But this is the kind of ass-clownery that stems from the fact that all philosophy looks weird when you don't have one.

Nothing drives your opponents more crazy than being utterly reasonable. And nothing makes demonizing or delegitimizing your opponents easier than letting them shriek unreasonable things for you. The Republicans need to get back to being the party that elicits unreasonable shrieking from their opponents. Not the other way around.

Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings.

Hollywood's martyr-mythology leaves out the fact that the famed Hollywood Ten, for example, were in fact members of the Communist Party, which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in violation of the Smith Act and which took orders directly from Moscow.

(I)t is simply wrong to confuse cowardice with appeasement. Cowardice is a failing of character. Appeasement is a failure of policy. Stalin appeased Hitler when he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin was an evil character, to be sure. But cowardice really isn't the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Stalin ' that word is “sexy.” I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Cultures grow on the vine of tradition.

If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.