Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain (Part One)

A reader recalled my posts on evil as privatio boni from the old blog and wants me to upload them to the new, which I will gladly do.  So far I managed to scare up two.  Here is the first.

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The goddess of blogging sent me Peter Lupu whose comments are a welcome stimulant. Peter displays the virtues of a good commenter and indeed co-worker: he is 'up to speed,' 'in there' with the terminology, and he knows how to oppose without becoming churlish. He tells me that theists, confronted with the logical argument from evil should not reject the premise that objective evil exists. I agree. But a good philosopher examines every aspect of a problem, no matter how bizarre it appears at first, and every premise and every inferential joint of every argument pertaining to the problem. So we need to consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

 For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present –namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem — dating back beyond Hume to Epicurus — of reconciling the existence of God (as standardly defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first  note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.

The Problem of Pain

But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positive evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, etc.

Two Possible Responses. Pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. But the painfulness of this substratum is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness.  If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent.   This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain.   Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for another time.

Non-Nature-Themed Haiku

Haiku Grammar Lament

Into desuetude
Falls the subjunctive mood
Along with the hyphen.

Haiku Commentary on Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

The Marxist Nowhere Man
Attempts to change
What he does not understand.

Anti-Commie Haiku

Utopic heads in fog,
They broke real eggs
For an unreal omelet.

9/11 Haiku

Nihilist numbskulls
Virgins in brain,
Topple a tower with a plane.

Kerouac and the Ancient Lures

I told myself that come November I would quit Jackin' off for a while, but October's momentum continues.  I was just now looking in an old journal for something else and found this entry from 10 November 2000:

During the years he wrote Some of the Dharma, Kerouac had a chance.  But then On the Road was published in 1957 (in a sense the opposite of Some of the Dharma), fame came, and he was lost forever. Sex, drugs,  booze, and fame.  Ancient lures.  A lure is an evil that appears good.  The alluring is that which to all appearances is good but is poisonous at its core.  The fish lure se-duces the fish then hooks him.  Women are the chief "fishers of men" to twist a New Testament phrase.  The fish is 'taken in' by the lure and then 'taken out' by it.  "Pretty girls make graves," said Ray Smith the Kerouac character in The Dharma Bums.  The meaning  is that sex leads to birth and birth to another go-round on the "slaving meat wheel" (Mexico City Blues, 211 Chorus) of samsara.

A Map of Bohemia

Originally published in 1896 by Gelett Burgess  in The Lark, the following curiosity I found on the inside front cover of Albert Parry, Garretts and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America, 1933, rev. 1960 with a new chapter "Enter Beatniks" by Henry T. Moore (New York: Dover Publications).  The Book Gallery on Mesa Arizona's 1950s-reminiscent Main Street wanted ten dollars for this 50 year old paperback, but I gladly paid it particularly because of the 'new' chapter.  I was disappointed, however,by the exiguous coverage of Joe Gould on pp. 148 and 346.

Gelett_Burgess_-_Map_of_Bohemia_1896

What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

Her real name was Linda Boreman. The daughter of a New York City cop, she was raised in Yonkers and attended Catholic school where she was known as "Miss Holy Holy" because of her noli me tangere attitude. She died in April of 2002. Read her sad story here.

Her case and that of others, Kerouac for one, point us to what I will call the problem of the inefficacy of religion for moral improvement.  Linda Boreman attended Catholic school and ended up a porno star.  Kerouac, for all his Catholicism and Buddhism, two ascetic religions, ended up most unascetically destroying his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, with sex and drugs and booze. 

Of course, the counter-question can and must be asked: How much worse would we be if not for the moral teachings we have received from religion?  And even if you yourself got no such instruction in your impressionable years, you were buoyed up by a society in which those teachings were partially, if inadequately and often hypocritically, embodied.  (The hypocrite at least pays lip service to high standards, lip service being better than no service at all.)   The boneheads of the New Atheism cannot of course understand this.  They would sweep religion aside without considering what good it has done, and how the genuine problems it addresses will be solved without it.

