(Part 4) Top products from r/Conservative

The speech codes enacted at certain colleges in the "PC nineties" have been revoked, largely for the best reason pointed out in Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors: nobody has a monopoly on knowing what's offensive, so the goal of "no hurt feelings" is unattainable. College campuses weren't looking to shut out odious speech, but to protect the feelings of certain people (and in doing so happened to shut out odious speech).

As far as workplace speech goes, I'm inclined to believe that speech that advances business is always preferred over all other kinds. I fail to see how incendiary commentary in the workplace would benefit anyone's business, and more importantly it's censure is not the same thing as being told "you can't express that opinion." It's more like "you can't express that opinion, in this building, 9-5, and keep this job for which we pay you our money." Which is really applied everywhere; you can exercise your free speech rights in a buddy's house, and find yourself thrown out for being a dick. It's not an overarching, rigidly enforced political correctness that encourages this kind of behavior, but simply getting along with one another and, in the case of business, trying to turn a dollar into two dollars. Even the most racially prejudiced car salesman turns it off when someone of the lesser race(s) comes to buy a car.

As a staunch defender of total free speech (including the neo-nazis, WBC, the Klan, etc) I frankly find the current trends encouraging, not discouraging. Unless I'm missing the point here.

Free to Choose

Also, Friedman did several hour long documentaries based on this book that are all available on YouTube. Just search "free to choose milton friedman." He takes an issue, examines it over the first 30 minutes, and the second half is all discussion with various prominent people. There's some great debate between folks like Friedman and a young Thomas Sowell and their pro-union, pro-big government counterparts. Outstanding work. I've watched them all.

Well, I haven't found any arguments that are fully convincing such that I would leave Catholicism, however here's a quick list of robust, intellectual atheism:

• Atheism: A Philopshical Justification by Michael Martin
  
  
• An Ethics for Today by Richard Rorty
  
  
• Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht
  
  
• The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach
  
  
• Arguing About Gods by Graham Oppy
  
  

A very insightful review. Thanks for sharing, /u/jimrosenz, I'll have to pick this one up.

Since he was mentioned in the review, I would always recommend Burnham's work, particularly The Managerial Revolution and Suicide of the West to anyone who hasn't read it. He is easily one of the most insightful minds of the 20th century. Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left seems similar to Oppenheimer's work here, but read both only after reading the Venona Papers.

Obviously you can only take guns away from the innocent citizens, and you can never take them away from the criminals. If you think society is better off by disarming honest, innocent citizens, then you're so stupid I can't help you.

https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493636

It's interesting that this is from Seattle. Down in Mexico, there is a legend of a Toltec prince named Ci Atl ('One Reed'), after the year of his birth. His people came from the North into the Central Valley of Mexico, and unlike the people who lived there, his tribe had light skin, and wore beards. His symbol was a spear thrown through a single reed. Long story short, eventually he was forced to leave his kingdom, but he swore one day his people would return, in the year of his birth, to reconquer the land.

500 years later, in the year Ci Atl, King Montezuma of the Aztecs allowed a mysterious group of foreigners to walk directly into his capital unopposed. Why? Because they were light skinned, wore beards, and wore a symbol on their chests that looked like a spear thrown through a reed, or a cross. So, you see, the Indigenous predicted the Spanish- Columbus merely made them right.

Source

http://www.amazon.com/Reverence-Renewing-Forgotten-Paul-Woodruff/dp/0195157958

:)

That's fine... you can read this book and get back to me.

Wikipedia is fine for conversations.

;-)

The US should have the lowest rates in the world, not just in the OECD (which is full of sickened, overtaxed economies anyway)! I'm not sure who prepared this data, but measuring tax burdens in the US is extremely complicated, because of so many jurisdictions that cross over, and I would have to see their analysis. They may not, for example, have included Social Security "contributions," which of course are a tax, even if politicians and their minions do not wish to call them that.

Additionally, this does not take into account the costs associated with regulation and trade barriers, which are embedded in costs and reduce our standard of living.

If you actually are willing to consider the expansion of government in US history, I encourage you to read "Crisis and Leviathan" by Robert Higgs. Alternatively, you can listen to the related lectures here.

Actually, it does those as well:

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

Passionate Marriage

The Selfish Gene

Science can put ethics to the test, just like any other activity.

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0029303303/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Alger Hiss by Susan Jacoby. She's still a leftist.

Witness by Whittaker Chambers.

I'll just leave this here.

> In the twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right.

This guy apparently forgot that the liberal party was founded in 1859 and there were a hell of a lot of people who called themselves liberals long before 1920 and who continue to be referred to as liberals today.

https://www.amazon.com/Treatises-Government-Everyman-John-Locke/dp/0460873563

https://www.amazon.com/Liberty-AmazonClassics-John-Stuart-Mill-ebook/dp/B074BYLSGG/

https://www.amazon.com/Law-Other-Essays-Annotated-ebook/dp/B00BMV0Y9I/

Seigal sounds interesting but I stand with Hayek on this one.

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553

> I don't think we have to blame everything on communism. It's counterproductive. Sometimes a movement can just be taken over by bad people and they don't have to be linked to Communism in some way. I think the word communism has taken on the same meaning as white supremacy for the left. To go to buzzword for when you need to scare people against something

Did you listen to Leonard at all? His time in the communist party of America and how it infiltrated the civil right movement is literally the topic of the speech. And it's not a new speech, he talks about events from the 1930's etc.

Mr. Patterson died back in 1980 and this speech was given before then. He literally went to Moscow and was trained on how to infiltrate the civil rights movement, he literally admits this and discusses it in the speech. He was literally a communist and was also high up in the communist party of America. He literally states he walked away because he realized that the communist didn't care about the blacks, or any race for that matter, and only cared about the enslavement off man.

