That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
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Aldous Huxley
Author: Redactor
Another riot, more violence, one person dead. What to make of it all?
Click on over to Townhall for the question (if not the answer) of the day.
- Washington Post: One dead and 19 injured as car strikes crowds along route of white nationalist rally in Charlottesville
- Trump condemns ‘hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides’ in Charlottesville
- CNN: Videos show car crash into protesters
- Willamette Week: As Portland Police Stand By, Alt-Right and Antifa Protesters Beat Each Other Bloody
- San Jose Mercury News: Trump rally attendees sue San Jose, Mayor Liccardo and police chief
- Washington Post: Ugly, bloody scenes in San Jose as protesters attack Trump supporters outside rally
- Townhall: Do You Know the Way of San Jose?
- CNN: Trump supporters, protesters clash after Chicago rally postponed
- Townhall: Mob Violence and Its Defenders
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A Slave Saw Something
On August 13, 1831, Nat Turner witnessed a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God. Eight days later he and 70 other slaves killed approximately 55 whites in Southampton County, Virginia.
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Frédéric Bastiat
Government is not maimed, and cannot be so. It has two hands — one to receive and the other to give; in other words, it has a rough hand and a smooth one. The activity of the second is necessarily subordinate to the activity of the first. Strictly, Government may take and not restore. This is evident, and may be explained by the porous and absorbing nature of its hands, which always retain a part, and sometimes the whole, of what they touch. But the thing that never was seen, and never will be seen or conceived, is, that Government can restore more to the public than it has taken from it. It is therefore ridiculous for us to appear before it in the humble attitude of beggars. It is radically impossible for it to confer a particular benefit upon any one of the individualities which constitute the community, without inflicting a greater injury upon the community as a whole.
Frédéric Bastiat, “Government” in Essays on Political Economy (New York:
G. P. Putnams & Sons, 1874)
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James Damore Speaks About Google
The big news this week has been the “Google Memo” scandal, which ended up with the firing of its author, James Damore. He gave several interviews after getting the sack, most prominent being with Dr. Jordan Peterson:
Bloomberg covered the story:
Damore also talked to Ben Shapiro:
But Damore’s first public interview was with Stefan Molyneux:
https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro
Molyneux also talked about the affair, a little earlier:
https://youtu.be/gxIw9fyIK_c
And then there is Paul Joseph Watson and the art of the rant:
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Spain Conquered
On this day in 1898, an Armistice ended the Spanish-American War, a war commemorated best by sociologist and economist William Graham Sumner in his classic essay “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”
We shall soon cease completely to understand the language of the people. Now we say: ‘The theory of progress,’ ‘the role of the individual in history,’ ‘the evolution of science’ and a peasant says: ‘You can’t hide an awl in a sack,’ and all theories, histories, evolutions become pitiable and ridiculous, because they are incomprehensible and unnecessary to the people. But the peasant is stronger than we; he is more tenacious of life, and there may happen to us what happened to the tribe of Atzurs, of whom it was reported to a scholar:
‘All the Atzurs have died out, but there is a parrot here who knows a few words of their language.’
Leo Tolstoy, quoted in Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, (1919; English, 1920), S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, translators.
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Adam Ferguson
Men are to be estimated, not from what they know, but from what they are able to perform.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Part I, Section V.
On August 11, 1972, the last of American ground combat troops exited South Vietnam.
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Adam Ferguson
Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. If Cromwell said, that a man never mounts higher, than when he knows not whither he is going; it may with more reason be affirmed of communities, that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is intended, and that the most refined politicians do not always know whither they are leading the state by their projects.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). The first sentence has been cited often, becoming a byword for Austrian economist and social philosopher F. A. Hayek.