Group items tagged

Aristotle, Greek Aristoteles, (born 384 bce, Stagira, Chalcidice, Greece—died 322, Chalcis, Euboea), ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history.

He was the author of a philosophical and scientific system that became the framework and vehicle for both Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic philosophy.

Aristotle’s intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts,

if Trump starts to seem like he’s hurting the GOP’s popularity more than he is helping it, he has no reserve of personal goodwill or substantive support for his ideas on which to fall back

Trump’s unpopularity was illustrated most colorfully by an unnamed GOP representative quoted by conservative commentator Erick Erickson. “I say a lot of shit on TV defending him,” the legislator said. “But honestly, I wish the motherfucker would just go away. We’re going to lose the House, lose the Senate, and lose a bunch of states because of him. All his supporters will blame us for what we have or have not done, but he hasn’t led. He wakes up in the morning, shits all over Twitter, shits all over us, shits all over his staff, then hits golf balls. Fuck him. Of course, I can’t say that in public or I’d get run out of town.” The unnamed congressman even declared of the president he has defended on television, “If we’re going to lose because of him, we might as well impeach the motherfucker.”

The populist right of 1994 to 2014 might have seemed rudderless, insofar as it appeared to drift from the Contract with America to late 1990s anti-interventionism to panicked anti-jihadism to Iraq War boosterism to the Tea Party to Donald Trump-style white nationalism.

COWEN: How has the decline of American religiosity influenced US foreign policy?

MEAD: Well, I think the most important way is that it has diminished our coherence as a society and undermined the psychological strength of individuals in our foreign policy world.

What do I mean by that? If you think about what it’s like to do foreign policy, or even think about foreign policy in today’s world, what are we looking at? Existential threats to human existence. You led us off with nuclear weapons. In the book, I talk about how, as a 10-year-old, my friends and I used to stand around on the playground, debating whether our town, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, would be destroyed in a nuclear attack.

“He’ll never concede anything to the left,” said William Nardi, a college student in Boston, who used to look up to Mr. Shapiro. “He’s saying the left is wrong and I’m right. Kids love that. All they care about is this feeling that they are right and that their identity is preserved. That’s what he gives them.”

Conservatives say he is a force for good. Liberals may not like his conclusions, but they are guiding young people at a time when the conservative movement is adrift and ideas of white nationalism are competing for their attention

you listen to Ben Shapiro and you are likely to be both entertained and enlightened,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative pundit and Trump critic. “He’s high octane. He reads books. His mind works really fast. He likes to get under people’s skin. He’s clearly part of this younger generation. I could imagine Bill Buckley looking down and smiling.”

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life

In fact, the “far right” was never that far from the American mainstream. The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, writing in the journal Social History, points out that “scholars of American history are by and large in agreement that, in spite of a welter of fringe radical groups on the right in the United States between the wars, fascism never ‘took’ here.”

Nevertheless, Steigmann-Gall continues, “fascism had a very real presence in the U.S.A., comparable to that on continental Europe.” He cites no less mainstream an organization than the American Legion, whose “National Commander” Alvin Owsley proclaimed in 1922, “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”

DiAngelo, who is 63 and white, with graying corkscrew curls framing delicate features, had won the admiration of Black activist intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” who praises the “unapologetic critique” of her presentations, her apparent indifference to “the feelings of the white people in the room.”

“White Fragility” leapt onto the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and next came a stream of bookings for public lectures and, mostly, private workshops and speeches given to school faculties and government agencies and university administrations and companies like Microsoft and Google and W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex.

As outraged protesters rose up across the country, “White Fragility” became Amazon’s No. 1 selling book, beating out even the bankable escapism of the latest “Hunger Games” installment. The book’s small publisher, Beacon Press, had trouble printing fast enough to meet demand; 1.6 million copies, in one form or other, have been sold

Hitchens’s style of left-wing radicalism is now out of fashion, but it has a long and venerable history: George Orwell’s unwavering opposition to totalitarianism and censorship, Bayard Rustin’s advocacy for universal civil rights without appealing to tribalism and identity politics, the post-communist anti-totalitarianism that emerged on the European left in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hitchens described himself as a “First Amendment absolutist,

Hitchens’ most fundamental political and moral conviction was universalism. He loathed nationalism and argued that the international system should be built around a “common standard for justice and ethics”

In truth, no one wants to get rid of history or philosophy or communications or English; it’s the college professors teaching those subjects who strike our interlocutors as wasteful and unnecessary

our opponents don’t view the humanities as ever-expanding sites of intellectual inquiry. Rather, they believe the humanities are already dead: essential bodies of knowledge, but essentially complete in their present form.

Our critics readily concede that knowledge of the humanities is an important part of citizenship; indeed, their devotion to history, literature, and philosophy often rivals our own. Yet they view our fields as museums of past knowledge for which we serve merely as curators. They imagine us in the classroom, like Harry Potter’s ghostly Professor Binns, monotonously reciting stale facts from yellowed, centuries-old notes.

to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life

over all, there are, I think, fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is a different matter, however. The move from grudging defense of a Trump presidency to full-blown, Fox-like rationalization has been ongoing since Trump won the nomination.

The Journal editorial page was long thought to be the crown jewel of fiscal conservatism — a staunch defender of open markets, legal immigration and economic freedom. Internationally, it was anti-communist and supportive of U.S. leadership in the world.

