Free Republic

The twentieth anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer, in May 1983, passed with very little notice of one of the most incisive thinkers of his time -- a man whose writings continue to have great relevance to our times. How many people today even know of this remarkable man with no formal schooling, who spent his life in manual labor -- most of it as a longshoreman -- and who wrote some of the most insightful commentary on our society and trends in the world? You need only read one of his classics like The True Believer: Thoughts on...

Gravity has its laws courtesy of Sir Isaac Newton, and protest has its authoritative field notes by Eric Hoffer. A longshoreman and philosopher in pretty much that order, Eric Hoffer described the protesters of his time, the Hippies and Yippies of the Sixties, with such enduring insight that he might have been talking about Occupy Wall Street today. The specific focus of protests, if any, may change with the times. But the general spirit remains remarkably the same. It's a kind of free-floating dissatisfaction with the world. Or maybe the dissatisfaction is just with the protesters' place in it. The...

Here's a quiz that may appear some day on history tests: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in November 2009, was: a) Part of a terror network that had planned attacks on the United States since the 1990s; b) A deranged psychotic who snapped under the pressure of treating soldiers returning from Iraq and who happened to be a Muslim; c) A prime example of "The True Believer," the lonely, frustrated individual who attaches himself to an overarching cause as a way of compensating for personal disappointments. The answer, of course, is "c," the true...

A friend just emailed me (Michael Ledeen) this, a comment from Eric Hoffer in 1968: The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back...

NYC: Smokers Who Buy Online Need To Pay Up City Enforcing Cigarette Tax Laws Jan 13, 2005 12:20 pm US/Eastern NEW YORK (CBS) The New York City Finance Department has ordered smokers who bought tax-free cigarettes on the Internet to pay city taxes on their purchases. The demands were made in letters mailed this week. Finance Commissioner Martha Stark says “it's part of a new effort to enforce the cigarette tax laws." The city mailed letters to about 2,300 people whose names were obtained from cigs4cheap.com, which is no longer operating. The letters warned that recipients who failed to pay...

Big Brother Bloomberg is watching. Smokers who've been buying cigarettes from Internet sites to beat the city's $1.50-a-pack tax are in for a shock: tax collectors know who you are and are now sending out thousands of bills going back more than two years, The Post has learned. Andrew Hoffer, a utility worker who lives in Queens, told The Post he was flabbergasted to get a threatening letter from the Finance Department demanding $1,005 for the taxes due on purchases he made back to July 2002. "I had a feeling of violation," said Hoffer, 37. "Internet purchases are traditionally...

A leader of one of the major protest groups planning to disrupt the GOP convention said Monday she will not instruct her members to refrain from violent attacks against New York City police, delegates or city residents during a planned 250,000 person march on the night before the convention. Referring to planned protests as "a battle," Tanya Mayo, national coordinator for the protest group "Not in Our Name," told radio host Sean Hannity that her group alone has 30,000 members, but that other groups could swell that number by hundreds of thousands during a planned march up 7th Ave. to...

National Character: The Quest for Sainthood. By Robert Wolf There is a theory that national behavior is an amplification of the aggregate behavior of its individual citizens, i.e., that the political macrocosm is a reflection of the microcosm. The theory should not startle anyone, historians and public leaders have spoken and written about ‘national character’ for a centuries and have concluded that individual responsibility and morality can not be divorced from good government. Transubstantiation Does government transform society or is it society that transforms government? When Progressives and others lovers of the collectives chide government over its inability to transform...

The twentieth anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer, in May 1983, passed with very little notice of one of the most incisive thinkers of his time -- a man whose writings continue to have great relevance to our times. How many people today even know of this remarkable man with no formal schooling, who spent his life in manual labor -- most of it as a longshoreman -- and who wrote some of the most insightful commentary on our society and trends in the world? You need only read one of his classics like The True Believer: Thoughts on...

The twentieth anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer, in May 1983, passed with very little notice of one of the most incisive thinkers of his time -- a man whose writings continue to have great relevance to our times. How many people today even know of this remarkable man with no formal schooling, who spent his life in manual labor -- most of it as a longshoreman -- and who wrote some of the most insightful commentary on our society and trends in the world? You need only read one of his classics like The True Believer: Thoughts on...