[JohnHuang2]

Wednesday, February 5, 2003

Quote of the Day by EternalVigilance

[Cicero]

Very nice. I'm bookmarking this about 2/3 through because I've got to get to bed. But it's really an excellent essay.

[marron]

Worth re-reading again tomorrow.

[The Iguana]

Great read.

Thanks for posting it.

[Tamzee]

This is truly one of the most incredible essays I have ever read.... it is long, but so very, very worth it.

I'm in awe.

Tammy

[Byron_the_Aussie]

Marvellous, John. Bookmarking and printing it.

And thanks so much for all you do around here. It's the handful of people like you, searching out the best in writing, like this, that make FR the constant delight it is.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

What interested me in the [Burke's] Reflections was the positive political philosophy,

The wisest person I know suggested this book to me and I still haven't read it...

[Tredge]

*bump*

[The Great Satan]

The trouble with Edmund Burke's philosophy is that it can be used to justify anything. Therefore, it says nothing.

[nickcarraway]

BUMP

[dennisw]

.

[HumanaeVitae]

Bookmarking.

[Cacique]

philosophy ding dong. Aren't you tired of pings?

[RaceBannon]

This is a very good read!

[betty boop]

Thanks for this truly outstanding post, JohnHuang2.

[Semaphore Heathcliffe]

bump. thanks for posting such a thoughtful article.

[VOA]

bump

[Mr. Jeeves]

We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.

Appalling.

[Billthedrill]

Great post - I get chills reading the scene in Czechoslovakia. "The air raid was me." Just so.

You have to realize that when Burke wrote Reflections that the revolution in France had not yet entered its Terror phase, and that much of what he wrote that appears to us as a sad chronicle was, in fact, a stunning prediction. So accurate it's spooky, so accurate I wouldn't have believed it if it hadn't already been published by the time the heads started appearing in the baskets.

I, like "feller" above, read it and its reply by Paine, The Rights of Man, in sequence. The one serves as a corrective to the other, Paine's passionate defense of liberty contrasted against Burke's grim prediction of just how that would be abused, Burke's equally passionate defense of the existing social order punctured by Paine's description of how that had been abused. Both men were foreigners (Burke, Irish, and Paine, English) working in their respective venues (Britain and France), and hence had a view of their subject unclouded by simple parochialism. Both wrote beautifully and convincingly about their points of view.

I find it a bit disturbing that American colleges are lauded as presenting more of a corrective to Marxism than their European counterparts, inasmuch as the former seem the last bastion of true belief in such intellectual manipulators as Michael Foucault. That fellow is mandatory reading for anyone who really wants to get inside the motivations of today's left - to Foucault life is politics and politics is (literally) a struggle for power between groups pursuing dominance over other groups. What seems odd to me is the emotional attachment many of his followers have to this essentially sterile view of society, but they are as passionate about it as Burke and Paine were, without the redeeming element of rational analysis (that being - surprise! - merely a tool of power in Foucault's view, like everything else). Political discourse between left and right has been cheapened and made superficial, and that's one reason.

[Edmund Burke]

I'm glad that you enjoyed my writings.

[Phaedrus]

And a belated Thank You to you for a fine article, John, and for teaching me once again that I am not too old to learn.