American Heritage Dictionary – Cite This Source ni·hil·ism 
(nī’ə-lĭz’əm, nē’-) Pronunciation Key
n.
- Philosophy
- An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence.
- A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.
- Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief.
- The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement.
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Nihilism is the end of everything we know and the replacing of those knowns with . . . nothing at all. It is a vacuum. An absence of values, an absence of honor, an absence of faith, belief, love, hope. Perhaps it’s also an absence of war and hate and fear, but given the disappearance of all things positive, the result sounds remarkably like a blank, vegetative, meaningless, and entirely hopeless existence.
And that, according to Evan Sayet, an ex-liberal deep in Hollywood’s heart, is the Left’s ultimate goal: nihilism. Carve out 47 minutes for yourself and listen to what he has to say (below). Part of me wants to say “It’s a good speech, but he’s just exaggerating to make a point.” And part of me, having drifted to my neo-con position from the liberal side of life knows that that meaninglessness was where my life was going and that he’s described the belief systems from which I escaped.
Incidentally, on a related topic, think of Matt Sanchez, the Army corporal who went to Columbia University and exposed its violent, repressive “liberalism.” While he was at CPAC, he was outed as a former gay porn actor. He’s since renounced that life style (good for him), but he said something fascinating about it when discussing his journey from left to right:
Porn reduces the mind and flattens the soul. I don’t like it. That’s not hypocrisy talking; that’s just experience. I sometimes think of myself, ironically, as a progressive: I started off as a liberal but I progressed to conservatism. Part of that transformation is due to my time in the industry. How does a conservative trace his roots to such distasteful beginnings? I didn’t like porn’s liberalism. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is magnified.
Being in the adult entertainment industry was sort of like being in a cult, and like all followers of a cult, I have a difficult time figuring out when I stopped believing in the party line. I can tell you, though, that by the time I finished my brief tour of the major studios, I was pretty disgusted with myself. It was an emotional low, and the people who surrounded me were like drug dealers interested only in being with the anesthetized in order not to shake off the stupor of being high.
Why did I become a conservative? Just look at what I left, and look at who is attacking me today. (Emphasis mine.)
In other words, for many, conservatism is the search for meaning. It’s the recognition that the human condition is not innately flat, empty, and without either high notes or low; instead, it’s the belief that, because the human condition encompasses good and bad, it is incumbent upon us to recognize the bad and embrace the good.
Anyway, make the time, watch the video, and let me know what you think:
Hat tip (for the video): American Thinker
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Thanks BW. I doubt I would have seen this if not for you. Its a shame this video will be seen by so few. I think this guy would make a good teacher.
Hey Book, these are some good connections. Like the thing about preventing war by making people disbelieve, and believe in nothing. I need some time before I can come up with any real reply.
To be free from war, one must destroy human desire. If in order to destroy human desires and beliefs, one must destroy the good, then that means destroying the US. In those terms, Book, Osama Bin Laden is a freedom fighter. He fights for our freedom from war, by destroying the US, the standard of goodness, which cannot be good becaus good is something people fight for and die for. Perhaps they believe after the US is gone, they can start in on the Islamic Jihad…
It also sort of ties into your underdog discussion, Book. It explains, why, in a much better why that kind of Leftist behavior exists. We knew of course, that behavior existed, but it is kind of hard to explain why, in a philosophical sense. Why do people wish to destroy America and raise the status of underdog is the good to anyone who wishes to destroy America. Why do they think they can support human rights by destroying those who protect rights, while supporting those who violate rights.
I strongly recommend Neo’s latest two posts about evil, good, and humanity, Book.
I once heard a story about the Jewish attitude toward what we are describing here, the element of human and animal nature known in Hebrew as the yetzer ra, or the “evil impulse.” It’s the source of violence and selfish drives, and in the legend the evil impulse is held captive by the people for three days. At the outset, the yetzer ra utters a foreboding warning:
“Realize that if you kill me, the world is finished.”
