If you live in the general Washington, DC metro area you should be prepared for a fun-filled, traffic jamming time the weekend of September 11th. Thousands of citizens from all walks, incomes, and political backgrounds are slated to descend on the city for the so-called 9/12 March on Washington–the latest in the series of national tea party gatherings.
As I noted in my blog recounting my experience speaking at the Independence Day tea party the only way the tea party movement…
One of the most popular logical fallacies I’ve encountered has been a heavy reliance on what I’ve come to call argumentum ad governmentum.
Relying on government to fight our ideological battles for us is a shaky means of convincing others to see things our way by arguing for majority standards and controls over minority beliefs. At its worst, argumentum ad governmentum is a way of getting others to act and think the way we would like them to by using a…
Over the last few months I have been keeping an eye on the tea party movement. My participation has waned and heightened throughout, from my first impressions to my ultimate conclusions about the utility of tea parties. This weekend I was able to glean a different perspective when they asked me to deliver one of the speeches at the DC Independence Day Tea Party at Upper Senate Park next to the Capitol Building. This time, I was able to get a…
It is truly amazing to me that some people who call themselves “liberal,” “progressive,” and “tolerant,” are so irrationally afraid and intolerant of anyone who holds a differing viewpoint to the degree that they feel the need to lash out, discredit and attempt to purge them from the intellectual discussion of ideas. Recently, I was shocked to discover that such people were trying to accomplish this by employing methods I thought hadn’t survived beyond the Nuremberg trials.
I saw this spectacle…
Tea party protests questioned the constitutionality of some of the massive bailouts over the past year, which amount to trillions of dollars. That drew bizarre attacks from leftists, who argue that these peaceful protests will somehow lead to another terrorist incident like the Oklahoma City bombing, and that the tea party protesters, like the Founding Fathers, are just a reactionary “bunch of white males who didn’t want to pay their taxes.”
Not all of the bailouts are illegal or unconstitutional, but some of…
The “tea party” protests against out-of-control government spending have been very clear in identifying what wasteful spending they object to. One example is Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which was falsely sold to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but which the Congressional Budget Office repeatedly pointed out would actually cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” Another example is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford…
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