Thoughts of a Republican 26 Aug 2009 A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left. [Abraham Lincoln, first Inaugural Address, 1861] Politics Quotes Quotes
Metaphysics Woodger on Properties 14 Nov 2010 The whole notion of ‘having properties’ seems to me to be suspect. It may be that the notion of a thing having properties is a vestige of an animistic extension of the notion of a person having property (in the sense of chattels) to things other than persons. [John Henry… Read More
Freedom Good faith, bad faith and no faith in reasoning 7 Oct 201823 Nov 2018 We are hearing a lot of calls for there to be public debates with climate deniers, the alt-right (that is, modern fascists), creationists and antivaxxers, and this has led to people marking the so-called “paradox of tolerance” named by Karl Popper in his epochal 1945 Open Society and its Enemies: Read More
Politics People or classes? 10 Oct 2007 It seems that almost nobody can mention Jews without making an inadvertent or deliberate ass of themselves. Most recently, Richard Dawkins put his foot in it in this Guardian article. He said: When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less… Read More
Sadly the modern Republicans are pretty much the inverse of the 19th century Republicans. If Lincoln had been running in 2007-2008 for the Republican nomination, he would have been drummed out as a radical.