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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Science vs. Scientism

Socialism, of which liberal-progressivism is the American sect, is a gross misapplication of presumed science to inappropriate fields of human experience. 18th century socialists, progenitors of today’s socialism, were strongly influenced by Newton’s laws of motion and his equations measuring the effects of gravity. The Newtonian world, as they saw it (though Newton certainly didn’t see it that way) was matter set in motion and continuing so without the intervention of God, Whose existence was expressly denied.

The hubristic presumption of early modern socialists was that human political and social interactions were, as Newton’s universe, subject to laws of motion that the socialist elite alone were able to perceive. This is quintessential scientism, not science.

In the socialist and American liberal-progressive view, because only the elite professoriate were able to discern and apply the presumed laws of social and political interaction, it is both the prerogative and the duty of that elite to control and direct the daily behavior of the rest of us.

That deformation of our original constitutional ethos is brought into focus in Mark Hendrickson’s essay on the Forbes Website:

The Pandora’s Box Of Progressivism: Positive Law

Posted by Thomas E. Brewton on 06/18 at 01:04 PM
Constitutional Principles • Thought Police & PC • Welfare-State Socialism • (0) Comments
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Thursday, June 13, 2013

Creating A Problem

Liberal-progressives who believe that there are no essential differences between men and women go recklessly far beyond offering equal opportunity to women. Mandating complete interchangeability between men and women in military combat roles creates a serious problem that is easily avoided.

Thomas Sowell summarizes the issues.

In The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution I noted the results of an earlier thrust of feminist zealotry based more on politics of the day than upon reality and military readiness:

On the negative side, look at what results when liberal planners decide to root out old traditions and impose new “traditions” with regulations from intellectuals whose minds are uncluttered with any sense of reality. The notorious 1991 “Tailhook” controversy illustrates social engineering in action.

For many years, Naval aviators had met annually for pep talks, presentations of awards, and partying in a gathering known as Tailhook (named for the mechanism that stops a plane landing on an aircraft carrier’s flight deck). Tailhook was the occasion for special recognition of meritorious combat performance of the Navy’s top pilots. Liberals strenuously oppose such “elitist” ideas, working to reduce everyone and everything to the lowest possible level of dull equality.

In 1991, when the Clinton administration made feminism official policy, a female Navy officer filed a complaint that she had been groped by drunken sailors at the Tailhook meeting. Led by Patricia Schroeder, then liberal-progressive-socialist Congresswoman from Colorado, a delegation of women in Congress demanded punishment for the military’s insensitivity. Supported by the New York Times and other socialist propaganda media, they blitzed the public with the message that things had to change; the military “just didn’t get it;” ideas about combat readiness and fighting spirit were out of place in the new era of gender equality.

To appease Congresswoman Schroeder and her fellow feminists, the Navy’s most senior officers with combat command experience were forced to retire. President Clinton appointed as Chief of Naval Operations a personnel officer with almost no sea duty and no combat command experience. His job was to make the Navy into a model work force with the primary mission of being nice. Naval officers who failed to commission a female aviator candidate simply because she repeatedly failed her flight tests were forced out of the service. Getting more women pilots, to achieve statistical equality, was more important to liberals than worrying about the dangers of an incompetent aviator landing a multi-million dollar fighter plane on a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier loaded with men, aircraft, munitions, and fuel.

Liberal-progressives reject altogether the traditionalists’ belief in an unwritten constitution based on fixed moral principles. Making “value judgments” about right and wrong is unscientific ignorance, they say. Liberal-progressives prefer the view that economic and social equality, not individual morality, is the proper target of political and social action. For them, there is no difference between moral traditions that have gained general acceptance over centuries of usage and brand new regulations to be promulgated tomorrow morning by government regulators. Any tradition that stands in the way of egalitarian social justice is to be peremptorily scrapped.

Back to summary...

Posted by Thomas E. Brewton on 06/13 at 09:18 PM
Foreign Policy • Thought Police & PC • Tradition & Morality • (0) Comments
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Geopolitical Reality And American Foreign Policy

Read George Friedman’s analysis of the largely unrecognized criticality of Azerbaijan to the United States’ foreign policy and to western Europe’s future.

Posted by Thomas E. Brewton on 06/11 at 09:26 PM
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Saturday, June 08, 2013

Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing vs. Historical Fact

Read The Friedmanite Corruption of Capitalism by Thomas J. DiLorenzo in the Mises Daily website.

Posted by Thomas E. Brewton on 06/08 at 04:45 PM
Economics • Welfare-State Socialism • (0) Comments
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Friday, June 07, 2013

End Justifies The Means?

Liberals’ secular (anti-religious) philosophy of pragmatism leads the main-stream leftist media to whitewash Obama’s depredations. Since the 1920s, liberal-progressivists have countenanced almost any degree of savagery (e.g., murder of tens of millions of Russians by Lenin and Stalin) with cold-blooded flippancy: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”

As I wrote in another post, secular liberal-progressives, having abandoned the nation’s historical Judeo-Christian ethics and opted for John Dewey’s atheistic, self-centered philosophy of pragmatism, are just doing as Dewey taught. They believe that lying, cheating, or malfeasance of any sort are justified as the means to attain their glorious goal: a fully socialized society in which everyone is equally poor and only the gospel of Karl Marx (or the Koran) can be freely expressed without government retribution.

Peter Wehner on the Commentary website agrees:

Obama Can’t Be Trusted with Power

Posted by Thomas E. Brewton on 06/07 at 05:24 PM
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More Mush From The Foreign Policy Wimp

Obama’s Strategy Deficit

Posted by Thomas E. Brewton on 06/07 at 04:41 PM
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Thursday, June 06, 2013

Commentary On The Obvious

Secular liberal-progressives, having abandoned the nation’s historical Judeo-Christian ethics and opted for John Dewey’s atheistic, self-centered philosophy of pragmatism, are just doing as Dewey taught. They believe that lying, cheating, or malfeasance of any sort are justified as the means to attain their glorious goal: a fully socialized society in which everyone is equally poor and only the gospel of Karl Marx (or the Koran) can be freely expressed without government retribution.

White House Integrity Problem: Next Up—Obamacare

Posted by Thomas E. Brewton on 06/06 at 02:47 PM
Thought Police & PC • Tradition & Morality • Welfare-State Socialism • (0) Comments
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