Free Republic

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical...

Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable. History is a curious thing, and Niall Ferguson investigates not only what happened but why. 20 minute video at the link

FLORENCE, S.C. (AP) — Florence police say a 9-year-old girl stabbed her grandmother after they argued about whether she could watch television. Investigators said the girl stabbed her 64-year-old grandmother in the back with a kitchen knife as she read the newspaper around 2 a.m. Thursday. The woman called paramedics, while the girl called her mother. Authorities say the grandmother was treated and released from the hospital, while the Department of Social Services placed the child in the custody of another relative. The girl will be charged in Family Court. Her name was not released because of her age.

Rights campaigners and politicians Wednesday condemned a video showing women from a protected and primitive tribe dancing for tourists in exchange for food on India's far-flung Andaman Islands. British newspaper The Observer released the video showing Jarawa tribal women -- some of them naked -- being lured to dance and sing after a bribe was allegedly paid to a policeman to produce them. Under Indian laws designed to protect ancient tribal groups susceptible to outside influence and disease, photographing or coming into contact with the Jarawa is illegal.

If National Geographic had more stories like this one, I’d be inclined to subscribe. This is fascinating stuff.Seven thousand years before Stonehenge was Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where you’ll find ring upon ring of T-shaped stone towers arranged  in a circle. Around 11,600 B.C. hundreds of people gathered on this mound, year after year, possibly for centuries.There are plenty of mysteries on this hill.  Some of the rocks weigh 16 tons, but archaeologists can find no homes, no hearths, no water source, and no sign of a town or village to support the hundreds of workers who built the rings...

A noted left-wing author who teaches at a bastion of so-called progressive education recently delivered a surprising defense of Western civilization—and an attack on prevailing academic attitudes towards it. Unfortunately, Christopher Hitchens said, confidence in the superiority of the West has been eroded in recent decades. Hitchens teaches at the New School in New York City. Hitchens criticized those Americans (on both the Left and the Right) who responded to the September 11 attacks by asking what America had done to deserve them—a question belonging to a mindset he called “moral suicide.” Such relativism, Hitchens said, is the result of...

22 Signs That The Thin Veneer Of Civilization That We All Take For Granted Is Starting To DisappearNovember 14, 2011 In order for a society to function, there has to be a certain level of trust. Each day when we leave our homes, we take for granted that most people are not going to attack us for no reason, that there will only be isolated incidents of theft in our community and that rioting and violence are not going to erupt in the streets. Whether we realize it or not, we depend on the fact that the vast majority of...

On Oct. 31, the U.N. Population Fund marks the arrival of the 7 billionth person on Earth and raises the population estimate for the planet at mid-century to 9.3 billion people.         There is a possibility, says the United Nations, that, by century's end, world population may reach 15 billion. What does this mean for Western civilization?         It may not matter, except to identify who inherits the estate. For while world population is exploding, Western peoples are dying. Not a single European nation, except Muslim Albania, has a birth rate that will enable it to replace its present population.         By mid-century,...

Leading Population Researcher: There Is A 90% Chance Of “Collapse Of Global Civilization” (Ehrlich) Mac Slavo October 25th, 2011 Paul Ralph Ehrlich, biologist and professor of population studies at Stanford University, has been warning for decades (The Population Bomb, 1968) that the earth is becoming increasingly unstable and incapable of supporting our ever expanding population growth. With 7 billion people on the planet and growth estimated to continue at a pace that would reach 15 billion by the end of the 21st century, Ehrlich notes that our concerns about feeding the world’s population and meeting energy resource needs for future...

A speech by Don Feder at Ave Maria University, September 20, 2011 Hollywood has a penchant for blowing things up – especially the world. Since the 1950s, apocalyptic movies (which come with a variety of special effects) have been all the rage. We’ve met our doom through nuclear war (“On The Beach,” “The Day After”), a worldwide super-plague (“Twelve Monkeys” “The Stand”), global warming (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Waterworld,”), the earth’s core over-heating (“2012,” “The Core”), overpopulation (“Soylent Green”), a comet striking the earth (“Deep Impact,” “Armageddon”), sentient machines taking over (the “Terminator” and “Matrix” series), rampaging simians (the “Planet...

