Political Backwash

You defeat a despot at the ballot box and work to create political affiliations and movements to undermine their destructive goals or else the problem gets worse. You cannot kill ideas. We should have learned this during the War on Terror and yet the faulty notion continues to proliferate.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the... See more

Hannah Arendt powerfully explained “the constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and... See more

Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but... See more

Looking thus at the state of the country, I know of no better use to

which I can put this sacred day, I know of no higher duty resting upon me,

than to enforce my views and convictions, and especially to hold out to

reprobation, the short sighted and ill judged, and inefficient modes adopted

to suppress the rebels. The past may be dismissed with a... See more

“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,”

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behavior — impulsivity, grandiosity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such disorders — narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are characterized by overemotionality and... See more