Free Republic

Technically speaking, progressives have had about six different names. I believe that if the progressives ever did change their name again, they would choose the word "technocrat" as their new hiding place. First, for a little background. Note: this is not designed to be an all-encompassing, uncover-every-stone-history lesson. Starting out, the earliest progressives were known as "Georgists" - that is, Henry George and the publication of the book Progress and Poverty. Note the word "progress" in the title. Georgists were not the uniform statist that we would come to know, starting around the beginning of the 20th century. One of...

Computers have as much consciousness as cars or concrete. This will not change. They’re machines. They can be programmed to follow directions and calculate certain kinds of solutions within those directed parameters. That’s it. That’s the beginning and end of the story. Why do some technocrats believe computers will gain actual consciousness? They think a) the brain is a machine that expresses consciousness via information processing, and b) information processing is all the consciousness there is. To sum up, technocrats are high-IQ idiots. You can assemble all the information in the world and cross-reference it 100 billion different ways; you...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yesterday on This Week with Christiane Amanpour, George Will -- this was during the roundtable discussion, George Will discussing Mitt Romney. WILL: It has a lot to do with Romney. He is rising as more and more Republicans come to the conclusion that the Republican Party has found its Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor running on competence, not ideology. RUSH: Did you hear that? George Will characterizing Mitt Romney as the Republican Party's Michael Dukakis. Michael Dukakis, a Democrat loser running for office in 1988, one of the most famous things that Dukakis did was he...