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This is an idea with logical force, many practical attractions and great philosophical appeal. It is courageous. It is clever. It stands, in short, no chance of success. – Matthew Parris, underlining that practical politics runs on interest, not intellect. September 19th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information, you have to modify your view of what a reasonable person would believe to take account of what those around him believed. If you have no training in science and your only information on biotech comes from the popular press, it may not be obvious that a story on mice with human brains cannot be right. If you have devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to living your own life, doing your job, dealing with those around you, it isn’t all that unreasonable to accept as truth what those around you believe about wider issues less directly observed, such as the existence of God or the weakness of the case for evolution. What applies not only to people in the past who couldn’t have known the evidence for evolution but to people in the present who could have but in all probability don’t. I long ago concluded that most people who say they do believe in evolution, like most who say they don’t, are going mostly on faith. As I pointed out in a post some years back, many of those who say they believe in evolution, most notably people left of center, have no difficulty rejecting even its most obvious implications when those clash with their ideology.” David Friedman, speculating on what is the right way to decide if a person is, or is not, a nutcase. September 18th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh, it’ll change. We must always strive to avoid the common misconception that we live at the end of history. Humanity has a very long time ahead. In the shorter term, there will be a reaction against the current hegemony. The key thing for us now is to strive to be the ideologists of it when it happens; last time that role was grabbed by the marxists. We’ll win this thing one day. Not next week. But we will win. We will win because liberalism is the only ideology compatible with sustainable advanced civilisation; all the competing ideologies, of Left and Right, are holdovers from more primitive social/technological stages of existence. We may never see it (but we may; history moves faster than we think) but our descendants surely will. Without running away anywhere. – Redoubtable serial commenter Ian B September 17th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Brooks and Krugman are on some sort of Thelma & Lousie like quixoticly suicidal journey to be the last guy off the bigger government meme. They’re going off the cliff, but they couldn’t be happier. At least their abusive small-government loving spouses won’t hurt them anymore.” From the comment thread of this article about the absurd David Brooks. No wonder he writes for the New York Times. September 14th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 12th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment. But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.” Those mid-term elections in November should be interesting. September 9th, 2010 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
A free life makes it harder to acquire riches for this is not easy to do without becoming servile to mobs or kings. – Epicurus September 7th, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed. – Vaclav Klaus September 6th, 2010 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy. – Benjamin Disraeli Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose August 31st, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Love, when legislated, becomes hate. – John B, from the comments here. (This is a SQOTDBPD, or Samizdata Quote of the Day by Popular Demand.) August 30th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound – if I can remember any of the damn things. – Dorothy Parker August 25th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America’s eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take “risks for peace.” August 20th, 2010 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
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