Krauthammer on Reversion to the Norm and Obama’s Cluelessness

Charles Krauthammer is one astute commentator. Excerpt:

Nor should Republicans overinterpret their Tuesday mandate. They received none. They were merely rewarded for acting as the people's proxy in saying no to Obama's overreaching liberalism. As one wag put it, this wasn't an election so much as a restraining order.

The Republicans won by default. And their prize is nothing more than a two-year lease on the House. The building was available because the previous occupant had been evicted for arrogant misbehavior and, by rule, alas, the House cannot be left vacant.

The president, however, remains clueless. In his next-day news conference, he had the right demeanor – subdued, his closest approximation of humility – but was uncomprehending about what just happened. The "folks" are apparently just "frustrated" that "progress" is just too slow. Asked three times whether popular rejection of his policy agenda might have had something to do with the shellacking he took, he looked as if he'd been asked whether the sun had risen in the West. Why, no, he said.

Keith Olbermann Suspended From MSNBC for Campaign Contributions

It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.  I mean that ironically, of course.  The guy is a first-class moral defective.  This stupid attack on the sweet and avuncular Dennis Prager as a "right-wing yakker" and "worst person in the world" is a clear example of his leftist scumbaggery.

There is a very simple distinction between equality of opportunity, equality of treatment, and the like, on the one hand, and equality of outcome or result, on the other.  I am sure Olbermann can understand this distinction (whether he in fact does I don't know).  So the problem with Olbermann is not stupidity but moral scumbaggery.  He attacked Prager without attempting  to understand what his position is.  This is typical of the Left. They make no attempt at understanding conservative positions.  They typically content themselves with SIXHIRB: the tarring of their opponents with such epithets as sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted.

This clip does a tolerably good job of explaining the distinction between formal and material equality.  Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Prager's views knows that he fully supports equality of opportunity, equality before the law, and the like as American values.  His point is that equality of outcome is not an American value.  And he is right.  Olbermann, like that other moral cretin who was given the boot, Alan Grayson of Florida, who lost decisively to Daniel Webster, took the words of the person he was attacking out of context and twisted their meaning completely.

And Olbermann calls himself a journalist? 

On Smiting One’s Political Enemies

Tony Hanson e-mails from the once-great state of California whose governor-elect is once again Governor Moonbeam:

I see you had Berlin's essay in your library and reread it. I just wanted to say I don't think that we are in quite the bind you describe since there still seems to be a lot of room for some good rationally justified smiting, polemics and general political ass-kicking in spite of value pluralism. I'll make this very brief.

Defense of Polemics. I am sure you would agree that one's opponents may have all sorts of bad reasons for their positions, and (politely?) exposing them can make people more thoughtful, and may even enlighten them to the truth of value pluralism so much so that they may "flinch" too. Could this encourage comity?

That is a good point and I fully agree with it.  The pluralistic position, according to which no objective resolution satisfactory to all competent practioners is possible due to irresolvable value differences, is entirely consistent with the possibility of the fully objective exposure of bad arguments and empirical falsehoods on both sides.  Take abortion.  There are bad arguments on both sides of the debate, and almost everyone will agree that there are.   (I won't say what those bad arguments are lest I spark a meta-debate as to exactly which arguments on both sides are bad; but that there are bad arguments on both sides is uncontroversial.)   An argument can be objectively bad for a number of different reasons: it is logically invalid; rests on an empirically false premise; involves a weak analogy; commits an informal fallacy; is so murky and indistinct as to be insusceptible of evaluation, etc.  The essence of the pluralistic position is that once all the bad arguments on both sides are set aside, one arrives at a set of 'good' arguments which, however, do not resolve the issue for an  impartial observer.

I would quibble, though, with your use of 'polemics.'  From the Greek polemos, it means strife, struggle, war.  So we can define polemics as verbal warfare, warfare at the level of ideas.  There needn't be anything polemical about pointing out to an opponent that one of his arguments falls short of an objective standard such as the one represented by formal logic.  Here there is the possibility of convincing the opponent (assuming he is sincere, intelligent, etc.) because the cognitive values that come into play (truth, clarity, logical coherence, etc.) are agreed upon.

