ParisTampaBlog

It is easy to lie with statistics, but it's a lot easier to lie without them.(Richard Herrnstein)

"…if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming.”(Richard Rorty)

There is, in fact, rough justice in the common quip that "we will recognize the rights of animals whenever they petition for them." The fact that animals can obviously not petition for their "rights" is part of their nature, and part of the reason why they are clearly not equivalent to, and do not possess [...]

On the surface it would seem, and was so reported by the media, that the Rwandan catastrophe was ethnic rivalry run amok. That is true only in part. There was a deeper cause, rooted in environment and demography. Between 1950 and 1994 the population of Rwanda, favored by better health care and temporarily improved food [...]

Immigration to the United States is not a problem. It is a phenomenon. The only way the United States can stop this phenomenon is by destroying the capitalist economy that draws immigrants here. We need to move in the direction of more open immigration, not in the direction of militarized borders fit only for a [...]

In the end, though, what happens on the opposite shore will not be up to us. We have little reason to expect societies in the grip of a powerful political theology to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique crisis within Christian civilization. This does not mean that those societies necessarily [...]

Life, for Becker, is a desperate business, in which a steady heroism before the terrors of existence is in general the only thing to be commended. (J. M. Cameron, from a review of Becker's Denial of Death)

It is evident that the common enthusiasm for equality is, in the fundamental sense, anti-human. It tends to repress the flowering of individual personality and diversity, and civilization itself; it is a drive toward savage uniformity. Since abilities and interests are naturally diverse, a drive toward making people equal in all or most respects is [...]

o learn is the proper business of youth; and whether we increase our knowledge by books or by conversation, we are equally indebted to foreign assistance.(Samuel Johnson, The Rambler # 121, May 14, 1751)

We have to go the way of the grasshopper even though it takes longer.(Earnest Becker, from The Denial of Death)