Nonetheless, fluoridation combined with the Bircher conspiracy mindset provided Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick with the elements to create General Jack D. Ripper, the rogue officer in “Dr. Strangelove,” who goes off his rocker and tries to attack the Soviet Union.

Strangelove was great ammunition against the anti-communist cause.

(not a Bircher — too young! — but do we really know what they taught and did, or just what the MSM and MRM (main right media) have told us? — in light of revelations these days, is it possible (gasp!) that they were misrepresented somewhat?)

huxley Says:
June 28th, 2018 at 7:46 pm

“Expat” should expand on the beginning of his list of Questions To Ask A Liberal.

Richard Stockinger: Sadly that ship sailed a while back. As far as the current crop of liberals — actually progressives and some now out-of-the-closet socialists — are concerned, there will be no debate. …

Here’s a NYT op-ed from a few days ago by a professor of philosophy at Yale and Vassar:

“The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/free-speech-just-access.html “

And it seems, a visiting professor at someplace called Wuhan University, in China. Apparently he is also a translator of Chinese “philosophical” texts. I use scare quotes around “philosophical” to point to one of the debates or minor controversies he’s been engaged in, which followed his claim that the so-called canon of philosophy texts in American universities should be inclusive of non-western texts and perspectives: whereas, some of his critics rejoin that he has ignored what philosophy is, and where and how it originated, in the first place.

For those who wish to get some insight into his philosophical perspective, I think it is probably safe to refer to the second part of a lecture he gave to Chinese students or Richard Rorty.

My bet is that although it does not describe his own epistemic theory so closely that there is no wriggle room, he nonetheless would himself own most of the statements and views he attributes to Davidson and Rorty.

Especially important I think – and this relates directly to the tone and tenor of his NYT article – is his view of what constitutes socially legitimate skepticism (from the prevailing social consensus), AND, his view on what constitutes sufficient knowledge to act. Or more practically in a political sense: what kinds of grounding is necessary in order to claim that you know the “truth” or enough of it to compel others.

And in this he is it appears, at odds, as are all progressives and pragmatists, with the notion of the moral necessity of initially possessing indubitable or self-evident first principles when it comes to managing “our collective life”; managing, that is to say, the lives of others.

Thus, what once were seen in our tradition as political and interpersonal boundaries not to be crossed -unless we first had a confrontation (a self-evident/ seeing engagement) with indubitable first principles from which we could then safely deduce such permissions – are now dissolved.

This has been accomplished by relocating foundational knowledge not a confrontation with an undeniable “thing”, but rather in the divination of the supposed sense of the community – presumably, that would be the sense of the “progressive” segment of the political population.

This perspective, they then claim, is not relativism. And they imagine it is therefore immune to the self-devouring claims of that comic relativism which is mocked by table-turning metaphysical realists as a mere taste (chocolate or vanilla) which undercuts the relativists’ presumption to speak on behalf of, or to morally lecture, others.

https://youtube.com/embed/khpLc7Bkq54?start=306&end=369

https://youtube.com/embed/khpLc7Bkq54?start=1327&end=1436

Maybe I’m just too old and cynical, but their immaturity is showing with this impatience. “I want my way now!” they scream, as if wanting something passionately enough makes it happen. Is this the Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste generation?

“Party leaders in Albany concocted the cockamamie idea of running a mid-June primary for national races while saving the statewide races for the usual September primary. This decision to create a deliberately small voter pool is an old-time cynical ploy designed to give incumbents like Crowley an insuperable advantage — because low turnout almost always favors candidates who have institutional support.

Almost always. But not always. In this case, Ocasio-Cortez quietly played a series of cards against Crowley — Hispanic vs. white, leftist vs. liberal, young vs. old, female vs. male — that built her a 15,000-voter following apparently invisible to him and his team.

That was enough to finish him off. I suspect that had he been paying sufficient attention, Crowley could have ginned up another 4,000 voters from the Democratic Party’s database in a district where he received 150,000 votes in November 2016.”

Richard Stockinger: Sadly that ship sailed a while back. As far as the current crop of liberals — actually progressives and some now out-of-the-closet socialists — are concerned, there will be no debate.

For them Republicans and conservatives are simply Nazis, white supremacists and all varieties of -phobe and bigot. To engage us openly is to empower evil foolishly. So they won’t.

In the meantime they are looking for every lever to “deplatform,” as they call it, conservative speech, so we may speak but not be heard.

Here’s a NYT op-ed from a few days ago by a professor of philosophy at Yale and Vassar:

“The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/free-speech-just-access.html