SOME PHILOSOPHY

The Maverick philosopher: "There are other people for whom truth counts for nothing, but power for everything.... They project their own lust for power into everyone else interpreting everything that is manifestly not a power-move as latently a power-move. There are plenty of leftists like this. Taking their cue from Nietzsche, they assume that everything is power at bottom. Die Welt ist der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! "The world is the will to power and nothing besides!" Supported by this assumption, they set out to unmask (deconstruct) phenomena that manifestly are not power-driven, for example, attempts to state what is the case. Compare my comments on Stanley Fish in "Of Truth and Fish". Power-mad themselves, these leftists project lust for power into everyone and everything. It is a curious pars pro toto fallacy: one takes a phenomenon one finds in oneself, lust for power, and then interprets everything else in terms of it".

Kant was a libertarian! "Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is a highly significant resource for classical liberalism and libertarianism. Not only can one rely upon Kant's account of the foundations of morality to derive libertarian principles: Kant's own specifically political philosophy is written very much in a classical liberal vein that opposed paternalist government while emphasizing the centrality of the individual's property rights.... In the Metaphysics of Morals [Metaphysik der Sitten], Kant claims that each individual has only one innate right, that of freedom. It is because of this right that one's person may not be arbitrarily coerced, and not because of a right to property that covers self-ownership. "Freedom (independence from being constrained by another's choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity""

Human rights vs. animal rights: Review of Tibor R. Machan's "Putting Humans First": "The only book I have encountered that views today's environmental movement from a historical and philosophical perspective and convincingly argues why we have been on the wrong track. Machan then lays out a simple blueprint for man's future interaction with the planet and animal kingdom. "Putting Humans First" should become the gold standard for warm and friendly human beings endeavoring to understand and explain why, though we may love animals and nature, they are intrinsically inferior to humans."

"There does exist therefore, gentlemen, a law which is a law not of the statute-book, but of nature; a law which we possess not by instruction, tradition, or reading, but which we have caught, imbibed, and sucked in at Nature's own breast; a law which comes to us not by education but by constitution, not by training but by intuition-- the law, I mean, that should our life have fallen into any snare, into the violence and the weapons of robbers or foes, every method of winning a way to safety would be morally justifiable. When arms speak, the laws are silent; they bid none to await their word, since he who chooses to await it must pay an undeserved penalty ere he can exact a deserved one." (Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero:The Speeches with an English Translation, "On Behalf of Milo", infra, p. 17)

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