The world is finished? Whatever could this mean? The people found out soon enough. With the evil inclination out of commission, the hens stopped laying. It was discovered that the impulse was what gave the drive to life itself: desire, striving, commerce, sex, all sorts of things that are necessary for life to have any vitality at all.
This is metaphysics in a sense. Meaning, if evil exists, then can you destroy evil? And ethically speaking, should you destroy evil if it can be destroyed?
But that is just the thing isn’t it, if you destroy evil, actually destroy evil… then good becomes destroyed as well. I’ve brought this subject up via the duality principle before. Light and Darkness. The ability of humans to understand light is based metaphysically on the actual existence of its opposite, darkness.
In some ways the Left and the Islamic Jihad reminds me of that. Perfection. To be perfect. To destroy evil permanently, through the perfect means, Forever. But that isn’t possible, is it, and even if it were, should people actually do it?
Do people really want to achieve perfection, where nothing gets worse and nothing gets better? That is perfection you know, stasis, the heat death of the universe, where there is no hotness, there is no coldness, no evil, no good, no motion. Heat death. Utopia. The vision of the Left and the vision of the Jihadists. They each have their own views on paradise and utopias.
The Left sees evil and wish to exterminate it, without understanding or accepting that they will never get rid of all evil. That there will always be weaknesses and temptations… amongst themselves if nobody else. And still, they deny this truth, they deny this metaphysical reality, they deny it even at the same time they deny epistemology and knowledge. They don’t want to know.
This must be why in a sense, the “moral high ground” is self-destructive and does not help people. Because it is in essence, a philosophy about how to destroy yourself. Climb up to a high place and then throw yourself from it to your doom below.
People tend to ask, “what is the use of all this philosophizing”. People are interested in pragmatic needs and solutions, things that actually work, applications rather than theory. But this is more than theory after all. Nihilism is more than something cooked up by eggheads, now a days. But if you read Neo’s link, there’s more than just desire for humans. There’s emotions, thinking, long range thinking, and rationality. Reasoning.
Your views of what humanity is, where we are going, what defines good and what defines evil… will determine what you believe in and what you are willing to do. That is important, that leads to action. It is no reflex, we are not animals, bound by instinct. We can choose.
An absence of values, an absence of honor, an absence of faith, belief, love, hope.
It is in a sense, why people complain about negativity by the Left and negativity in Iraq. It is the destruction of what we have in return for… what? Seriously, for what? What are we trading in for except for some scammed promise?
Part of me wants to say “It’s a good speech, but he’s just exaggerating to make a point.”
But he can’t be exaggerating, Book. Because the behavior he describes exists, he just ties them all together, better.
And part of me, having drifted to my neo-con position from the liberal side of life knows that that meaninglessness was where my life was going and that he’s described the belief systems from which I escaped.
I wonder whether we should call that “experience” or “intuition”.
http://neoneocon.com/2007/03/23/nature-red-and-compassionate-in-tooth-and-claw/
There’s the link.
One of the reasons I disagreed with the opposite of hate being indifference, is because indifference is apathy and a lack of belief. If hate is bad, then indifference by that kind of metaphysics, becomes good. But it isn’t good. And neither is hate, evil.
When a person has to decide what is good, what does he decide between, hate or indifference? Which one is better? When put like that, apathy starts looking a lot better, doesn’t it. But apathy is simply being unable and unwilling to tell the difference between good and evil, right.
But if a person has to decide between love and hate, that is a different question, epistemologically.
As I see it, “tearing down” things isn’t inherently evil. It is just destruction, a tool in a sense, ethically neutral like darkness or light. But tearing things down without replacing it with anything, really is the death knell, the evil, the void.
Loving evil is not good, and hating good is not good.
Doesn’t the Left view things in this way, that they either must believe in religious lies and Bush lies, or they must believe in nothing? Either you are right, like them, or you are the void, the evil.
That’s not the epistemology. At least I don’t think so. I can provide little proof currently why placing things that way is bad, but it is different. Why? because. When choosing between two options, one of them is better than the other one, right? Right. BUT!! If your other option is “nothing”, the “void”, and “apathy”, and your first option was “hate”, “war”, “poverty”, then wouldn’t you choose the avoid, the destruction of all?