Jay Rosen of New York University tells me via email, “From my perspective the Oct. 25 editorial was an important event because it combines so effectively with this development, in which the Journal reporters were told to stand out by their greater willingness to give Trump the benefit of the doubt — greater, that is, than the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Politico, Bloomberg and others in their peer group.” He continues, “The implicit appeal is not to impersonal and timeless standards of veracity but to an ideological position that, according to the newsroom editors, the others guys have taken while the Journal does not.” He argues, “This is an attempt to give intellectual respectability within the news tribe to ‘the enemy of the people’ attacks. The editors were saying to their reporters: Okay, maybe not enemies of the people, but they’re acting like enemies of Trump! We don’t do that.”

Charles XII, (born June 17, 1682, Stockholm—died Nov. 30, 1718, Fredrikshald, Nor.), king of Sweden (1697–1718), an absolute monarch who defended his country for 18 years during the Great Northern War and promoted significant domestic reforms. He launched a disastrous invasion of Russia (1707–09), resulting in the complete collapse of the Swedish armies and the loss of Sweden’s status as a great power. He was, however, also a ruler of the early Enlightenment era, promoting domestic reforms of significance.

Prince Charles was the second child and eldest (and only surviving) son of Charles XI of Sweden and Ulrika Eleonora of Denmark.

Charles XI had stipulated a regency, but the regents proved anxious to obtain the new king’s concurrence in all decisions, and the Riksdag called in November 1697 declared him of age.

The Conservative Sensibility, a thoughtful, elegant reflection on American conservatism and the Founders’ political thought.

By “sensibility,” Will has in mind less than an agenda but more than an attitude. A sensibility is, he argues, a way of seeing.

how to think through complex social problems.

the educational composition of the two parties has diverged. From 1997 to 2017, the share of registered Republican voters who finished college stayed the same. Among Democrats, it rose by 15 points. T

In 2010, Democrats were seven points more likely than Republicans to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on America. By 2017, they were 36 points more likely.

a decade or two after Bush and DeLay realized that anti-intellectualism mobilizes Republicans, Warren and Buttigieg have realized that intellectualism mobilizes Democrats

Today, Friedman might seem to belong to a bygone world. The Trumpian wing of the Republican Party focuses on guns, gender, and God—­a stark contrast with Friedman’s free-market individualism. Its hostility to intellectuals and scientific authority is a far cry from his grounding within academic economics.

The analysts associated with the Claremont Institute, the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the National Conservatism Conference (such as Michael Anton, Yoram Hazony, and Patrick Deneen) espouse a vision of society focused on preserving communal order that seems very different from anything Friedman, a self-defined liberal in the style of John Stuart Mill, described in his work.

Jennifer Burns, a Stanford historian, sets out to make the case in her intriguing biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative that Friedman’s legacy cannot be shaken so easily. As she points out, some of his ideas—­the volunteer army, school choice—­have been adopted as policy; others, such as a universal basic income, have supporters across the political spectrum.

Submission is still very clearly a dystopian novel—an increasingly popular genre these days—but, more than that, it is a meditation on the aimlessness of late-stage Western liberalism, where there is nothing much to be believe in, and nothing much to fight for, except the never-ending expansion of personal freedom.

Houellebecq is among a growing number of Western intellectuals flirting with anti-liberalism: Perhaps liberalism is not the unmitigated good most of us are raised to believe it is.

In an odd way, though, liberalism’s critics end up saying more about the resilience of liberalism than its demise.

China had long been the only superpower in the region, secure in the knowledge that it was the Middle Kingdom around which the rest of the world pivoted. Japan, cushioned by stormy seas, held itself apart from its Asian neighbors much of the time and had developed a unique and inward-looking culture.

both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan faced a new threat: imperial expansion by the European powers and later the United States.

Both countries responded with growing nationalism, but their versions of nationalism had different focuses and outcomes.

In his vicious and ad hominem way, Carlson is doing something extraordinary: He’s challenging the Republican Party’s hawkish orthodoxy in ways anti-war progressives have been begging cable hosts to do for years. For more than a decade, liberals have rightly grumbled that hawks can go on television espousing new wars without being held to account for the last ones. Not on Carlson’s show.

Carlson responded that Boot had been so “consistently wrong in the most flagrant and flamboyant way for over a decade” in his support for wars in the Middle East that “maybe you should choose another profession, selling insurance, house painting, something you’re good at.”

On Iran, Carlson made an argument that was considered too dovish for even mainstream Democrats to raise during the debate over the nuclear deal: He questioned whether Tehran actually endangers the United States

Reading through TASP’s website, I was seduced by its promises—a thoughtful community, where, for once, I’d be surrounded by free-thinking academics and learning from leaders whom I deeply admired.

Like Carlos told us on the very first day, we didn’t know what was best for us. Not because we were working to decide for ourselves, but because someone else already knew. TASP was no longer a democratic experiment—it had morphed into a factory for totalitarian instincts, and it operated like an oligarchy.

“If I could give you one piece of advice,” he said, “make sure you befriend someone who is entirely different from you. As many people as you can. Talk to them about everything you disagree on—you’ll only be better for it.”

'There's Enough Time to Change Everything'

Last month, David Gelernter, the pioneering Yale University computer scientist, met with Donald Trump to discuss the possibility of joining the White House staff. An article about the meeting in the Washington Post was headlined, “David Gelernter, fiercely anti-intellectual computer scientist, is being eyed for Trump’s science adviser.”