Relating as persons: psychology, society, politics
The modern distinction between fact and value goes back to David Hume who argued that “is” does not imply “ought” — there is no way to get from facts to values. This contrasts with the Aristotelian philosophy in which everything has a nature so that what something is and what it ought to be is defined by […]
The political Left and Right began with the French National Constituent Assembly of 1789. The Left supported the revolution and democracy, the Right opposed the revolution and supported the aristocracy, and the Democratic Royalists supported a constitutional monarchy. Today there is no aristocratic Right to speak of, at least not in countries such as America.
Congress passes a bill to authorize a government program and expenditure of funds before passing an appropriations bill to approve the expenditure of funds. Authorization bills cover multiple years (such as 3 or 6) whereas appropriations are usually annual. Some programs such as so-called entitlements do not follow this process. One advantage of periodic authorizations is that they
Augustine of Hippo wrote crede, ut intelligas, “believe so that you may understand” (Tract. Ev. Jo., 29.6), which contrasts with what many want to do, that is, understand so they may believe. Both of these have their place but the point of Christian faith is to trust that we may trust more. Christian faith is in the
This is not intended to be a political blog, but sometimes a warning message needs to be given about where things are going. We don’t like to think our lives will be interrupted by national or international events, but that has happened to many if not most people in the past and there’s no reason
Wikipedia notes: The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc [a socialist] in 1850 and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon [an anarchist] in 1861. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the capitalistic system (kapitalistisches System) and to the capitalist mode of production (kapitalistische Produktionsform) in Das Kapital (1867).
Michael Crichton, a well-known scientist and author, delivered the Caltech Michelin Lecture on January 17, 2003. He entitled it “Aliens Cause Global Warming” which criticized what is called “consensus science” starting with SETI. A few excerpts: I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called
The problems with the two extremes of government are well known. Monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and the like are all forms of government in which one person or a small group of people have almost all the authority, land, power, wealth, etc. The problem is that either they are not necessarily wise or competent or
The Founders did “better than they knew” when writing the U.S. Constitution. They wisely separated the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. They also wisely made the legislature bicameral with an executive veto to make new laws difficult to enact. However, now that many, many laws have been passed, we can see that the difficulty in
Human beings certainly have a greater variation of behavior than other kinds of organisms but that should not obscure the existence of norms. The norm for human beings is monogamy: a marriage of one man and one woman. The existence of variations from that norm and failures to adhere to the norm do not invalidate the