Just cause it is the wrong selection of options doesn’t matter, people will choose it. This seems to me to be what the speaker is talking about. The belief in nothing, atheism itself becoming a …. well belief in preference over the realities of our day. This is like looking into a mirror that is facing another mirror. The rabbit hole just keeps going deeper and deeper.
Hey Book, were you as surprised by the eloquence and clarity of those who were asking the questions? I can easily imagine them being good reporters and asking the “tough” questions.
Not surprised, Y. It was the Heritage Foundation, and I’m assuming that they’d attract a better crowd than your average press conference!
Hello Book,
Once upon at time I wrote an essay about this topic. I didn’t publish it since I was still a novice at writing (I still am actually). The essay, however, was not about nihilism. It was about subjectivism.
In my view, these two ideologies are so close to one another that one would be hard pressed to find a distinction. Subjectivism denies empiricism since it is essentially an ideology of self. Only the experiences of the self is the be all and end all. Logically, reason, logic, love, hate, honor and loyalty are contradictory to subjectivism.
When you reason subjectivism on out, subjectivism is simply the marriage of narcissism and nihilism into one ideology. Actually, nihilism is subjectivism is narcissism. I’ve never met a hedonist who wasn’t a narcissist/nihilist. I’ve never met a subjectivist who wasn’t a nihilist at the core.
This is the disease of our age. And we’re all infected with it to some degree or another…
I think in a sense subjectivism focuses on the epistemology of the philosophy, while nihilism focuses on the ethics department of the same philosophy. How you find the truth and what you see as the “good” are two different, but inter-connected objects.
The belief in eternal objects such as good and evil is a metaphysical concept. A belief, right or wrong, that evil exists independent of humanity. And I think evil does exist independent of humanity. Maybe not as the same thing, as we think evil is, but certainly as a force, as a power, as an energy, it does. Evil could easily be described as entropy in the greater context. The desire of everything to decay and be destroyed (approximately). When you combine entropy with human behavior and motivations… something different comes out.
I’m afraid it’s the shifting situational ethics (is there *nothing* you people actually believe in, except tax cuts) that betrays the post-Enlightenment center of conservative self-interest. For example, in this present entry, Bookworm rests her argument on the compromised opinion of a gay prostitute, one who advertised his services while serving as a Marine. Only in a post-Enlightened, conservative world is such “evidence” acceptable — And.There.Is.Nothing.That.You.Can.Do.About.It because conservatives have no concern but what they choose at any moment to embrace. It’s all rather post-nihlist.
Definition of a Liberal: Anyone who shows a compassion an understanding of humans and the environment.
Pornography for Conservatives: Guns an Ammo magazines and blog sites(stats show that they buy and hit on these magazines and sites a Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . . . y more than liberals . . . well we shouldn’t be surprised knowing how much they like their deer and dear !)
I think Left and Right are losing their utility in describing the contemporary political landscape. Bernard Lewis in a recent speech to AEI said “The seating arrangements in the First National Assembly after the revolution are not the laws of nature” and I’d concur. Politics in the 21st century should not be determined by where Frenchmen sat their derrieres in the 18th (to borrow a phrase from classical liberalism, we should break free of the dead derrieres of the past). Contemporary liberalism turns me off in that it substitutes good intentions and “feelings” for principles and analysis, and always seems to fall back on statist solutions to solve domestic problems (more taxes, more social programs based in the Beltway). Working 26 years for the govt has made me something of a libertarian about the efficacy of government programs and agencies.
Scarier Conservatives
Things were going along great in this country until the 1960’s when those smarty pant liberals made up fancy things that never existed before like health care ,gays, feminists, environmentalists,immigrants,abortionists, and African American.
And now WE(oh boo hoo)are Victims of Society and as a white conservative male I am suffering more than any other race in history.
Our traditional Family Values of a mother and father who vote Republican with two kids and attend a private school in the suburbs with a conservative church are all shot to *&^%$.
ps. and those stupid smarty pant classical Greeks,Renaissance and Enlightened thinkers should all be shot . . huh . . what . . they are already dead . . and then good . . save me some ammo .Yeehaw !
