Principles Of Government

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Education, Culture, Ideology

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    • Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here AA

    By Gary Saul Morson - Oct. 18, 2023

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    By Gary Saul Morson – Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle…. during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured … and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine…. In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism …Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. “Believe me, the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.” Read More

    On Marriage, an Economist Bravely States the Obvious B

    By Jason L. Riley - Sept. 26, 2023

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    By Jason L. Riley – George Gilder wrote about the importance of the nuclear family in “Sexual Suicide” (1973) and “Men and Marriage” (1986). Charles Murray, who had touched on it in his landmark study, “Losing Ground” (1984), made similar arguments in “Coming Apart” (2012). In 1994 David Blankenhorn published “Fatherless America,” and 1996 brought David Popenoe’s “Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society.”

    Other books that cover the same ground as Ms. Kearney include Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially”; James Q. Wilson’s “The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families”; Kay Hymowitz’s “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age”; and Ralph Richard Banks’s “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.” Read More

    Florida’s Education Triumph A

    By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller - Aug. 16, 2023

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    By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.

    Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.

    So far, Florida has introduced new standards in English, language arts, math, social studies, civics and health education. The English standards, for instance, are knowledge-based, rather than skills-based. They center on the great books of Western civilization Read More

    Identity Politics Could Kill America’s Scientific Edge A

    By Sadanand Dhume - July 6, 2023

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    By Sadanand Dhume – China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, ,,.Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken. …. Ironically, scientists in communist China need to care less about ideology than their American counterparts. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health requires some prospective researchers to demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” in order to receive funding”. Read More

    The New Moral Order Is Already Crumbling B

    By Gerard Baker - Sept. 25, 2023

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    By Gerard Baker – The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them. Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, …. This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration. Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress. Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected… Read More