Monday, October 24, 2011

Yman made me think of this

This is how it use to be. I remember hours of discussions, arguments that were heated but never nasty, and friends who disagreed but respected the rights of others.

"Lord, enlighten thou our enemies…; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."

By contrast, what we are seeing today are liberals trying to stifle free speech with laws in Canada and elsewhere in the West just because they feel safe to suppress upsetting conservative or independent minds: Geert Wilders in Holland, Mark Steyn in the US, Thilo Sarazin and Hendrik Broder in Germany and Andrew Bolt in Australia to name just a few.

Link

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them." - Karl Popper

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves.” - William Pitt


"Logic. There is little logic among the cultural elite, maybe because there is little omnipresent fear of job losses or the absence of money, and so arises a rather comfortable margin to indulge in nonsense." - Victor Davis Hanson