You can look the guy up, he was(he left) a member of the communist party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Patterson

Here is his petition that he delivered to the U.N. in 1951: https://www.amazon.com/We-Charge-Genocide-William-Patterson/dp/0717807452/

Here is his autobiography: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Cried-Genocide-Autobiography/dp/0717806855/

Here is a Biography someone else wrote of him that seems to explore the communist/civil rights link side of Mr. Patterson: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Revolutionary-Patterson-Globalization-American/dp/0252079434/

I just finished "The Conservatives" by Patrick Allitt:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Conservatives-Personalities-Throughout-American/dp/0300118945

A very non-partisan exploration into our Nation's history regarding conservative leaders. Their contradictions, the movements, and ultimately their under-riding general philosophy. I was skeptical at first, thinking it was going to be anti-conservative, but it was actually a very pure, historical breakdown of all the conservative movements and leaders (I know when I pull out a highlighter when reading a book casually, I've struck gold).

Couple that with "American Creation" by Joseph Ellis, and I think you'll start drawing a very vivid historical picture of the historical movement.

Edit*: Some highlighted quotes I pulled out of the aforementioned book:

"As a result, politics attracted manipulative, unscrupulous, and greedy men who sometimes saw it as an avenue for self-advancement rather than for the exercise of republican virtue... In fact, every election marked a crisis. The president no longer governs for the interest of the state, but for that of his re-election..." (pg 57).

"... Failing to do so meant undermining the traditional self reliance of the American people, by leading them to expect that the government would support them if they did not support themselves..." (pg 176).

"...All of history shows us that people are always self-interested, so that life in a planned society gives power to the planners to govern as they see fit. No matter their protestations of selflessness and high-mindedness, they will plan what they see as the good society and then impose it on those around them, at the cost of freedom..." (pg 160) .

Think about how unbridled immigration from third-world countries and open-arms refugee policies affects a nation's law, culture, traditions, and political philosophy. Just go take a peek at Europe's cultural suicide.

And I challenge you to think critically about the related issues independent of ethnicity! Resist the leftist impulse to view everything through the lens of race, and you'll gain some harrowing insights about what is happening in the world.

***

Read one of these books:

• The Death of the West
  
  
• Slouching Towards Gomorrah
  
  
  
  Observe the destruction of the family and the increasing infidelity, glorification of casual sex, and out-of-wedlock child births (which is one of the major predictors of criminality). The media normalizes so much of this.
  
  
  
  Consider the growth of the government and the ever-increasing dependence on government by citizens.
  
  ***
  
  I could go on.
  
  
  

It's not the 19th century anymore. The scientific community's understanding of the relevant phenomena has progressed to such an extent that it's not reasonable to compare modern climate scientists to some medieval plague doctor who thinks that diseases are caused by imbalances of the humors or something equally wacky.

They've understood the greenhouse gas effect, they've learned how to analyze the isotopes of a sample of atmospheric carbon to determine if it came from an older or younger, organic or inorganic source of carbon, they can measure the temperatures of the past by proxy using elements frozen in ice cores extracted from Earth's ice sheets. They know for a fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, that the burning of fossil fuels is primarily responsible for that increase, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat inside Earth's atmosphere, and that Earth's temperature has increased at an unusually rapid pace in recent decades. You know what's bad for the economy? Rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice sheets, increased frequency and severity of natural disasters like drought and tropical storms, the desertification of semi-arid regions of the world including the American Southwest, and the resulting disruptions to agricultural production.

Burying our heads in the ground because the steps that we need to take to slow or stop climate change would be economically costly isn't going to make the problem go away; if anything it will make the problem more costly because the impacts of climate change will be even more severe.

These are widely accepted, mainstream predictions on the logical consequences of climate change. Whether climate change is going to result in considerable consequences for human civilization is not a subject of controversy among most scientists; what is a matter of debate is how severe those consequences will be.

Sources:

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/education/

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know by physicist Joseph Romm

Thank you. A lot of people just resort to insults and Gish Gallop in the global warming argument.
I truly am not worried about the consequences of global climate change. Some things will be bad and some things will be good. But change is inevitable, to me it makes a lot more sense to adapt to your environment instead of trying to change it.

When you got educated people like Stephen Hawking spewing absolute drivel that the Earth could turn in to Venus or insanity like reporters wanting to criminalize dissenting ideas you realize that they are desperate to advance their agenda.

Climate change has been politicized in order to push an agenda.

Now before you say 'you are talking conspiracy, it can't be a conspiracy because too many people would have to be in on it', think about this.

That is the beauty of it, it is not some globally coordinated conspiracy, There is NO ONE at the top of this conspiracy.

The scientists fudge the data and focus on the worse possible interpretations of the data because that is what keeps the grant money flowing.

The politicians focus on the negatives and scare tactics because it is very easy to manipulate people with fear. This insures a frightened voting block that they can count on to deliver them votes. Fear means votes


The media focuses on the worse possible outcome because sensationalism sells. Have you ever heard the news term "If it bleeds it Leads"?


And finally the globalists see it as an excellent way to redistribute wealth from the rich countries to the poorer ones, a form of world socialism.

No, all of these groups did not get together and conspire to invent a global warming hoax.

But each and every one of the groups above see global climate change as a means to an end. And people just gobble it up while failing to realize that there have always been doomsday prophets who have predicted the end of the world.

The difference is today's instant global communications has given them a voice that they would not have had a hundred years ago.

Edit added link