Free Republic

Below is my column in The Hill on the long-awaited interview of Special Counsel David Weiss with House investigators. As expected, Weiss refused to answer most of the questions, but seemed perfectly Nietzschean in explaining obvious conflicts between the accounts of whistleblowers and the Attorney General. Here is the column: The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said that all things are matters of mere interpretation and “whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” One has to understand Nietzsche and his nihilistic rejection of meaning to fully appreciate this week’s interview with special counsel...

00:00 Part 1. Introduction: Philosophy and History/1. Fascinated by history 03:36 2. What is philosophy of history? 04:46 Part 2. Explaining Nazism Philosophically/3. How could Nazism happen? 06:17 4. Five weak explanations for National Socialism 14:31 5. Explaining Nazism philosophically 21:40 Part 3. National Socialist Philosophy/6. The Nazi Party Program 22:44 7. Collectivism, not individualism 24:01 8. Economic socialism, not capitalism 27:40 9. Nationalism, not internationalism or cosmopolitanism 32:25 10. Authoritarianism, not liberal democracy 35:21 11. Idealism, not politics as usual 38:42 12. Nazi democratic success 41:05 Part 4. The Nazis in Power/13. Political controls 43:27 14. Education 51:28 15....

No, this isn’t a joke.Edward Luttwak, the distinguished Israeli-American strategist and public intellectual, tweeted the following this morning:11 Chinese universities teach Greek and Latin. Another 20 seek staff to so as well. Back in the US, the Princeton CLASSICS department has just eliminated the Latin or Greek requirement “to address systemic racism”. Truly racist say I. Why not just end it ? Jobs await in 中国The Chinese characters at the end mean “Middle Kingdom.”Princeton created an uproar by ditching the requirement for classics majors to learn Greek or Latin. That shouldn’t be a surprise: In 2017 Harvard eliminated the music...

Link here I had never seen this before. Just stumbled upon it. This Bishop is brilliant. It's an hour long, but you won't ever be bored.

REASON #8: PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY IS A DEEP SUBJECT THAT CAN BE QUITE INTIMIDATING. MODERN PHILOSOPHY IS SO ESOTERIC THAT FEW CAN UNDERSTAND OR RELATE TO IT, BUT CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY IS DIFFERENT. As with so many things, if you go back to the beginning and learn first principles, you can develop a deep and satisfying understanding of a subject that is baffling in its modern form. While philosophy may seem abstract and unrelated to the real world, quite the opposite is true. In fact, we are all philosophers; we all have a view of reality, a worldview, as we say today....

It has been said that money is power. Some have suggested that knowledge is power. For Nietzsche, language was a central aspect of power. Frederich Nietzsche noted that the “lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power.” Philosophers have long recognized language as a crucial faculty that distinguishes man from other creatures. Aristotle wrote that human beings, unlike other animals, possess “rational speech,” which is, among other things, for distinguishing between the just and the unjust. That is to say, language is employed...

Video LinkFor those of you unfamiliar with Stephen Hicks, he is a professor at Rockford College (Illinois). He is an authority on Post-Modernism and is often cited by Jordan Peterson when Peterson speaks of Post-Modernism and/or Nietzsche.This somewhat short video is interesting because, in it, Hicks describes a little bit about how socialism and socialist resentment of capitalism/free markets evolved into Post-Modernism that we see today. In other videos I have seen he also describes how Marxism has evolved into Post-Modernism.His basic point is that socialism (based on old socialist writings) exhibited a resentment toward capitalism whereas Post-Modernism literally seethes...

God's Answer to Nietzsche, the Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. December 18, 2017 by SCOTTY HENDRICKS Article Image Søren Kierkegaard, the man who invented the word "angst". Existentialism remains one of the more popular philosophies for the layperson to read about, consider, and study. The questions that it asks and the problems it confronts, ones of free will, anxiety, and the search for meaning; are ones we all face in our daily lives. While the solutions it offers may not work for everyone, existentialism can have a particularly large blind spot when it tries to provide answers for the religious. Think...

From the outside, with its high minarets and bulbous Mughal-style dome, the Wilmersdorf mosque, located on Brienner Street in southwest Berlin, looks much the same as it did when it was built in the 1920s. But the institution, just like the city around it, has changed. Today, the mosque is a quiet place. It mainly serves as an information center: School children sometimes visit on field trips; it hosts interfaith brunches. A small community of Muslims regularly show up for Friday prayer. It’s all a far cry from the days when the Wilmersdorf mosque was the lively center of a...