Defense of War and Smiting.  You said, "Suppose further … that this value difference that divides them cannot be objectively resolved to the satisfaction of both parties by appeal to any empirical fact or by any reasoning or by any combination of the two." Say you are arguing with a Fascist or radical libertarian (who thinks property rights are absolute), and no empirical fact or reasoning satisfies them In other words, they are unreasonable.

But if you say that the radical libertarian is unreasonable, what are your criteria of reasonability or rationality?  I reject the radical libertarian position on property rights and I get the impression that you do as well.  But from his point of view, his stance is reasonable in that it is rationally derivable from certain axioms he accepts.  Is there some plain empirical fact that he fails to take cognizance of, or some rule of logic that he flouts?  When you  say that the radical libertarian is unreasonable, aren't you just rejecting his scheme of values? He places an absolute, inviolable, value on the individual and his property and refuses to admit that there are any competing values that would tend to have a relativizing effect.  Consider an eminent domain dispute.  Farmer Jones has worked hard all his life and owns 100 acres.  The Feds want to buy from him a strip of land for a much-needed road that cannot be placed anywhere else. Jones refuses to sell.  Even if he agrees that there is such a thing as the common good, he refuses to concede that it has the power to limit the absoluteness of his property right.

When you say that Jones is unreasonable, what you are doing is pitting your value-based conception of reasonableness against his.  But then my point goes through, which was that disputes like this are objectively irresolvable because rooted in value disputes which are objectively irresolvable.

Seems like its time for the Converse Clausewitz Principle [Politics is war conducted by other means]. Well, you can of course work to defeat libertarians in the political arena (though they do a pretty good job of this themselves, which is why I follow Medved in calling them 'losertarians.')  But the issue concerns your rational warrant for "unflinchingly" opposing them.  What makes you so cocksure that you are right and they are wrong?

Further, it seems a distinction needs to be made between the priority of a value, and the weight (or  height?) of the priority. Two people could prioritize security over liberty, but one would be prepared to sacrifice a lot more liberty for security than the other. The extremist gives his value too much weight, obviously; but it also seems one can be objectively wrong about the weight of the prioritized value, and not be an extremist. Invoking Aristotle might be helpful. Though one might not be a complete coward (or extremist), one might miss the mark with respect to courage and be a little cowardly, and so on with the various values. Moreover, it might not be possible to come to an agreement by using facts and reason, to what "hitting the mark" is, but you know it misses. Someone might have a different intuition on what hitting the mark is, or the target might be a large one allowing for disagreement, but it still might be worth trusting your sense of "tone," and fighting for it.

I agree that if value V1 takes priority over value V2, there remains the question of how much higher up in the axiological hierarchy V1 is.  Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death."  He apparently valued his liberty over his very life.  Would you call him an extremist?  If yes, then what is wrong with being an extremist?  If he is placing an inordinate value on liberty, how do you show that?  Or take the Obama liberal who is willing to sacrifice his liberty for (the promise of) cradle-to-grave security and material comfort.  How do you show in an objective manner that the liberal places too much value on security and not enough on liberty?  You simply assert that "one can be objectively wrong about the weight of the prioritized value." Gratuitous assertions, however, elicit gratuitous counterassertions in response.

Tea Partiers object to the liberty-encroaching governmental overreach of the Obama gang.  (Case in point: the 'individual mandate' of Obamacare which forces citizens to buy health insurance.)  The political conflict is rooted in a deep value conflict.  How resolve it?

I don't see how Aristotle helps in this.  I would also point out that he was talking about virtues, not values, which are a different animal entirely and didn't come into philosophical currency until the 19th century.  A virtue is a habit (hexis, habitus), a dispositional feature of an agent; a value is . . . well what exactly is a value?  An abstract or ideal object of some sort?

