Galt's Gulch

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  • Posted by $ SpiritWoman 4 days, 22 hours ago
    Your second chapter, Mr. Donway, reminds me of those particulars of a democracy, or republican form of government, that enhance the ability of unsavory characters, to take over the government.

    First, the very freedoms, to wit: freedom of the press, attract those who know how to work the system, and two, the actual fact that Americans are a caring people---this is undisputed, even Saul Alinsky was aware of that, and used it----propelled them to accept the 'truth' of the 'free press'.

    Somehow, we need to limit freedom's ability to do this.
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    • Posted by WDonway 3 days, 18 hours ago
      SpiritWoman, that's a heavy thought. The advocates of complete freedom of speech and press ("media" today) asserted confidently that if we were completely free to combat error we had nothing to fear from error, malefactors, evil... And yet, from the great ideas of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, and the founding ideas of the United States, we are...here, today--and America is the very best case. Great and promising ideas, really the essential truth in philosophy, have been displaced by postmodernism. And at least in the West, the ideas of the Enlightenment lost to Postmodernism in an essentially free exchange of ideas. In a nutshell, of course, Ayn Rand explained this as the unwillingness, the lack of courage, to challenge the all-powerful Christian moral tradition of altruism, reinforced by the German version of it... You could say, I guess, that the time periods we are talking about are very brief in mankind's history and progress surges and recedes as it progresses...
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      • Posted by $ SpiritWoman 3 days, 18 hours ago
        This might interest you: I have a theory, formed when I read Loren Eisley's "The Immense Journey" as a Freshman in college. And that is that the long childhood of mankind and the long childhood of man are mutually recapitulative. And according to this theory, then, the emergence of an atheism, following the enlightening theories of Voltaire, etc. (who became an atheist after the earthquake at Lisbon), was due to the emergence in mankind of his adolescent phase of development. The "I know more than Mom and Dad" sort of thing all parents go through!!

        (There was also of course, an atheistic humanism that erupted in the Renaissance, built on the discoveries of classical Roman and Greek thought, but that was more like the two-year old's defiant attitude. Humans beginning to have their own minds. And demonstrating it.)

        Laplace, when asked by Napoleon what he thought of God, replied: I have no need of that concept, Sir!
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      • Posted by $ SpiritWoman 3 days, 18 hours ago
        If, along with the control of information through the control of media, had been the only destructive element, Americans might have been able to combat it. But these unsavory characters took over control of education, K-12, too, and then attempted to hide or ban any dissenting information. Did you know that Bill Ayers went to university, where he graduated with a PhD in Elementary Education, and has since created a 'foundation' for the furtherance of 'education'?

        Thomas Jefferson felt our republic could only continue to exist if the electorate was educated and informed. I'm sure he meant 'with the truth'.

        As for Christians, Saul Alinsky's Rule to 'use their morals against them', was the final nail in the coffin for them. The conversion to Christianity of the 'wise and unwise'---the Greeks and the non-Greeks---was a necessary advance for humankind. However, it entailed a philosophy of love, and for the most part Christians find the alternative to altruism: 'tough love', hard to practice. I don't.
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  • Posted by WDonway 5 days, 5 hours ago
    Excellent, SpiritWoman, and thanks for your comments and for giving the book a try. I recently published a quite comprehensive book on the Age of Enlightenment and some 45 of its greatest names, but I also discussed the Age of Science and added an appendix on postmodernism. Title is "How Philosophers Change Civilizations: The Age of Enlightenment." Thanks again for taking an interest!
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  • Posted by $ SpiritWoman 6 days, 3 hours ago
    This is the introduction to a topic I posted on another forum in January 2015:

    Sometime late in the 19th century science became divorced from reality, specifically in regard to the physics of the submicroscopic universe. Man's ability to reason and argue causally was disowned by man himself.

    Although Galileo knew Aristotle was in error in much of his physics, he admitted that had Aristotle know, 2,000 years ago, what was known in Galileo's time, Aristotle would have agreed with him.

    The Renaissance man of science (the philosophers) were beginning to distinguish between what they called "natural magic" and "supernatural magic"---thus learning relationships between "natural" causes and their effects. Aristotle, although he understood that change was effected by some kind of "cause" imperfectly grasped temporal causal relationships in change. Even motion to the ancient Greeks was not fully understood. Galileo's contributions to the concepts of motion cannot be overestimated.

    These early experimenters enhanced the notion of causality, which most in quantum physics, and may I say, climatology, appear to have lost.

    I think it imperative to read the works of the original masters of science, reason, and experiment; such as Frances Bacon, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Galileo, at any rate.

    Following are some gems of wisdom from Galileo used in refuting those who resorted to the use authority and fallacious reasoning in determining cause-and-effect relationships.

    The topic was called "Reading Galileo". But since I am not a moral philosopher, nor interested in it, I was unaware of these other philosophical threads that Mr. Donway, you mention in the beginning of your book.

    Thanks.
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