  Going Directly From Adolescence to Senility David C. Stolinsky Sept. 15, 2011 I once remarked that I intended to go directly from adolescence to senility, bypassing adulthood entirely. Yes, it was a joke, but the underlying facts aren’t at all amusing. We seem to be trying to make my joke a reality. A few good people can help pull up a civilization, and a few bad ones can help pull it down. But in statistics, there is a phenomenon called “regression toward the mean.” A few outliers can pull the figures one way or the other, but over...

A child in a Hamburg residential complex: A new report has found that parents in 7 percent of German households can't afford to finance hobbies for their children. Despite substantial subsidies aimed at increasing the birthrate, the number of children in Germany continues to shrink. A new report by the federal government has found there are 14 percent fewer children under 18 than in 2000 -- and 15 percent of them, alarmingly, live in poverty. For Germany, the figures are the warning signs of a demographic time bomb in a fast-graying society. The number of children under the age of...

It begins with self-doubt; it ends with self-destruction. Historian Arnold Toynbee, who developed the theory of challenge-and-response to account for the survivability of civilizations, has said that great civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide — by not meeting their challenges. A variation of this historical insight may be phrased thus: When a civilization or an empire feels inwardly that it is dying, or as Oswald Spengler put it in The Decline of the West, that it wants to die and “wishes itself into the darkness,” it begins to go mad. Collective madness is a sure portent that an end...

Every society has its red lines. Areas that are off limits. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Lines that should not be crossed. And the left has progressively dismantled the red lines that constrain it, while seizing control of the infrastructure that marks out a society's red lines. By controlling that cultural infrastructure, the left can insure that all of a society's remaining standards are double standards. The inability to hold the left accountable for its actions is traceable back to this lack of standards. How does one call for accountability when there is no objective standard to measure the wrongness of...

GREECE Lesson on spending Greek civilization has lasted for thousands of years. It has survived domination by Persia, Turkey, Rome and Nazis. It has survived untold natural disasters including the 300-year-long "little ice age." It has survived the Dark Ages, famines, plagues and internal struggles. It has survived invasions and domination. It has survived two world wars and the Cold War. One of the world's oldest and most formative civilizations may soon face its end by a much more insidious enemy than it has ever faced in its thousands of years of existence. Uncontrolled deficit spending and the welfare state...

Let's compare two countries side by side. Country A has a sizable middle class and economy, social welfare benefits and a low birth rate. Country B is a failed state where thugs run amok in the street, a few families control the economy and the birth rate is off the charts. Country A's citizens are taught that nationalism is evil and that everyone should get along. Country B's citizens are taught that they are the greatest people that ever lived and would be running the world if not for Country A. But despite all this, Country B's citizens all...

A lot has happened in the past 40 years that has been of benefit to the gay community. Some I agreed with, others went too far, but marriage between people of the same sex giving them equal status with heterosexual couples, in my view, goes way beyond the pale. They argue that the present law discriminates against them. It does. And it's the same reason why I can't marry Jamie or Hamish. And how about the discrimination against pedophiles, prohibiting sexual relations with children? Why do we discriminate against 15-year-old girls and boys for what used to be called carnal...

Thoughts on Japan There is no more ordered, successful and humane urban society than found in Japan. Like most Americans, these last few days I have been moved as never before by the courage and calm of the Japanese people amid such horrific conditions, as one of the most sophisticated and complex urbanized cultures on the planet in a split second is nearly paralyzed. I confess I do not quite fathom the constant American news blitzes about all sorts of China Syndrome scenarios. Radiation pollution is a serious worry, but right now no one has died from exposure and perhaps...

Forget about Tokyo. Anyone having traveled from Paris through Belgium, the Netherlands and the Ruhr District in Germany (like I have) wouldn't be impressed by a small, rural Far-East Asian settlement like that. However, this part of the World isn't the only candidate to the title. Some experts would say the largest "cityscape" found on Earth is the Eastern Seaboard Conurbation of the United States of America extending from Maine down to Florida, housing around 110 million inhabitants. Personally, I've only visited the southern part of it (Fla.) and although there is plenty of farmland between cities like Miami and...

We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life. Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail women's: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year, women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships. [snip] What many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in...