 Machan's Musings-Cultural Relativism and Freedom
by Tibor R. Machan
In one area classical and modern liberals have tended to agree, namely, that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, expression, speech, and so forth. Both types of liberals have been supporters of the spirit and letter of the US Constitution’s First Amendment (although modern liberals have been known... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings-On Thanking God and Paying Heed
by Tibor R. Machan
Whenever I hear someone thank God for escaping some disaster, or meeting with good fortune I squirm. Does this person not imply by such gratitude that those who are hit by the disaster—say suffer from various medical maladies they caught without being responsible for it, or casualties of the tsunami—were pi... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings-Wanting but Reproducing
by Tibor R. Machan
At the Dallas/Forth Worth Airport I had to wait for two ours to board my flight back home, so I sat before a TV set beaming forth CNN’s various scary stories. (Even as the traffic there was quite calm, and even as my two days’ of lectures in New Orleans proceeded amidst a city now showing mostly evidence of... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings-Unexpected Science News
by Tibor R. Machan
You would not know about this if you didn’t follow recent scientific research, the kind reported in one of my favorite magazine, Science News. But guess what appears to be contributing big time to global warming? No, not car emissions; no, not your microwave oven; no, not even your electric razor. It is the... (Read more...)
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On Art
by A. Robert Malcom
One of the problems in dealing with the issue of aesthetics is that, from the philosophical standpoint, it has been considered the least of the branches of philosophy - this, despite the fact that it is personal, that is to say, individualistic, not tribalistic, and thus really the most important of the sibling of... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Another "Liberal" Ruse
by Tibor R. Machan
First, the reason I put quotes around "liberal" is that this was a label that had been used to designate people who favored individual liberty, in the tradition of the American Founders--the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and so forth. Today "liberal" is used to designate people who do not favor thes... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Teacher Watch!
by Tibor R. Machan
Here is my imaginary scenario: A black student alumni organization hears that some teachers are making racist remarks-advancing racist theories and conclusions-in, say, a sociology course. But they have no proof, so they offer to pay a student to take the risk of wearing a wire in class to make sure the report is accu... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - The Return of Marxism
by Tibor R. Machan
Since I just wrote a book, Revisiting Marxism, A Bourgeois Reassessment (Hamilton Books, 2004), one might imagine this is nothing but a plug. But in fact my reflections are prompted by the new movie, Why We Fight, made by Eugene Jarecki. Its theme is, coming from the horse's mouth itself, that America is pr... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - The Mind of the Fanatic Altruist?
by Tibor R. Machan
The New Republic (January 30, 2006) contains a fascinating and alarming piece-maybe it's a parody but it sounds mighty authentic to my ears-by Ali Salem, "The War of the Hotels" (p. 23) which appeared in the London based Al Hayat, a pan-Arab daily. The piece relates-or imagines-what one battlefield commander, Abu Fulan, supposedly narrated to some people about why it is so important to attack and kill all those from the West or anywhere else who are enjoying themselves, specially
in hotels. (Read more...)
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Thomas Aquinas' Christian Aristotelianism
by Edward W. Younkins
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the dominant thinker of the middle ages, combined the science and philosophy of Aristotle with the revealed truths of Christianity. Holding that Aristotelianism is true but is not the whole truth, he reconciled the philosophy of Aristotle with the truth of Christian revelation. Aquinas was a... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Artificial Controversies
by Tibor R. Machan
Enemies of the free society are prone to find something that will render the very idea of it not just odd but insidious. So we have one Gerry Stoker, writing in the January 2006 (issue #118) of Prospect Magazine that "Politics has been infected by one of the dominant myths of our time: that the goal of life is self-actualization. Politics as an exercise in collective decision-making has been unable to withstand the assault of a naïve individualism" (http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?search_term=Stoker&id=7176&issue=514). (Read more...)
