Posted on 06/15/2005 7:22:25 PM PDT by wagglebee
How could they miss the books by Ralph Nader? L. Ron Hubbard? Much worse than some of the picks.
Or Madame Hitlery's manifestos, "It takes a village idiot" and "Lying Hysteria."
Two Book's to be added.......(IMHO)
1) On the Origin of Species, -Charles Darwin
2) The Descent of Man, -Charles Darwin
.
They definitely should have been on there.
"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."
Its actually a pretty good quote.
the anti libertarian religiocons would disagree however.
With the current state of affairs, we appear to be headed towards a battle over who gets to bury liberty's corpse.
There are those who want to bury it in biblical interpretations from the first century. Just as others wish to do, in 7th century religous/cultural dogma.
Either way, liberty is toast... for our safety of course.
Good point bump!!!!!
This is an EXCELLENT point.
DUH, the reason that is a 'most dangerous' book is because it is a pack of lies, written by a sexual deviant himself who studied criminals, including sex criminals as his 'population' and treated it as the 'normal population'.
It was bad science that led to bad cultural consequences. Very appropriate to be on the list.
Mill is more controversial. When this came up in a thread a few weeks ago, I postulated that Mill's embrace of utilitarianism, the predecessor to many totalitarian 'social engineering' type thinking, may be what got him on the list.
This is a quite ignorant point by the author. "Griswold" is the case he is citing and it is a classic Warren court decision, where the US Supreme Court decided the law wasnt progressive enough for them, so they (ie Justice Brennan) invented an excuse - "substantive due process" - to overturn it.
That excuse in Griswold led DIRECTLY to the WORST DECISION BY THE US SUPREME COURT IN 50 YEARS: Roe v Wade. Griswold was the most cited and direct precedence for Roe v Wade, and so this decision he lauds led to the holocaust of the unborn that we've suffered under since 1973.
Just because contraception "should" be legal doesnt mean (a) it's a constitutional issue, (b) USSC should butt into such policies.
This author is seriously out to lunch.
Actually it's a moot point because Kinsey's data was wrong.
Excellent point about Kinsey - one of the fathers of junk science. He certainly deserves to be on the list. While I see your point about Mill's utilitarian ideas, there are surely a fair number of more toxic publications than his work.
They were put on the runner-up list by theocon idjits who were also down On Liberty.
If that was so, they were confused because they should have chosen Untilitarianism.
Or even better, a book by an author actually promoting totalitarian utilitarianism, which Mill wasn't.
Viz His arguments in favour of individuals runnning their lives instead of government
On one hand: Because individuals know what they want for themselves better than government, they are more likely to get what they want (utilitarianism)
On the other hand: even if they don't, planning their own lives is to their moral benefit, and likely to make them happier (utilitarianism)
The Gripping Hand: people, have we forgotten? Government by others is evil mkay?
You must be confused. This is FreeRepublic.com. Big nanny-state government is hunky-dory just as long as it has a (R) next to the name.
HTH & HAND
;-)
TFF! "...For our own safety of course." That's classic!
Mill's book definitely belongs on this list. His idiotic "harm principle" is used to undermine any legal support for maintaining the virtues necessary for a free people and checking the vices that undermine republicanism. Mill's kind of liberty makes the free forget how to rule themselves. His utilitarianism, which I don't remember being defended in On Liberty, makes all goverments no different than pirate ships writ large.
As for his free speech, let us recall that prominent men usually only argue for "all sides of the story to be heard" when their side is losing or indeed completely irrelevant. What's worse, his argument tends to treat any social pressure as intolerably coercive, even when it isn't backed by the force of law. This is a self-defeating argument in the long run because once his libertarian state is instituted, the inevitable social pressure against non-Liberal social pressures will make such arguments look like the grab for power they most likely are.
Does anybody know how the far left took over the universities? They made Mill's arguments about free speech and the inevitable success of truth from the process of disputation when they were a minority and their academic departments were dominated by New Deal liberals. This sentiment conveniently evaporated once they were in control.
There is a very good case that Mill himself intended his works to undermine Victorian-era Christianity and replace it with a positivistic "religion of science" out of Comte. Check out the book review The Authoritarian Secularism of John Stuart Mill. (Warning: PDF).
Mill's version of the free society is likely intended to be a transitional state. I am certain that such pleas for liberty in the mouths of many leftist ideologues are also intended to be such transitional states. Those who innocently and uncritically praise Mill are useful idiots in the ongoing destruction of civilization.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.