplomat Count Joseph Marie Maistre (1763-1821) observed, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” The only hope we have is that we don’t deserve her and we are not the idiots that the polls indicate.
How Can So Many World Leaders Be So Wrong?
They are wrong because they are world leaders, its seldom that any are really right in much of anything they do.
By Alan Caruba ~
In a recent Daily Caller article, Michael Bastach took note of “25 Years of predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’.” This is the message that the Earth is warming rapidly and, if we don’t abandon the use of fossil fuels for power, it will arrive to wreak destruction on the human race and all life on the planet.
It is astounding how many past and present world leaders are telling everyone this despite the total lack of any real science, nor any actual warming—the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since 1997!
At the heart of the global warming—now called climate change—“crisis” has been the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that has been issuing apocalyptic predictions since its inception in 1988. None of its predictions have come true. How could they, based as they are on the false science of computer…
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Two Sacred Cows
By Prof. Paul Eidelberg
The controversy over the free speech issue triggered by the Mohammad cartoon contest recently held at Garland, Texas – and notable public figures have participated in this controversy – is that the ideas advanced by the participants lack a truth position.
They are intellectually limited by position of John Stuart Mill’s famous and most influential essay On Liberty. This essay, written in 1859, has been the cornerstone of the American Supreme Court decisions on what has become the First Amendment’s exaltation of freedom of speech. The Court has effectively held that free speech has a “preferred position” vis-à-vis other values, including public morality and even issues involving national security (qualified by the “clear and present danger” doctrine).
The preferred position doctrine concerning free speech, in America constitutional law, lends itself to absolute or unfettered freedom of expression. This absolutist position is conceptually related to multicultural moral relativism, which may be regarded as a resurrection of the teachings of the Greek sophists, notably Protagoras. So much for some background.
Now, what’s lacking in the free speech controversy triggered by the Garland event – and it’s lacking in Mill’s famous essay – is a TRUTH position. The absence of truth, and its consequent moral relativism, is the malaise of modern liberalism, in contradistinction to the classicalLiberalism of America’s Founding Fathers (which I have discussed elsewhere).
The absence of truth logically entails absolute or unfettered freedom of speech. This logically excludes any restraints on public pornography, now a multi-billion dollar industry for which we must thank the American Supreme Court, most notably the late Associate Justice William O. Douglas, an unabashed, not to say vulgar, moral relativist.
I hasten to add, however, that exposing the vicious character Islam is justified if only because Islam is unambiguously a “clear and present danger” to America, and, indeed, to the Judeo-Christian values of Western civilization (leaving Mill’s essay On Liberty a subject for antiquarians).
Nothing of intellectual significance, however, should be expected from the controversy mentioned above, since the issue of truth is foreign to contemporary liberalism, which is as much a sacred cow for liberal democrats as Islam is for Jihadists.☼
Judge Jeanine Blasts the Media Over Pam Geller’s Event in Texas
TIE-DYED TYRANNY
PROGRESSIVISM: EMPIRE OF LIES
LOCH NESS SOCIALISM
THE STRUGGLE FOR STUPIDITY
Freedom of Speech: Introduction
By Prof. Paul Eidelberg
A lot of sophomoric trite has been uttered in the media about freedom of speech in reaction to the terrorist attack at Muhammad Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas, 3 May, 2015. Let’s be serious about a most serious subject.
Freedom of speech is of course a fundamental human value. This value seems to have its home in liberal democracy. In fact, liberal democracy exalts freedom of speech over all other values. Unfortunately, the exaltation of this freedom has led to its degradation. Today, freedom of speech lacks rational and ethical constraints. Divorced from truth, freedom of speech has become a license not only to lie but even to incite people to murder, as witness Harvard’s defense of Oxford poetaster Tom Paulin who urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead”.
To redeem and elevate freedom of speech, let’s explore its pristine origin, the Bible of Israel.
Recall Abraham’s questioning the justice of G-d’s decision to destroy Sodom: “Peradventure there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt Thou indeed sweep away and not forgive the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should be as the wicked; that be far from Thee; shall not the Judge of all earth do justly?”
G-d permits Abraham to question Him. By so doing, the King of Kings affirms freedom of speech as a fundamental human right. But clearly this right, from a Judaic perspective, can only be derived from man’s creation in the image of G-d. Only because man is endowed with reason and free will does he have a right to freedom of speech. This right, however, must be understood in terms of the purpose or function of speech.
Speech is not an end-in-itself or mere exercise in self-expression. Rightly understood, speech is a manifestation of reason, the quintessential function of which is to communicate ideas and inquire into their truth or falsity, their justice or injustice. Hence, speech is an intellectual-moral phenomenon. To divorce speech from truth is to relegate this distinctively human faculty to a mere instrument of self-aggrandizement and to reject the biblical concept of man’s creation in the image of G-d. This is the current tendency of liberal democracy, a tendency that degrades man and makes a mockery of his right to freedom of speech.
It cannot be said too often – it is hardly said at all – that if freedom of speech is divorced from truth, democracy is no more justifiable than tyranny. More precisely, if there are no objective standards by which to distinguish right from wrong, or modesty from shamelessness – whether in speech or in behavior – then there are no rational grounds for preferring democracy to totalitarianism.
Notice, moreover, that the denial of objective moral standards does not logically justify the toleration of all lifestyles. Moral relativism undermines any objective grounds for preferring tolerance to intolerance, hence freedom of speech to censorship.
It has been said that the only rational defense of freedom of speech or of intellectual freedom is that it can facilitate the quest for truth, including the truth about how man should live. But no such quest can even begin unless we already know, in some general and authoritative way, what is right and wrong. Clearly, the claim to academic freedom can have no justification unless it is commonly understood that it is wrong to cheat or deceive, to plagiarize or steal, to defame or murder. This suggests that moral relativists, who very much dominate the academic world, take civilization for granted.
The true father of civilization is none other than Abraham who, by discovering the Creator of man, discovered the moral unity of human nature. The moral unity of human nature presupposes the rule of reason over self-regarding passions, of moral suasion over brute force and arbitrariness. It is in this light that we are to understand the destruction of Sodom. G-d tolerates Abraham’s questioning because Abraham’s speech is not a mere ventilation of emotion. To be sure, Abraham is the exemplar of compassion. But Abraham’s compassion is informed by truth, that is, by his knowing the difference between righteousness and wickedness. Apart from such knowledge, freedom of speech is noise or nonsense.
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To be continued
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