Author: Barry Arrington

The issue of whether the Nazis were on the left or the right comes up most often in discussions of economics.  Some argue the Nazis called themselves socialists, and therefore they should be classified on the left.  The problem with that argument is that in spite of the fact that the formal name of the Read More…

The following is President Trump’s statement: Today, our Nation mourns the loss of a titan of the law. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served more than 27 years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—notably just the second woman to be appointed to the Court. She was a loving wife to Read More…

Weigel takes to the pages of First Things and informs us that the United States has arrived at its sorry state because we have paid insufficient heed to Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: For Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde diagnosed a primary cause of our current distress over half a century ago.  Böckenförde was a German constitutional law scholar whose “dictum” Read More…

Indeed, it is more than merely true; it is an inexorable logical certainty if the premises of the theorists are true.  That is the question I will address in this post. Before we go on, we need to understand what ‘critical theory’ is.  Wikipedia has a good summary:  In sociology and political philosophy, the term Read More…

The New York Times reports: Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” the group said on Tuesday. Wikipedia reports that in “The Morality of Birth Control”, a 1921 speech, Read More…

A recent report from The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity is must reading for educators.  The report concludes that any fair assessment of the balance of risks overwhelmingly supports a return to in-person leaning this fall.  I encourage you to click on the link and read the whole report, but here are some of Read More…

A friend writes on Facebook: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “with liberty and justice for all” still seem like pretty good concepts to build a country around. Lets start living it. Happy 4th everyone! To which I responded that I agree wholeheartedly. But I would add that both of the quotations have Read More…

After working in the field for 20 years. See here. Give him props for honesty and courage to tell the truth in today’s cancel culture.

Since 1859 Darwinist have made their living leveraging mere logical possibility (no matter how astronomically improbable) into scientific certainty. And that is why I thought of them when a friend posted this on Facebook.

You live in the country that Washington founded. Did he found it single-handedly? No, but he was the indispensable man. His efforts were not alone sufficient, but they were necessary, and without him there would have been no founding. Every single person in this country owes him an eternal debt of gratitude for the indispensable Read More…

A man is not a woman, and anyone who says or implies otherwise is a liar. On June 15, 2020, this lie prevailed in the Supreme Court of the United States of America. This lie is now the law, and it will be enforced with all of the terrible power of the government. Alexander Solzhenitsyn Read More…

From Wikipedia:  “The motte-and-bailey fallacy** (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions with similar properties, one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial (the “bailey”).” It occurs to me that the entire Darwinian project is often portrayed Read More…

There is no evidence – none whatsoever – that the genetic code arose through blind unguided natural processes.  The genetic code instantiates a semiotic process in matter.  On the basis of countless trillions of instances of experience, where the provenance of an instantiation of a semiotic process in matter has been actually observed, it has Read More…

Several times now Orthomyxo has sneered at the idea that the genetic code is anything more than “chemical reactions.”  In an exchange with Upright Biped, UB defended the position that the code, while certainly operating through chemical reactions, is just as certainly governed by a staggeringly complex semiotic information system.  We pick up the debate Read More…

Renaissance astrology, in other words, was a premodern form of scientism, if we take scientism in its broadest sense of unwarranted reliance on science, or a predisposition to believe opinions that present themselves illicitly as scientific facts. It differed from our contemporary forms of scientism largely relative to its intellectual prestige. In the modern world Read More…