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POPS "Intellectuals" ~ by Thomas Sowell Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages. During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model — all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food. More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine — about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust.
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POPSFundamentalist Religion makes you stupid It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of social Darwinism . But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."
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POPSThe Triumph of Ignorance
More: "Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America. The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism. Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the US edu
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POPSFailed Gods No wonder we've seen a disoriented John McCain wandering the moors howling about Bill Ayers. What's he supposed to do? Admit that the Reagan-Thatcher faith in unregulated capitalism, to which every GOP presidential candidate was pledging allegiance just last winter, has collapsed? The doctrine of laissez faire has been so dominant, so pervasive over the past three decades that hundreds of Democratic politicians can deliver a paean to the market at the drop of a hat, but not a single Republican pol can plausibly defend government as a check on capitalism run amok, even at the drop of thousands of points in the Dow.
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POPSSwift Satire gores both sides I think Jon Swift is one of the funnies guys in the blogosphere. He goes on to say: "But some conservative “intellectuals” like David Brooks subscribe to the canard that the conservative movement was defined by pointy-headed eastern elites like William Buckley, whose “entire life,” Brooks recently wrote, “was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.....Brooks even goes so far as to claim that conservatives once valued “constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking.” We did? Since when? Does he honestly believe that the conservative movement was based on people who read books? Reagan wasn’t elected by the Harvard faculty. It was an angry mob tired of welfare queens and pinko fellow travelers selling us out to the Soviet Union that put him in office."
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POPSThomas Paine and American Values "Aspirations of Thomas Paine and his fellow liberal-progressives toward economic equality as the necessary condition for earthly social perfection gave us the bloody French Revolution. More than 70,000 French citizens – from children to the elderly – were murdered on the guillotine, by hanging, and by firing squads, in the name of "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood." Those same liberal-progressive ideals espoused by Thomas Paine gave us the 20th century, the most savagely sanguinary and oppressive period in human history, all in the name of perfecting humanity." These realities combined with the motivations from Rousseau laid the foundations for nationalism and socialism that came to fruition in the early 20th century Europe.
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POPSRed Primer for Children and Diplomats The Order of the October Revolution (Russian: Орден Октябрьской Революции, or Orden Oktyabr'skoy Revolyutsii) was instituted on October 31, 1967, in time for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. It was awarded to individuals or groups for services furthering communism or the state, or in enhancing the defences of the Soviet Union. It ranked second amongst the Soviet orders, after the Order of Lenin. Nicholas II of Russia born Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov (18 May 1868 – 17 July 1918) was the last Tsar of Russia, King of Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland. Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until his abdication in 1917. His rule ended with the Russian Revolution of 1917 in which he and his family were imprisoned first in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, then later the Governor's Mansion in Tobolsk. Finally, at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Nicholas and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks on the night of July 17, 1918.
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POPS The Left vs Free Speech The truly outrageous aspect of such comparisons is that the American left, with its Stalin-redux willingness to rearrange history, neglects to mention that, outside of Japan, all of the 20th century's great totalitarian regimes had roots on the political left. It wasn't just Lenin and Stalin whose propaganda machine prefigured MoveOn. Nazi is an acronym for "National Socialist." Read Mein Kampf. It isn't a tribute to free-market capitalism, folks. Mussolini was a populist. Mao was a leftist, as was Pol Pot. The last century's worst censors and book burners all emerged from leftist ideologies. As this column recently pointed out, Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home! disappeared from the political scene the instant Obama called for sending those troops to Afghanistan and Pakistan, instead of back to Fort Hood. For the hardcore left, the party line always trumps conscience. MoveOn isn't new - it's just Pravda with poor punctuation.
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POPSHow we arrived here "Although the first two of the three mentioned causes (material circumstances and politicians' self-interest) certainly played a part, the most important cause was a change in the prevailing understanding of justice among leading American intellectuals and, to a lesser extent, in the American people. Today's liberalism and the policies that it has generated arose from a conscious repudiation of the principles of the American founding."
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POPS'Intellectuals' Pining For Higher Tax Rates Why are the treasuries of Hong Kong and Singapore flush with revenue? Why have the U.S. and Britain shown tremendous growth since Reagan and Thatcher while Continental Europe with their pseudo-socialism putters along with chronic double-digit unemployment? Go around the world these last 25 years and compare nations with high tax rates to countries with low tax rates, you'll find a pattern. Growth produces wealth, which leads to higher tax revenues and a more prosperous nation. Less growth produces less wealth and in turn lowers tax revenues. High tax rates retard economic growth; low tax rates encourage more growth. It really isn't that complicated. Seriously. The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby The Return Of Voodoo Economics http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/14/AR2006051400806.html Bush Should End This Tax Cut Myth http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/07/AR2006050700924.html
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POPSSilent No More: Iranian Student Sentenced To Death
The protests Mr Batebi took part in nine years ago frightened Iran’s rulers. The students were angry about censorship, the persecution of intellectuals and the thugs who beat up any student overheard disparaging the regime. Mr Batebi thinks Iran could well turn solidly democratic some day. In neighbouring states, religious extremism is popular. In Iran, he says, the government is religiously extreme, but the people are not. He is cagey about how exactly he escaped. But he says he used a cellphone camera to record virtually every step of his journey, and will soon go public with the pictures and his commentary. Meanwhile, he seems to be enjoying America. He praises the way “people have the opportunity to become who they want to be”. Shortly after he arrived, he posted a picture of himself in front of the Capitol on his Farsi-language blog,* with the caption: “Your hands will never touch me again.” http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-KjyoxDgwc6uQN8Q8PTn1n8dj8oA-?cq=1
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POPSA Gleam of Sufi Hope in the Darkness <<<Another belief he shares with Sufism is the idea that God, humanity and the natural world are all linked, and might even be part of a single entity, a sort of cosmic trinity. This idea has practical consequences. For example, it suggests that a believer will love and respect humanity and the natural world as they would God. It also means that no one should be seen as an outsider.>>> Who today represents a Christian counterpart?
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POPSOne Jew Terrorist is not more important than 10,000 Kidnapped Palestinian They really do think they are superior. Anyone else in the world pulling this crap, it is called what it in fact is - racial supremacy. No matter who does it, it is extremely sick and twisted. No matter how many adherents to such ideology, it is delusion at best - grossly criminal at worst. They do it shamelessly as if they do not even include the word in their decadent vocabulary. Humanity does not get much more evil than the crimes of Israel. The Nazis were some pretty fucked up folks, but Israel one-ups the Nazis in sheer cruelty and fanaticism.
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