Barry Arrington

The other day I had an exchange with a progressive about Amy Coney Barrett.  The exchange was touched off by Ms. Progressive’s comment about Barrett’s faith:  “I don’t think her religion is a problem as much as her religious convictions driving her decision making is.” I encounter this sort of muddled thinking from progressives all of the time.  And it is always based on the same progressive myth – the myth that some people (namely, progressives) arrive at their conclusions (whether the conclusion concerns a matter of policy, law, politics or whatever else) from some morally neutral and objectively rational “view from nowhere” while other people’s conclusions are based on their biases (or bigotries if the progressive is not feeling Read More ›

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 Nazi party translates to the “National German Socialist Workers Party,” they were not socialists.  The Nazis did not advocate for or impose the central tenet of socialism – the ownership of the means of production by the state.1  Yes, Hitler employed socialist sounding propaganda when it furthered his political aims (thus the name of the party), especially in attracting disenfranchised German workers.  But in actual 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 her late husband, Martin, and a dedicated mother to her two children. Renowned for her brilliant mind and her powerful dissents at the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg demonstrated that one can disagree without being disagreeable toward one’s colleagues or different points of view. Her opinions, including well-known decisions regarding the legal equality of women and the disabled, have inspired all Americans, and generations of great 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” is familiar to, if often ignored by, political scientists: “The liberal secularized state lives on conditions that it cannot guarantee itself.” Put another way, the liberal institutions of a modern democracy—free speech, a free press, freedom of association, universal adult suffrage, majority rule and protection of minority rights, religious freedom, and so forth—rely for their credibility, and their tensile strength under pressure, on cultural foundations 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 Critical Theory describes the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s and draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. . . . Postmodern critical theory analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in order to challenge modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives, rationality, and universal truths, while politicizing social problems ‘by situating them in historical and cultural 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, Sanger divided society into three groups: the “educated and informed” class that regulated the size of their families, the “intelligent and responsible” who desired to control their families in spite of lacking the means or the knowledge, and the “irresponsible and reckless people” whose religious scruples “prevent their exercising control over their numbers”. Sanger concludes, “There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking 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 the key findings: School aged children are at much greater risk from flu than COVID-19. “The good news is that children are at very low risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19. Indeed, children aged 5–14 are seven times more likely to die of influenza than of COVID-19. Children aged 1–4 are 20 times more likely to die of influenza. Overall, Americans under the age 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 context that is essential. Where do the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come from? Men are “endowed by their creator” with those rights. And we are a nation “under God,” with liberty and justice for all. All politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from shared views about fundamental metaphysical ideas. And ideas about the existence of God are the 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 role he played in founding a country that, while far from perfect, would in the fullness of time become the greatest nation that has ever existed in the history of the planet. 244 years later you people stand on his shoulders. And from that vantage you shit on him because he was not perfect and failed to found a leftist egalitarian utopia. Your ingratitude is 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 said this about lies: Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. And he said this about refusing to surrender one’s soul to a terrible lying government: It will not be an easy choice for a body, but it is only one for a soul. And if we get cold feet, even taking 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 in terms of a motte-and-bailey fallacy.  How many times have you heard the statement “evolution is as certain as gravity”?  Well, given a certain sense of the word “evolution,” the statement is true or nearly so.  Consider the following proposition:  Evolution means “change in the biosphere over time.”  No one – from the most ardent materialist atheist to the most fervid young earth creationist – 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 always – without a single exception – been the production of intelligence.  Thus, there is plenty of evidence that suggests it is, in principle, impossible for the genetic code to have arisen through blind unguided natural processes.  After all, the old aphorism “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” has its limits.  As this article in Forensic Science International discusses, it is only common 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 with UB responding to Ortho by outlining how the system works: I told you the critical physical condition of the system (described as such in the literature) that allows the system to function as it does, in a material universe determined by inexorable physical law. The gene system must have the physical freedom to specify itseIf, as well as any variation of itself. In case Read More ›