 Machan's Musings - Parker’s Stumble into Stereotyping
by Tibor R. Machan
I confess I was saddened by the fact that Parker allowed himself a conventional vice I most despise, business-bashing. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (9 messages)
Machan's Musings - Appreciation for A Bad Man’s Words
by Tibor R. Machan
This is something I would never have thought I’d write—words of appreciation for the last words of a vicious murderer. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (29 messages)
Machan's Musings - Welfare Statism and Evil
by Tibor R. Machan
Perhaps these people need to learn a thing or two from Professor Stone and start admitting that some people ask for their own misery, and public policy and political theory need to take this into account. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (6 messages)
Machan's Musings - When Elites Use Ad Hominems
by Tibor R. Machan
Being a fanatic about liberty hasn’t ever seemed to me such a dangerous thing. As when Barry Goldwater said, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," so neither is fanaticism in defense of it so awful. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (4 messages)
Machan's Musings - Further Paradoxes of Full Equality
by Tibor R. Machan
This is a response to Professor Michael Marmot's call for further leveling of American society [Op Ed, "Life at the Top," 2/27/05]. I can only wonder whether he is familiar with George Orwell's Animal Farm and Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," two classic literary works very intelligently skeptical about egalitarianism. Surely the worst inequality is inequality of power, and any effort to establish the kind of society Professor Marmot appears to favor would usher in just the kind of Draconian inequalities I think we all do well to try to avoid. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (6 messages)
Machan's Musings - What Happened to Political Rights?
by Tibor R. Machan
Sen advocates the spread of political rights, which at first sounds the right thing to do. Surely everyone in a country needs to have his or her right to take part in the political process protected. This is simply the extension of one’s right to liberty, the liberty to weigh in on political matters. Trouble is that by "politics" Sen and his followers around the globe, including the United Nations, have in mind any issue that concerns people. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (0 messages)
Machan's Musings - Ethics vs. Politics in Million Dollar Baby
by Tibor R. Machan
Million Dollar Baby depicts what must be understood as a sound political or legal doctrine, even if one can take issue with its morality. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (2 messages)
Machan's Musings - Communism Was No Bogeyman
by Tibor R. Machan
Communism was no bogeyman but a bona fide evil--as were slavery, or Nazis--and post-modernist blather will not manage to obscure this. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (20 messages)
Machan's Musings: Ownership Society - True and False
by Tibor R. Machan
Bush's ownership society isn't about ownership but a quasi-royal grant of partial use. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (10 messages)
Machan's Musings - Another Liberal Duplicity
by Tibor R. Machan
Modern liberals want it both ways--pragmatic and principled. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (2 messages)
Machan's Musings - Science and Sense
by Tibor R. Machan
Is it really true that "most of what we do every minute of every day is unconscious"? I made a survey of my own doings, and here is what I did just a few minutes ago. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (13 messages)
Machan's Musings - Who Regulates the Regulators?
by Tibor R. Machan
"Regulating people’s lives to prevent their doing harm to themselves is futile. It ought to be stopped. Let the law handle cases where someone violates another’s rights, period." (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (0 messages)
Machan's Musings - On Involvements with the State
by Tibor R. Machan
It is complicated to live and work in a society that widely and persistently violates the principles by which one ought to live, but so long as one is living by and promoting these principles as much as that is possible, one is not betraying them ... (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (4 messages)
Machan's Musings - A Writer's Vicious Prejudice
by Tibor R. Machan
It is a vile prejudice, that is what it is, and I’ll just forgo reading such muck even if the author is otherwise a clever writer—as I am sure Mr. J. J. Freedman is ... (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (7 messages)
Machan's Musings - Newspeak Anyone?
by Tibor R. Machan
By trying to please everyone with his idea of liberty and freedom, Professor Fisher, most likely inadvertently, undermines the work that these concepts are supposed to do for human beings. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (3 messages)
Machan's Musings - A Dissident Dissents
by Tibor R. Machan
This lopsided moralizing betrays the practically obsessive anti-Americanism of too many people. Only Americans ever do things wrong—the rest need to be defended at all cost no matter how vicious they are. Balderdash. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (9 messages)
 Sicking The Saddamites #6: Machan's Musings - A Contrary View
by Tibor R. Machan
Liberty is indeed a worthy goal for the US government to champion and pursue, but not by means that undermine that very goal, namely, embarking on military aggression, even if it’s against a dictator like Saddam Hussein. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (78 messages)
Wednesday
January 26, 2005 |
Machan's Musings - Johnny Carson, An American Natural
by Tibor R. Machan
Johnny Carson, who died recently, was perhaps the greatest comic craftsman in American popular entertainment. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (13 messages)
Machan's Musings - Feminist Fog
by Tibor R. Machan
When questions surrounding male and female attributes are politicized, of course, nothing much good comes of it all. Not only do some of the most vociferous civil libertarians forget their principles—as the feminists forgot theirs because Bill Clinton was a politician they liked—but rational investigation of interesting issues suffers. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (15 messages)
Machan's Musings - Schools, Government and Creationism
by Tibor R. Machan
The real problem is that government schools exist. The delusion that you can get religion and values out of education is part of what lulls so many people into the misguided belief that government education is just fine. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (5 messages)
Machan's Musings - Revisiting the Death Penalty
by Tibor R. Machan
What there is no way to guard against is the occasional application of the death penalty to someone who doesn’t in fact deserve it. In short, the probability of a mistake is significant. So no one ought to risk it because it will at times perpetrate a great wrong. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (57 messages)
Machan's Musings - What Should We Be Proud Of?
by Tibor R. Machan
I am always hoping people will take language seriously and "being proud of something" very much suggests that you had something to do with bringing it about. Like the firm you built or painting you created or novel you wrote—provided, indeed, that they have merit, are worthy achievements. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (9 messages)
Machan's Musings - Good God, Bad Deeds?
by Tibor R. Machan
(Editor's note: the following will shortly be published in Think, Royal Institute for Philosophy, UK.)
Raised as a Roman Catholic, I was pretty set in my beliefs until I started to listen up in church. At first it was talk of angels that puzzled me, then talk of self-sacrifice that’s rewarded with everlasting salvation (which is a pretty good deal, I gathered, so not unselfish after all). Then I began to think about God’s goodness and all the pretty awful things happening in the world. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (3 messages)
Machan's Musings - Senator Boxer and American Democracy
by Tibor R. Machan
For my money, democracy is a minor political virtue. It is completely derivative—based on the far more important principles associated with the American political tradition of the individual’s right to liberty. Democracy follows this right—one is free, so one is free to take part in politics. But what is far more important is what should be part of politics. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (4 messages)
Thursday
December 30, 2004 |
Machan's Musings - Death Of An Anti-American
by Tibor R. Machan
Susan Sontag may have been a decent novelists and essayist, a good wordsmith. But her thinking, as illustrated by her response to 9/11, shows that she really was a quintessential anti-American, given her complete rejection of one of the central tenets of American civilization, namely, individualism. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (28 messages)
|