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Generation Gap
by Marty Lewinter
Though I have older and younger friends, each a generation apart from me, I do not experience a significant generation gap with either group. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Limiting Outsourcing is Wrong and Harmful
by Tibor R. Machan
... (Read more...)
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Wednesday
January 25, 2006 |
Government Revisited: The central role
by Joseph Rowlands
What is the primary purpose of government? The typical Objectivist position is that the government’s job is to protect our rights. This inevitably leads to the question of whether the protection of rights needs to be done by the government, or if it can be done privately. Before even going down that path, I want to ... (Read more...)
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Wednesday
January 25, 2006 |
Machan's Musings - Roe & Privacy
by Tibor R. Machan
One reason that Roe v. Wade is still with us is that legal scholars and jurists are arguing about the wrong issue. The question isn’t whether the US Constitution contains any reference to a right to privacy. Let’s assume it does. Let’s assume that the Ninth Amendment, as argued in Griswold v. Connecticut and some other cases, implicitly refers to the right to privacy every human beings has. Why would this be relevant? (Read more...)
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Jean-Baptiste Say's Law of Markets: A Fundamental Conceptual Integration
by Edward W. Younkins
John-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) is one of the most important and insightful thinkers in the history of economic science. Say was a major proponent of Adam Smith’s self-directing economic system of competition, natural liberty, and limited government. He frequently praised the Scotsman’s work, publicized it, and described... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Post-Modernism and Science
by Tibor R. Machan
The main tenet of post-modernist philosophy is that reality is constructed, non-objective. (A good description of the movement is at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Modernism ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Modernism and in Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism at www.explainingpostmodernism.com.) In Ameri... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Looking Back at Kelo and More
by Tibor R. Machan
Since back when the Supreme Court ruled on Kelo v. City of New London, CT—in favor of the city’s use of eminent domain measures against private owners with viable property so as to obtain more taxes from the development other private parties may initiate—there has been much consternation about just what went wrong here... (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Modern Liberalism's Central Flaw
by Tibor R. Machan
Modern liberals sadly cling to their most grievous flaw and that is what makes them, even if at times only inadvertently, fundamentally misanthropic. They believe that advancing their objectives, even those that are perfectly valid, ought to be done by using coercion against those whose cooperation they seek. (Read more...)
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Circumstance Based Market Segmentation and Activist Products
by Ryan Brubaker
How circumstance-based products can help Rebirth of Reason shift its focus toward activism. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - The New York Times on Alito's Advance
by Tibor R. Machan
The New York Times made much of the fact [01/15/06] that Democrats couldn't trip up Judge Samuel Alito during the recent hearings at the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Times fretted a lot about how Democrats felt outflanked both by Alito and by the Republicans. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Tyranny Taught at Yale Law School
by Tibor R. Machan
Yale Law Professor Kenji Yoshino wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine, "The Pressure to Cover" [01/15/06], that's a frightening diatribe in favor of a police state. Its ideas pretty much match the worst portions of the Right Wing's Patriot Act-another piece of evidence that Left and Right are mostly two sides of the same coin. (Read more...)
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New Testament Myths: The Diary of a Madman Named Saul.
by Robert Davison (Wolf)
The greatest irony in history is that the religion named for Christ is the religion of Paul and of Rome. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - Writer vs. Reviewer: Sunstein’s Bifurcation
by Tibor R. Machan
The University of Chicago Law School’s Cass Sunstein is now nearly as prominent a modern liberal—Leftists—legal scholar as is Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Tribe—just the other day I heard someone mention him as the equivalent on the Left to Samuel Alito on the Right, someone who might be nominated for the Supreme Court by a Democratic President. (Read more...)
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Machan's Musings - What Does "Unalienable" Mean?
by Tibor R. Machan
It would really be extremely valuable for today’s children to understand what is meant for a right to be unalienable. But it isn’t likely they will be taught about this much in today’s school—from elementary to graduate ones, in fact. (Read more...)
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