Look around for the best case against free speech. You’ll find that the best cases against such a notion, especially “Free speech absolutism”, is essentially the fact that it allows for what one might call “hateful” to be allowed. Not accepted necessarily but allowed. While this is true, we are coming up to the big problem here; namely, who gets to decide what hate speech is? We have differing opinions regularly being shut down as “hate speech”. A 2017 article from the Atlantic asks “Why isn’t expression that shames or demonizes a speaker not a legitimate form of counter-speech.” When positing that “It doesn’t address the merits of the argument”, the writer says that idea reflects “a rather narrow view of what counts as the merits. To argue that a speaker’s position is racist or sexist to say something about the merits of her position.” Continue reading Infringe →

I have a long, drawn out history with the academic world, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed really any part of my experience. I kinda lost my way halfway through and never recovered. I’ve often say that the one thing I gained from the academic world that I am confident I will use, was a belief in God, and that’s it. Wishing not to demean the importance of faith in God, it’s just not what people come to school for. The reason for this belief is the Coalition for Christian Outreach (The CCO). I encountered them at Point Park as a very strict atheist who had been burned by religion one too many times. The group at Point Park was called “The Body”. I was there, just to better understand how Christians thought and when I asked questions, I wasn’t really seeking anything. This was a matter of “I’m going to learn how to take everything you say apart.” You see how well that worked, but stick with me. Eventually, I’d get involved with the team at Duquesne, known as “Crossroads” as well. Continue reading Jubilee →

“There is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding,—that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be known beforehand. Reform is not change in substance or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.” Edmund Burke

When I stumbled upon this quote, at a time when the nation reflects on the Civil Rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, as well as a beautiful essay by Peggy Noonan, I was finally able to put my finger on what it is that truly concerns me about today’s activists, both gun control and otherwise. Noonan observes that the civil rights marches were not merely peaceful, but dignified. Black and white men and women marched together peacefully looking like they were attending a serious meeting. Their preacher was one of the best orators in human history. The March for Our Lives was one that continued David Hogg’s interminable 15 minutes through endless attacks on the opposing viewpoint and hyperbolic rants about the epidemic of gun violence. The actual crime rate in America is still at “historic lows”, according to the FBI. The gun control movement is almost entirely attacks on the National Rifle Association and its members. Calling them everything from terrorists and people who like children getting killed among other unproductive vilification. Continue reading Burke →

The more I’ve ruminated on the marches and how the gun control movement hasn’t moved in 20 years, I’ve started to realize a few things:

One: the left -still- generally refuses to believe that evil exists and seems to think that it can be legislated out of existence.

Two: They don’t seem to have the aftermath of their laws in mind. Continue reading Consequences →

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it” — Upton Sinclair

“To give truth to him who loves it not is to only give him more multiplied reasons for misinterpretation.” George MacDonald”

So, that big march for gun control took place today, I’m sure you heard of it, you see that there is word of this huge wave of support for gun control. Do you not see the crowds? The signs? Do you not hear the speeches? Continue reading Enough →

The individual American is so weak that the only solution one can think of is that we march in no particular direction, shouting what we are told to shout and hope the government steps in and does something based on our shouting. And the government is the only body that can do anything, and the first group Americans now turn to fight something. It’s the largest, heaviest brick we can think of and we’re trying to throw it at everything all at once. Everything needs a law now: Free speech must be curtailed for what some describe as hateful speech, which is more often a euphemism for “opposing view”, the government needs to step in and make bad people disappear, the government needs to step in and curtail this group of people or that group of people, all of this in line with what the speaker finds to be hateful, bigoted or otherwise evil. Continue reading Brick →

We do not live in a culture that believes in redemption. Single tweets destroy decades-long careers, a video dug up from 15 years ago can do the same thing. Moral outrage is a political tool, the moral argument in politics begins with “Look what an advocate for this once said”, which is met with a similarly disparaging remark from someone on the other side of the argument.  “Look what Jeff Sessions said a few years back” is met with the fact that Democrat legend Robert Byrd was a high-ranking member in the KKK.. In fact, a large part of the discussion today is noticing that the people who supported something when Obama was in office are now against it with Trump, and those who support what is essentially Obamacare were vehemently against it when Obamacare wasn’t being threatened.  It doesn’t take long to see that the culture is made up of hypocrites with a fetish for magnifying the sins of others. Especially those they do not know and who’s misfortunes they are unaffected by. In fact, this distance makes the pouncing all the more cathartic. We’ll discuss two examples. Continue reading Incarceration →

There is a great irony in the political scene today. It is at once chaotic and boring. Most of this is, of course, because the #resistance has made fever pitch routine, but as more people begin to realize that Trump is not the authoritarian, tyrannical Nazi-esque so on and so forth (and whatever the President is this week in addition to the usual epithets), they find he is a thoroughly uninteresting antagonist with nothing remarkable about him. Save maybe for his punctuality in light of eight years of “30 minutes late” being considered “on time”. You’re either dealing with this terrifying force of nature one remembers from the primary and the general but who has demurred in a way, or just the guy you’re used to seeing in the President’s seat at this point but are personally invested in yelling at. Continue reading Stagnant →

There is a sense of delusion guiding the Social Justice Movement that I didn’t realize they weren’t aware of until the Grammys, and the funny thing is we’ve seen it before in New Atheism. It comes from the idea that they are fighting some massive, monolithic figure with a stone and a sling. Instead, they are fighting the version of that which they despise most that makes them feel like they’re under pressure to defeat him for the good of the world. They’re trying to be something they’re not, by fighting a caricature of what’s actually there. We’ll tackle the New Atheists first and move to parallels with the SJW as the New Atheists approach is the bedrock for the activist of today.

The subtitle of “Fighting God” by American Atheists President David Silverman is “An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World”. The implication of the subtitle and a running theme of the book is that Atheists in America are fighting an uphill battle to have themselves be heard, to have religious talk expunged from the political sphere as though it were a common presence, and to adopt a fighting style called “Firebrand atheism”. Continue reading Projection →