Who caused the build up big governmet in America in the first place ?
1. Robber Barons
2. The Capitalistic an Imperialistic supporters of World War 1
3. The fanatic conservatives of WW 2(guess who and where they came from?).
And who has been trying to straighten the mess out the last 60 years ? That’s right Roosevelt,Truman,Kennedy,Johnson, Carter and Clinton ! You think it is HARD WORK being president? How about being a president immediately after a republican president. NOW THAT IS HARD WORK !
Swampy, coherence eludes you. Bye now.
Incoherence SMEARence from you, but we southpaws stick,hold and cling togeter.Synchronicity in our complicity !
Who do you think was a better southpaw Sandy koufax, Steve Carleton,Whtey Ford or Warren Spahn or maybe the BIG UNIT Randy Johnson ? I bet you liked that lefty Willie Clinton who was in the Bigs from 92 to 2000 ?
ps . have a nice weekend and don’t let government get you down !
Southpaw? You aren’t Deb Frisch by any chance, are ya, Swampie?
Excuse me ? Are you takin to me ? If you are that is a good one ! Not nice but a good one !
In the boxing ring if a professional fighter fights dirty by hitting an opponent below the belt,or does something really dirty(like biting off an opponent’s ear – – Tyson what a rascal )that fighter is disqualified.Your DQ’d J.
Next time fight clean and fair !
Thank you, Swampy. You have a nice weekend too. And yeah I’m a proud southpaw but not one who follows sports.
Book, thank you for the great link to Evan Sayet – his words helped so many pieces to fall into place in my undestanding of the Liberal mind. Both he and your detractors on this blog reminds us that the divide between civilization and barbarism is very thin, indeed.
There is no Right for me, but there is a Left.
OK. Sayet has had the “rebirth” that Bookworm had. He has realized that Liberals do not work for health, growth of mind and body, and freedom. He tries to place Liberal behavior in the concept of a behavior he calls Nihilism. And he at least partially attempts to give them a legitamicy with their alleged desire to remove pain from the world. The analysis is interesting. But… Sayet states the Liberals are not evil because he knows them. But he also knew them before he realized that they really did/do hate their wives/the USA.
The Liberals are evil. They refuse to acknowledge that we, the United States, fought a hideous Civil War over the idea of slavery. They refuse to acknowledge that the people of the United States, through its government, slowly eliminated most of the procedures, and local policies, and clinging trappings of slavery. Slavery, a concept that has existed for over two thousand years in every cultural cradle around the planet, and we went a long way to correcting it in a mere two hundred years. (and yes, we are still dealing with slavery’s vestiges, Swampy, but we are dealing with them.)
And there are many other things the US has done to correct the various aspects of evil around the planet without so much as a desire for appreciation.
I really do believe that “good” is constantly challenged by “evil”. Our intelligence is continually giving mankind more powers. And of course with those greater powers, mankind gains greater ability to do greater good, or evil. Ymasakar is right. One definition of evil is entropy. And the Liberals various positions on social behavior lead to social entropy of a gut choking sort.
Try this idea. If you do not have a standardized measuring instrument, you can not tell which way the experiment is going. If you do not have a standard of societal behavior, you can not tell if the society is getting better or worse.
Liberals, modern Liberals, refuse standards. They move by definition to entropy. They are, by their own behavior, evil.
Sorry for being so antagonistic.
Al
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Swampthing, did you graduate from college with a degree in Hystrionics? I was just asking if you were Deb Frisch, because Southpaw is one of her monikers. As for me, I am ambidextrous, as far as my hands go. I can do somethings with my right hand that I can do better with my left. But I wasn’t trying to malign you. Please don’t get so bent out of shape.
Al, I guess the word for these unfortunates is well-intentioned. Evil doesn’t like to be named as such. Evil always parades around as Virtue. Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. They have noble intentions, but they refuse to consider the consequences of trying to legislate a perfect society. Hell. Hell for everyone but themselves, but eventually for them, too.