Mr. Trump’s strength is strange. It is reminiscent not so much of the classic American strongman as it is of the conjectural German Superman. Could it be that Donald Trump is an incarnation of Nietzschean social philosophy? A man who has surpassed the common man? A fantasy icon of power, fame, riches, confidence, mass influence, and moral indifference? Is “The Donald” the Übermensch? Mr. Trump’s force-of-will, come-what-may, shoot-from-the-hip, couldn’t-care-less attitude is in keeping with the self-willed assertion of Nietzsche when it comes to the rejection of accepted moral and political norms. Breaking with custom was central to Nietzsche’s philosophy of...

Rabbis, priests, bishops in Britain I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists. Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s...

Biases upfront: I'm a 46 year-old health nut obsessed with exercise and eating right. I don’t smoke or drink, and there are supermodels who worry less about their weight. However, I do admire those who don't live like that; who might not live as long as I do, but will probably enjoy their overall quality of life more than my somewhat Spartan one. Oh, and I also realize that this is America. And if people want to pursue happiness through a double cheeseburger and a pack of Newports, any joyless, left-wing bossy-pants who has a problem with that can go...

It was St. Peter Damian, a Doctor of the Church, who explained that the vice of sodomy "surpasses the enormity of all others," because, "Without fail, it brings death to the body and destruction to the soul. It pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, and gives entrance to the devil, the stimulator of lust: It leads to error, totally removes truth from the deluded mind . . . It opens up Hell and closes the gates of Paradise . . . It is this vice that...

At the center of Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity is the idea that Christianity involves an attack upon the human will. In The Antichrist he says the following: "The Christian conception of God…is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types.… God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! … God–the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!"1In this passage, and in much of his work, Nietzsche is reacting against a version of...

No serious thinker has done more harm to the Jewish people than Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings were an important inspiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Yet far from being an anti-Semite, Nietzsche was one of the most pro-Jewish German writers of his time. How can this paradox be explained, and does it have any lessons for the present day? Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Protestant ministers. He became an academic expert on ancient Greece, yet his poor health forced him to resign his professorship at a young age. He spent most of the rest of his life on...

I have often learned my most valuable lessons from my worst enemies. In graduate school I spent several years wrestling with the texts of the atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who taught me one unforgettable lesson: Those who lack the tragic sense of life are apt to invent realities to replace the one they cannot face.Nietzsche aimed his argument at Christianity, with its supposed invention of an otherworldly paradise. He was wrong on this score, however: The Christian faith affirms the inevitability of suffering. The cross is a perennial reminder of the tragic limitations that all human beings must not...

Does Obama’s anti-democratic ideology result from his dysfunctional childhood? An intriguing book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, by Paul Vitz, argues this type background is a common precursor to the classic tyrant’s personality. This suggests Barack’s beef with America might result from his own deficient past. Does it matter the source of our politician’s mental makeup? Of course it does. After all, we expect leaders to make policy based on empirical knowledge, not just knee-jerk reaction to past trauma. For example, would Americans be pleased if the president outlawed taxis because his pooch was run over by...

Martin Gross, Social Scientist and NY Times best-selling author, calls Obama, Congress, and mainstream media "masters of deceit" with no restraints and no conscience. "There is no responsible group in America taking care of the middle class." Gross reports what he was told when, on several occasions, he personally called the Bureau of Public Debt to question Obama's fuzzy accounting regarding the deficit. Video at site

We're increasingly uncomfortable with religion these days. As a society, we tolerate pastors, priests, rabbis and other religious folks, so long as they confine their message to a vanilla "God is love" theme and bless babies, brides and caskets. But when religious leaders speak out on the issues of the day -- especially using morally tinged language -- the elite gatekeepers of public opinion in the media, government and academia warn shrilly that a new Dark Age is upon us. More and more, we see outright hostility to religion -- particularly to Christianity. Consider the wild popularity of a recent...

From CatholicInsight.com Features The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to corrupt By Timothy Matthews Hardcopy Issue Date: March 2009 Online Publication Date: Mar 17, 2009, 22:36 Western civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social...