Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:26pm

The One Thing the World Will Never Run Short Of

 

A lady once asked him how he came to define ‘pastern’, the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as might be expected, he at once answered, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”

James Boswell, Life of Johnson

 

 

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist looks at the contemporary media and concludes that the main problem with it,is the arrogant ignorance that abounds among the younger members of the Fourth Estate:

 

The real problem is the arrogance that goes with the ignorance. Take Kate Zernike’s 2010 attempt at an expose of the ideas that motivate tea party activists that ran in the New York Times. She wrote:

But when it comes to ideology, it has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas. It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon.

Who are these obscure authors of long-dormant ideas? She points to Friedrich Hayek, for one. Yes, the same Hayek who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and died way, way back in … 1992. Whose Road To Serfdom was so obscure that it has never been out of print and was excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that obscure publication with only 17 million readers. The article doesn’t get around to actually providing any insight into these activists’ philosophy and it’s probably a good thing considering that this is what she has to say about “the rule of law”:

Ron Johnson, who entered politics through a Tea Party meeting and is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented “the rule of law,” Hayek’s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of “personal ends and desires.”

Oh dear. Where to begin? How about with the fact that “rule of law” is not Hayek’s term. The concept goes back to, well, the beginning of Western Civilization and the term was popularized by a 19th century British jurist and constitutional theorist named A.V. Dicey. It’s not an unwritten code, by definition. The idea that this would be an obscure concept to someone says everything about Zernike and the team at the New York Times and precisely nothing about Ron Johnson or Hayek or that sector of citizens of the United States who retain support for the rule of law.

A few weeks ago, David Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a stunning upset. The media didn’t handle it well. You might say they freaked out. Among other things, reporters sounded the alarm about a phrase Brat used in his writings that, they said, suggested he was a dangerous extremist: “The government holds a monopoly on violence. Any law that we vote for is ultimately backed by the full force of our government and military.” As National Review‘s Charles C.W. Cooke noted:

“Unusual” and “eye-opening” was the New York Daily News’s petty verdict. In the Wall Street Journal, Reid Epstein insinuated darkly that the claim cast Brat as a modern-day fascist. And, for his part, Politico’s Ben White suggested that the candidate’s remarks “on Neitzsche and the government monopoly on violence don’t make a whole lot of sense.”

Unusual, eye-opening, and non-sensical, perhaps, to people who had never studied what government is. But that group shouldn’t include political reporters, who could reasonably be expected to have passing familiarity with German sociologist Max Weber’s claim that “the modern state is a compulsory association which organizes domination. It has been successful in seeking to monopolize the legitimate use of physical force as a means of domination within a territory.”

 

Go here to read the rest.  Our higher educational system too often tends to produce ideological think alikes who are bone ignorant outside of the rote repetition of opinions spoon fed to them.  Journalism seems to specialize in these non-prodigies.  Oh well, the situation will eventually right itself but probably at a dreadful cost.  Benjamin Franklin, a dead white male whose writings few contemporary non-ink-stained wretches have probably read, put it nicely:  Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

 

 

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Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, July 10, AD 2014 5:23am

The “Rule of Law” is a very ancient idea. “The Greeks had a word for it,” Ίσονομία, Isonomia from the Greek ἴσος isos, “equal,” and νόμος nomos, “usage, custom, law,” is used by both Herodotus and Thucydides

It finds expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, which requires that “Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law… It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes” which is pretty much the Greek notion.

As for the proposition that “The government holds a monopoly on violence. Any law that we vote for is ultimately backed by the full force of our government and military,” on the Continent, universal suffrage and universal conscription were long seen as two sides of the same coin. Its proponents pointed out that, under the ancien régime, the same principle applied; it was the military aristocracy which had the principle voice in the making of the laws and the sword was everywhere the badge of the gentleman.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, July 10, AD 2014 7:46am

The sorry surplus of resentful/wrathful and ignorant/unintelligent people among the lying media continues to increase.

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