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The Cognitive Dissident

A blog by Ronald P. Thompson, Ph.D.

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Political Philosophy

Of Human Rights and Government

I am an American.  The sanctity of unfettered freedom of speech, assembly, press and religion has been ingrained in me as, it is in all Americans, since my earliest years.  This belief is, in many ways, the heart of who we are as a people.

“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are endowed by their creator to certain inalienable rights:  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  This we believe as a people.   The political right, center and left know the fastest way to public repudiation is to trample those basic rights.

Americans citizens regularly get in trouble in other countries when they give the authorities the proverbial finger only to find out that they have committed a crime in doing so.  This type of behavior is often seen as American arrogance, but in fact it is not that Americans think they should have that right, they believe every person on earth already has that right. Rather than being arrogant, we tend to be naive to the ways of the rest of the world.

Against that backdrop we look at the execution last year of a women’s rights lawyer for simply stating that women have rights equivalent to men.  We see the Chinese government arrest people for practicing unapproved religions and systemically destroying Christian churches.   We see the a number of governments arrest not only those who practice freedom of the press, but lawyers who defend the journalist. And we hear of death sentences handed out by the governments in several countries on the charge of changing religion or daring to question even the smallest tenant of the official religion.

How can all this be?  Don’t all people know they have the inherent human right to freedom of speech, press, assembly and religion?  It is a puzzlement for us in America. How does a government get away with it?  Such a flagrant violation of the social contract between government and the governed simply must result in the fall of the said government.  Mustn’t it? Continue reading “Of Human Rights and Government” →

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privlige

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Of Human Migration

In both Europe and the United States, issues of human migration are front and center.

My ancestors left the region that is now Denmark around two thousand years ago in search of a better life in a less harsh climate.  They headed south.  However, there was already an established culture in north-western Europe.  The Celtic peoples populated most of the heart of Western Europe.

My ancestors were not there to assimilate or to work their way up in the established social system. They did not come prepared to pick crops and wash dishes. They came with ax and spear and shield to displace (kill) the locals. And they did. By the time the Romans arrived, the Celts were gone from northern Europe, they had been annihilated by my migrating ancestors.

The Romans held them up for several hundred years, but the southern march continued and did not stop till they had conquered nearly all of Western Europe from the Alps to Brittan to Rome and even parts of North Africa. Though they were not able to keep control of all that land and they grew into a number of distinct language and cultural groups, they never went “home”.  Some of their descendants, the Angles and Saxons became the English and ruled the oceans for 200 years. Today, the richest country in Europe is named after one branch of these migrants (Germany); and, in the United States, the world’s super-power, the largest racial group is the descendants of those Nordic peoples. Whether they are called English, German, Dutch, Norwegian or Swedes, they are all children of those same migrants. Continue reading “Of Human Migration” →

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hater

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Of Fairness and Equity

 

I recall hearing a news story a few years ago about the Chinese government’s ban on billboards that glorify royalty and lavish lifestyles.  What got my attention was a comment about a wealthy young man regarding the huge divide between rich and poor in China today.  The young man blithely said that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor because they rich work hard and the poor do not.

I’m not sure you could find a wealthy American who would plainly and publicly say what the Chinese young man said; however, I suspect there is a fair percentage of Americans that believe in that basic sentiment; life is basically fair in its distribution of gifts.

I think that is nonsense.  Life is not fair.  I was born into the family of an up and coming engineer in the United States; did I somehow deserve that fate as opposed to being born to an impoverished family in Bangladesh?   Of course not.  That family of birth and the genetic gift of IQ has given me options that only a very few in this world enjoy.  My mother and father were both born to poverty, but in the United States where their natural gifts of intelligence allowed them to rise into the middle class.  Again, had they been born in another place or with less intelligence they would not have been afforded that opportunity.   Any effort to rationalize the distribution of ability and opportunity is doomed to failure; there is no reason for it. Continue reading “Of Fairness and Equity” →

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leftism

Sadly most people don’t even realize that the far left are not liberals at all.  This is especially true in universities where leftist professors are waging an all out war on liberalism. To the far left, they see liberalism as more of a treat to their ideology than conservationism.   Until liberals wake up and understand we are being undermined from within, we will never fight back.

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hubris

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Conservatives Might Be More Cautious About Opening Pandora’s Box

The far right are becoming ever more vocal in their belief that they represent the viewpoint of a significant majority of Americans.  An article today   by FoxNews  states ”

 What if a supermajority of states could override a federal law or Supreme Court ruling? That’s just one idea being proposed by advocates of a “convention of states” to amend the U.S. Constitution. “The American people are mad and they’re looking for a way to say, ‘No more,’” said Brooke Rollins, president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Our founders, in their brilliance, gave us a tool to do that. And it’s Article V.”

I think it is rather sad that seemingly intelligent people can be seduced by their own rhetoric into believing their views are far more popular than they are.  It is as if these people simply pretend places like NYC, San Francisco and Boston where  ultra- conservatives are as rare as Dodo birds, don’t exist.   Not only do they fail to imagine the chaos that would ensue if America held a constitutional convention; but it seems not to occurred to them at all that the far left have an agenda too, and there are a lot of them as well.

With the percentage of Americans who hold to and articulate the core liberal values enshrined in the Bill of Rights continually shrinking I find the idea of such a convention terrifying.  It would become a battle between the totalitarian theocratic right against the totalitarian identity politics left.  Think Germany in 1925.  And like Germany after WWI, liberalism and universal human rights would be trampled by the totalitarians on both sides.  It could literally spell the end of the great American experiment and/or lead to a second Civil War.

This is simply the worse idea of all the crazy ideas spawned by the far right.

 

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