Think about children who are born to celebrities…or purchased by them, the preachy celebrities whose lives are in ruins, whose kids o.d. on drugs or alcohol, who are forever in the shadow of their colossus parents. Patemkin people with Patemkin ideals and living in a Patemkin world.
But don’t ever question their sincerity.
But… Sayet states the Liberals are not evil because he knows them.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the people he knows isn’t evil. He doesn’t say all the foot soldiers, cannon fodder, and puppet masters are innocent or full of well intentions. I think he goes to some lengths to present the examples of people he knows, in order to characterize the majority of people who believe in this kind of Leftist utopian beliefs. In this sense, it is the sort of the heirarchy of evil used in anime, as a plot device which gives the protagonist greater and greater challenges as the protagonist grows in wisdom, strength, and philosophy. This concurrent in crease in the difficulty of the challenges, is matched by the increase in the level of evil in the opponents. You can have anything from honorable opponents which become your allies after you fight them to enemies which must be destroyed, bar nothing no mercy no compassion no rules.
In a philosophical sense, people have been trying to define what is evil and what is good, for a very long time. There are different definitions and standards, not only different ways of looking at things, but different states of consciousness even.
My personal views on this subject has a lot to do with my belief in God and a higher power that orders the universe. And therefore, by looking at the universe and the physical principles which power it and the laws that it functions under, I get a peculiar insight into human values.
The reason why evil is a concept that exists independent of the existence of humanity, is because evil is the human adaptation and application of a universal constant/function. A lot of narcisissts and self-aggrandizing libertarian/self-fish folks talk about evil being something that relies upon the existence of man. Meaning, if man were to disappear, then what would be around to even think about what is evil or not evil, if free will disappeared through the disappearance of humanity, then would not evil disappear as will? Not exactly. Technically, that would be true, if evil was nothing but a human construct. But it isn’t… and why it isn’t is precisely because our existence is a universal existence, it functions through universal laws like the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, or energy just for short.
Life is a struggle, it is an evolution of sorts, a constant reinvention of the self and continued adaptations in order to increase function and ability. We are part of this universe, regardless of whether you believe that a man is a self-contained island, that if he dies, the world dies with him. Our ethics, values, and whatever are NOT just made up because of “will” or “free will” or even desire. Some are, but not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is universal truth, things that are true throughout the universe. You could not explore this using scientific induction, there is no experiment to go looking around the universe for “data” about “things that apply universally”. So we must use deduction, which is not the same thing as gathering data scientifically.
One of the reasons humans don’t make things up as they go along according to their individual fancies, is because they can’t. They couldn’t do so even if they wanted to. I mean you could go to lalaland on 9/11 like John Kerry did, but reality is reality. You can’t breath under water just cause you desire to do so. You can’t win a war just because you desire to do so. There are realities and limits which everything must abide by, not just humans, but gods and energy as well. If we understand and accept this basic concept, then why don’t people extend it to ethics, good and evil?
In the end, I think it is a basic question of “what makes humanity good”. And I think the answer is, human progress via technology and social reforms are the good, because it allows more energy to be harnessed from individuals, more productivity, more efficiency, more creativity, and more usable energy to be used.
Tyranny is bad, and if you asked a religion or a human why it is bad, they might answer that it is bad because tyranny violates human rights or hurts people. But on a universal level, the answer for why tyranny is bad, then becomes, tyranny is bad because it doesn’t work, it isn’t as efficient as other methods of governance, and therefore force equals mass times velocity squared. When Tyranny hits freedom, tyranny loses, because tyranny sucks. This is not a human value we just created out of thin cloth, this actually exists. Meaning, centralized systems are weak. All you have to do is to blow up the brain and the whole edifice will collapse. The universe likes freedom, if only because of quantum mechanics. All things are possible, and all things have occured. The universe likes uncertainty too, and tyrannies are all too certain. Tyrannies are nearing the heat death of their closed system, which allows nothing in and nothing out. Closed systems either have a zero increase in entropy or an increase in entropy. Entropy never decreases in a closed system, just because. And so it makes sense why tyrannies are evil and become more evil, as time goes on, doesn’t it.