The ComBox is open to give Hanson an opportunity to reply.  Others may chime in as well, but only if their comments are well-informed, intelligent, and stick precisely to the topic under discussion, what he says and what I say here and in the post that Hanson in replying to.  I simply delete comments I consider to be substandard. 

Can I Stand Unflinchingly for Convictions that I Accept as Only Relatively Valid?

Isaiah Berlin's great essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" concludes as follows:

'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, ' and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.'  To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity. (Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1969, p. 172.)

A marginalium of mine from 1994 reads, "If I think my convictions merely relatively valid, how can I stand for them unflinchingly?  Even if this is psychologically possible, it seems to be something we ought not do."

To expand upon my 1994 thought.  The liberty of the individual to be free from coercion and obstruction — "negative liberty (freedom)" in Berlin's terminology — obviously comes into conflict with other things we deem valuable such as equality, security, and public order. 

Consider how liberty and security are related. Liberty worth having is liberty within a context of security, and security is security worth having only if it makes possible a robust exercise of liberty.  For example, my liberty to leave my house at any time of the day or night  is worth very little if the probability is high that I will be accosted by muggers and other unsavory types when I step out my door.  The security of a police state would prevent that but at a cost too high to pay.

So liberty and security, though both values, are competing values.  Does one rank higher than the other such that we ought to prefer one to the other?  In a concrete situation in which they come into conflict,   one must choose.  Consider for example a sobriety checkpoint on New Year's Eve when by custom booze intake is high.  Such checkpoints involve a clear violation of the (negative) liberty of the individual, and yet they are arguably justifiable in the interests of security and public order.

Now suppose you have a conservative and a libertarian.  In conflict situations, the conservative tends to rank security over liberty, while the libertarian does the opposite.  They both agree that the values in play are indeed values, but they differ as to their prioritization.  Suppose further something that seems obviously true, namely, that this value difference that divides them cannot be objectively resolved to the satisfaction of both parties by appeal to any empirical fact or by any reasoning or by any combination of the two. 

Now here's the question.  Given that the two maintain contradictory value-prioritization theses, how can either "stand unflinchingly" for his thesis given that each recognizes that each thesis is true only from his orientation, an orientation which rests crucially  on his value-prioritization, a value-prioritization that he has no objective reason to prefer over that of his opponent?

I am suggesting that a truly civilized man, one who fully appreciates this predicament he is in, must give up his unflinchingness.  He ought to flinch!  After all, his opponent has all the same intellectual and moral virtues as he has –let us assume — is equally capable of reasoning cogently above whatever are the facts, and is equally well apprised of all empirical facts that bear on the issue.  Isn't there something "barbaric" about insisting on one's own position assuming that all of these conditions have been met?

I agree with Berlin that it would be "dangerous and immature" to claim absolute truth for convictions that rest on value judgments that cannot be objectvely established.  But once we get this far, then unflinchingness must also go by the board: what I recognize as true only from my point of view, I cannot hold in an unflinching manner.

And yet I must act, hold opinions, vote, take a stand, smite my enemies.  Suspension of judgment and retreat from the political sphere does not seem to be a viable option — especially not in the face of a bunch of leftist totalitarians who want to so extend the public /political sphere so as to destroy the private.  A hell of a bind we are in: we are essentially agents, hence must act, hence must stand fast, be resolute and smite our dangblasted political opponents — all the while realizing that we have no justification for our unflinchingness.

The admirable writer Berlin mentions is Joseph Schumpeter.

A Modal Ontological Argument and an Argument from Evil Compared

After leaving the polling place this morning, I headed out on a sunrise hike over the local hills whereupon the muse of philosophy bestowed upon me some good thoughts.  Suppose we compare a modal ontological argument with an argument from evil in respect of the question of evidential support for the key premise in each.  This post continues our ruminations on the topic of contingent support for noncontingent propositions.

A Modal Ontological Argument

'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived."  'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.'

1. The concept of the GCB is either instantiated in every  world or it is instantiated in no world.

2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world.  Therefore:

3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated.

