The Right's Wrong Books (barf alert)

What elevated discourse, first the image of the "conservative movement as a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics" is drawn, and then Human Events "offers a fair window into the dementia of contemporary conservative thinking."

Chait was amusing as a youngster. Since the ascent of George W Bush he's slowly but surely gone off the deep end. His "I hate Bush because of the way he holds his shoulders while walking" article last year was an abject embarrassment.

Now he's launched another of his patented psychotic rants because certain books weren't on the "worst" list.

It's fairly obvious that Chait only speaks to people who agree with his views on issues; that he's most comfortable in an echo chamber.

That's why he ends up writing piece after piece that construct false straw men then tear them down. Too bad, he actually had some talent as a writer. But now he's basically a beardless Paul Krugman.

Well, a beardless Paul Krugman without the pedigree and reputation. Which ain't much.

The Human Events column was talked about on CSPAN this morning. It was very interesting. You had left wing nut-quak-fags calling up.

As Ronald Reagan once said about these people, "I wear their indictment like a badge of honor".

As a thick-skulled conservative fanatic, let me summon all of my intellectual ability to say...

This guy sucks.

A nobody whines...

If a liberal bitches and moans and no one takes him seriously, does he make a sound?

And the LA Times loses readership every day...

bump for later napalm

(If you don't see the link between arguing for individual rights, exploring scientific mysteries and constructing a brutally repressive Bolshevik terror state, then clearly you're not thinking like a conservative.)

If you don't see the conceit and the amorality that begets all those arguments, then clearly you're thinking like a liberal.

One amusing thing about the list is its seeming inability to distinguish between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos

But the list doesn't need to disginguish between "seminal works social science" and "totalitarian manifestos". It's simply the list makers view of 10 worst books. period.

Can this guy not get that? He doesn't have to agree, but he doesn't have to smugly judge it based on some random standard.

Watching this imbroglio between Huamn Events and Jonathan Chait is like watching the Iran-Iraq War. The first thought is regret that only one side can lose.

I try very, very hard not to think of the conservative movement as a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics.

Chait started his article with an obvious lie. He does, truly think of the conservative movement in that way. But after all, he's a Demo/Commie, and they can't help but lie, can they?

Why does Human Events have a problem with John Stuart Mill?

LOL...isn't there a way to zot the author while keeping the poster? I'd love to see Chait and LA Slime get a dose of the beeber.

I try very, very hard not to think of the conservative movement as a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics.

Well, some of us thick-skulled fanatics have high IQs and advanced degrees. Which is more than can be said about the author of this piece.

I try very, very hard not to think of the conservative movement as a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics.

Funny, I try very, very hard not to think of lying liberal journalists as stooges for a party that is tant amount to the new NAZI Party of the 4th Reich......only they hate the military!

Why does Human Events have a problem with John Stuart Mill?

http://www.utilitarianism.com/jsmill.htm After reading about him and some of his writing, I think he's problematic for various segments of the right.

Little Jonathan is a pathetic metrosexual crybaby. He is nonetheless performing a service by drawing attention to a good article. This is a great list; my only quibble is that maybe Comte doesn't really deserve to be on there, and could be replaced by Gramsci.

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Posted May 31, 2005

HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.

1. The Communist Manifesto

Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848
Score: 74
Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers' revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.

2. Mein Kampf

Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26
Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out lebensraum ("living room") for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao

Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966
Score: 38
Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People's Republic of China, enslaving the world's most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the Cultural Revolution he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. "It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism," wrote Mao.

4. The Kinsey Report

Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948
Score: 37
Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. Kinsey's initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws, the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial.

5. Democracy and Education

Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a "progressive" philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

6. Das Kapital

Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894
Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx's materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.

7. The Feminine Mystique

Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp"--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer."

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy

Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, "I have naturally ceased to believe in God." Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term sociology. He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond theology (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through metaphysics (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries' reliance on abstract assertions of "rights" without a God), to positivism in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

9. Beyond Good and Evil

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886
Score: 28
Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: "God is dead --Nietzsche" followed by "Nietzsche is dead -- God." Nietzsche's profession that "God is dead" appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral "Will to Power" and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation," he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22

What Is To Be Done
by V.I. Lenin
Score: 20

Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno
Score: 19

On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
by B.F. Skinner
Score: 18

Reflections on Violence
by Georges Sorel
Score: 18

The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
Score: 17

Origin of the Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17

Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Score: 12

Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Score: 12

Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11

Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11

Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10

Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
Score: 10

Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9

Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Score: 9

Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9

The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9

The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4

Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2

The Judges

These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.

Arnold Beichman
Research Fellow
Hoover Institution

Prof. Brad Birzer
Hillsdale College

Harry Crocker
Vice President & Executive Editor
Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Prof. Marshall DeRosa
Florida Atlantic University

Dr. Don Devine
Second Vice Chairman
American Conservative Union

Prof. Robert George
Princeton University

Prof. Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown College

Prof. William Anthony Hay
Mississippi State University

Herb London
President
Hudson Institute

Prof. Mark Malvasi
Randolph-Macon College

Douglas Minson
Associate Rector
The Witherspoon Fellowships

Prof. Mark Molesky
Seton Hall University

Prof. Stephen Presser
Northwestern University

Phyllis Schlafly
President
Eagle Forum

Fred Smith
President
Competitive Enterprise Institute

You wrote, "The first thought is regret that only one side can lose."

That is an excellent line. Dead-on insight, as well. No wonder I like this place so much.

Interestingly, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a czarist forgery that incited countless massacres and inspires anti-Semites around the world to this day, failed to rate a mention. On the other hand, "Unsafe at Any Speed" and "Silent Spring," which led to such horrors as seat belts and the Clean Water Act, did. (Given that "Unsafe at Any Speed" launched the career of Ralph Nader, who went on to put George W. Bush in the White House, I wonder if conservatives might one day deem it one of the most helpful books of the last two centuries.

Hmm, and this whole time I thought it was five rogue Supreme Court justices in one ruling (and seven in another) that selected Bush to be president. [/sarcasm]

If Chait can blame Nader for fracturing off the kook vote that should have gone to Gore, can conservatives also claim that without Perot, Clinton never sniffs the White-house the first time?