Good to see more books like this being published, although their likes will never make it as primary and secondary textbooks:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Ar...Article.asp?ID=20751

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Events

A well kept secret and good source of conservative
POV. Ronald Reagan's favorite magazine. His son writes a column and it's usually pretty good.

quote:

A society begins to decline when superstition, hearsay and preconceived notions about human nature and the world supercede views based on evidence and logic.

I truly do hear a lot of that these days.

quote:

All progress is a result of confronting the truth. Almost all great disparities between people arise as a result of individual decisions�the way people think and act on their thinking. The Left may find this view repugnant, but it is actually very hopeful and optimistic. In a political and economic system such as that of the United States�, the disparities can be erased fairly quickly by people deciding to change the way they think.

I find that to be a most advanced philosophy, WC. One should probably point out the humans, although not the blank slates that the left believes, are still very impressionable and malleable. Therefore the "way people think" is going to necessarily be affected greatly if one, for instance, had to grow up in violent poverty as opposed to growing up in a safe, middle-class neighborhood, but neither is a guarantee of anything, of course. With the right attitude, those who live in violent poverty can make out. And with the wrong attitude, those who are quote "privileged" can screw up their lives readily enough.

quote:

Society, the media has a hair-trigger sensitivity to false or bad views from the right, but lets any half-cocked view from the Left pass unexamined.

For the most part I think that�s a big "yep".

quote:

One of the major points of Think is that thinking based on factual evidence and logical reasoning provides us with a common ground that is beyond political partisanship. The rise of strident, political partisanship is a sign we have abandoned critical thinking in favor of snap judgments made along political or ideological lines. But the root cause of strident partisanship is not directly ideology or politics, it�s the way we think. A conservative should be able to accept science providing firm proof an industrial practice is exposing people to a large health risk, just as liberals should be able accept a large body of evidence showing a free market is the best way to lift the living standards of people.

That sound like another great piece of wisdom from LeGault.

It only makes sense, sadly, doesn't it? You can't really account for Leftist bias except by these descriptions, i.e, the actual use of their brains defies their needs and agendas.

For instance, I heard some folks at a focus group, prior to the formal event, talking about the Patriot Act as a form of McCarthyism. Forget about criticizing their view of McCarthy. Since I was technically part of the conversation, there was only to point that if even 30% of Russian Orthodox churches had been harboring violent communist agendas, they wouldn't be referencing McCarthy in the way they were . . . or would they?

When I further pointed out that the imman from the Islamic Supreme Council of American told Clinton in 1999 that OBL was planning terrorist activity in the U.S., and that 80%+ of U.S. mosques were being run by terrorist supporting clerics, there was the kind of silence one might find in a room where a gigantic betrayal of etiquette had occured, and the offender expected to leave at once to restore the fictional harmony.

They are simply immune to their own brain- stench.

When I further pointed out that the imman from the Islamic Supreme Council of American told Clinton in 1999 that OBL was planning terrorist activity in the U.S., and that 80%+ of U.S. mosques were being run by terrorist supporting clerics, there was the kind of silence one might find in a room where a gigantic betrayal of etiquette had occured, and the offender expected to leave at once to restore the fictional harmony.

Nice piece of writing there, WC.

You know well enough where I stand on all this. But I thought it interesting to consider something that LeGault said in the opening paragraph:

quote:

I wrote this book because I believe America is suffering from an intellectual crisis that is threatening our jobs, security and freedom. The crisis is a result of a decline in sharp incisive thinking based on logical reasoning and evidence, and a corresponding rise in thinking based on emotion and intuitive, snap decisions, an approach promoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink, The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

I think we've had some brief discussions around here about the intellect vs. intuition, but I don't know that we've gotten into it very deeply. Intuition (along with its sister, "imagination") is good, of course. Without it we would simply be a very sophisticate piece of software, but one that was forever limited by whatever the programmer programmed into us at the beginning. Sure, we can still learn as we experienced life, but all the learning algorithms would have been built in and therefore somewhat limited and inflexible. It might be able to provide some very sophisticated behavior, but it would still, I think, in principle be limited in its repertoire of responses. But you might surely know that very simple programming can lead to very complex behavior such as in ants. Robotic engineers are now taking advantage of this fact and they are, I believe, achieving some good results by programming in simple insect-like behavior into their robots and making them do complex things. And many assume that the complexity that emerges from simpler behavior will eventually lead to something that is the equivalent of, or superior to, the human mind. And perhaps that is possible. And then we have to get into considering the difference between animate and inanimate, vegetable and mineral, etc. But let's assume that a level of sophistication is reach in a robot that it begins to truly intuit and to gain knowledge past strict rationalism. What does this mean really?

What I thought was interesting in that opening paragraph by LeGault was that we sort of have a conservative arguing for a liberal mainstay (rationalism, which almost always means radical rationalism) and against what ought to be a conservative mainstay, which is reason and faith. And I introduce faith now because, I guess for the first time in this context, I view intuition as a connection to knowledge outside of ourselves. Maybe intuition isn't always this way. Maybe sometimes it is our unconscious feeding us some new insights. But I've prayed before and/or had knowledge put in my head that couldn't have possibly come from me. So intuition, at least as I see it, is the connector to God or to whatever "thing" is outside ourselves and has knowledge and wisdom. And intuition is surely of immense importance to us, for without it I think we would be little better than ants. We would be stuck in quite rational programs and literally stuck in logic. People can and do rationalize themselves into the oddest corners. And this surely is because the universe is not fundamentally reasonable, and by that I mean so much that goes on in our lives that we enact, integrate, or respond to isn't particularly logical. I think that if we took a close look we'd realize how much our life is about art, especially the small stuff. So much of what we do we do because it makes a sense beyond mere "reason". We don't stop and reason how we cook that morning's eggs. There are surely methods, yes. But the actual implementation is always different. We are not computer programs. We want to inject differences and spontaneity in much of the things we do.

So it seemed odd to me to see a conservative argue vehemently for rationalism and sort of against intuition. The real problem isn't intuition. It's simply people confusing feelings with the "knowing" that indeed is a part of intuition. I think intuition is too often put into the service of a lazy or quite partisan brain. One's "intuitions" become little more than one's feeling of rage or some other emotion that is called up to feed one's need for rectitude and certitude almost like an addiction.

"One's "intuitions" become little more than one's feeling of rage or some other emotion that is called up to feed one's need for rectitude and certitude almost like an addiction."


Yes: purposely confusing the two. Nobody needs intuition to figure out the threat of Islamism, or the need for the Patriot Act. None of that requires subtle thinking or use of metaphor. They are almost as addicted to their displaced rage as the terrorists are.

I've been pouring over the alternative press for about a week now, and have become convinced that to some extent the media are losing their traditional role of "Fourth Estate" and becoming a conduit for
corporate and military points of view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

Here are some good sources:

http://www.opendemocracy.net

http://www.alternet.org

http://www.will.uiuc.edu/am/mediamatters/

http://www.freepress.org

http://www.freepress.net

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Schechter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristina_Borjesson

It's difficult to see a "liberal media" after taking a closer look.

liberal_media.com