This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form.  Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant.  (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)

(1) expresses what I will call Anselm's Insight.  He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible.  I consider (1) nonnegotiable.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God.  End of discussion.  It is premise (2) — the key premise — that ought to raise eyebrows.  What it says — translating out of the patois of possible worlds — is that it it possible that the GCB exists.

Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)?  Why should we accept it?  Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility.  But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.  I won't argue that now, though I do say something about conceivability here.  Suppose you grant me that conceivability does not entail BL-possibility.  You might retreat to this claim:  It may not entail it, but it is evidence for it:  the fact that we can conceive of a state of affairs S is defeasible evidence of S's possibility.

Please note that Possibly the GCB exists — which is logically equivalent to (2) — is necessarily true if true.  This is a consequence of the characteristic S5 axiom of modal propositional logic:  Poss p –> Nec Poss p. ('Characteristic' in the sense that it  is what distinguishes S5 from S4 which is included in S5.)  So if the only support for (2) is probabilistic or evidential, then we have the puzzle we encountered earlier: how can there be probabilistic support for a noncontingent proposition?  But now the same problem arises on the atheist side.

An Argument From Evil

4. If the concept of the GCB is instantiated, then there are no gratuitous evils.

5. There are some gratuitous evils. Therefore:

6. The concept of the GCB is not instantiated.

This too is a deductive argument, and it is valid.  It falls afoul of no informal fallacy.  (4), like (1), is nonnegotiable.  Deny it, and I show you the door.  The key premise, then, the one on which the soundness of the argument rides, is (5).  (5) is not obviously true.  Even if it is obviously true that there are evils, it is not obviously true that there are gratuitous evils. 

In fact, one might argue that the argument begs the question against the theist at line (5).  For if there are any gratuitous evils, then by definition of 'gratuitous' God cannot exist.  But I won't push this in light of the fact that in print I have resisted the claim that the modal OA begs the question at its key premise, (2) above.

So how do we know that (5) is true?  Not by conceptual analysis. If we assume, uncontroversially, that there are some evils, then the following logical equivalence holds:

7. Necessarily, there are some gratuitous evils iff the GCB does not exist.

Left-to-right is obvious: if there are gratuitous evils, ones for which there is no justification, then a being having the standard omni-attributes cannot exist.  Right-to-left:  if there is no GCB and there are some evils, then there are some gratuitous evils.  (On second thought, R-to-L may not hold, but I don't need it anyway.)

Now the RHS, if true, is necessarily true, which implies that the LHS — There are some gratuitious evils — is necessarily true if true. 

Can we argue for the LHS =(5)?  Perhaps one could argue like this (as one commenter suggested in an earlier thread):  If the evils are nongratuitous, then probably we would have conceived of justifying reasons for them.  But we cannot conceive of justifying reasons.  Therefore, probably there are gratuitous evils.

But now we face our old puzzle: How can the probability of there being gratuitous evils show that there are gratuitous evils given that There are gratuitous evils, if true, is necessarily true?

Conclusion

We face the same problem with both arguments, the modal OA for the existence of the GCB, and the argument from evil for the nonexistence of the GCB.  The key premises in both arguments — (2) and (5) — are necessarily true if true.  The only support for them is evidential from contingent facts.  But then we are back with our old puzzle:  How can contingent evidence support noncontingent propositions? 

Neither argument is probative and they appear to cancel each other out.  Sextus Empiricus would be proud of me.

Conservative Activism, The Left’s Incomprehension, and the Genetic Fallacy (2010 Version)

'Conservative activism' has an oxymoronic ring to it.  Political activism does not come naturally to conservatives, as I point out in The Conservative Disadvantage.   But the times they are a 'changin' and so I concluded that piece by saying that  we now need to become active. "Not in the manner of the leftist who seeks meaning in activism for its own sake, but to defend ourselves and our values so that we can protect the private sphere from the Left's totalitarian encroachment.   The conservative values of liberty and self-reliance and fiscal responsibility are under massive assault by the Obama administration . . . ."

Continue reading “Conservative Activism, The Left’s Incomprehension, and the Genetic Fallacy (2010 Version)”