And entropy is bad, because the more entropy there is, the less life there is in the universe. This isn’t just planet earth. Entropy is also bad because if your universe has a high entropy, your technology won’t work. Or if it does work, your ability to extract energy will be slow and inefficient, meaning you will pay a lot of energy to extract a little bit more than a lot of energy.
And that’s bad because the heat death of the universe is also the equivalency of everything in it. Cold is no longer cold, hot is no longer hot. (The temperature of a room becoming moderate between any two extremes in temperature would be entropy, a bad thing. Not a bad thing for air conditioning, but a bad thing for ethics, which is not luxury btw. )
There would be no stars because stars are low in entropy. Maximum entropy when engaged in by human agents, is what I call evil. There are many ways to do so. Dictatorships, human rights violations, wars, peace, fighting, lack of fighting. There are all kinds of ways to limit the ability of the human race to extract usable energy out of our world and universe. Slavery being one of them.
And that in essence, is why good and evil are independent of the existence of humanity. Evil is universal across the universe, so long as you work from some basic deductive principles of how the universe functions.
PS.
I never was satisfied with people’s attempts to define entropy. Because it is not something that can be defined as a “thing”. It is not a thing, an entity so to speak. It is more like a function, a process. I think defining good and evil becomes harder if you think of them as entities and things. This brings up the subject of demon possession… instead of say desires and urges.
A lot of basic applications of thermodynamics in Wankel Engines used in UAVs and Sterling Engines and various other engines which convert one kind of energy to another kind of energy, really do help in understanding what entropy is.
Al,
It is easier to tell whether people are doing evil or not, as opposed to determining whether they are or are not evil. Being evil or not being evil, seems to me more like a religious question, and not a physics question.
Please don’t get so bent out of shape.
I thought swamps didn’t have a shape, was I wrong?
I agree entropy is not a thing. I always conceived it as a state of being. Everything is even, the same, no concentration of matter or energy. As a process, entropy is the inevitable degradation of the concentration of matter and energy to that uniform state of existence. And yes, the good/evil debate is primarily discussed in a religious context. But let’s take some scientific concepts and use them in the humanities. And you already did that, ymarsakar. The universe likes freedom and uncertainty. Tyrannies crush freedom and insist on certainty. Tyrannies do not work because they are brittle and cannot change in the face of some new, unimagined, thing. And that is just one reason why tyrannies do not work, as you have noted.
That was a great read. Thanks.
And the road to Hell is always paved with the best of intentions. Celebrities who use money to buy all the best for their kids with the intention of being a “good parent”,
are the selfabsorbed and selfish unfortunates. If they spent the only currency which means anything in this life, their time with their kids, the kids would be fine.
Al
Sunday Reading List, 3/24/07
It’s Sunday morning, our week-long company has gone home. Yeah! I’ve got a hot cup of Earl Gray tea and a fine round-up of excellent reading on current affairs from the Right, Left, and everywhere in between. Enjoy. Right on
No I didn’t JaK but how were things over at HISSYfitrionics You ?
Hey Jak we do have something in common I’m andytixw . .
bambitex , , grrrrrr . . for example I shoot a gun,shovel grain and shoot pool left handed.I bat,throw and write right(good one Swamp).
ps nothing in common with YouScareMe.Just trying to bend him into some kind of healthy mental shape.
ps. get off the evil stuff it’s creeping me out !
The reason why I even had debates concerning whether evil was independent or dependent upon humanity, was because if evil depends upon our existence, then would it not be true that if you could wipe out humanity, global warming would not occur?
Oh wait, did I say global warming, I meant evil.
I don’t suppose I have to tell people that wiping out humanity is a bad thing, right? And that any motivations or philosophies that advocate it, are also a bad thing. That’s the worst case scenario in a way. But even the best case scenario is simple apathy. You just don’t care. Why defend the Iraqis from death squads if humanity’s very existence sustains eivl? Eh?
*
Thanks to Edmund Burke “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil(YouScareMe)is that good men(Swampy)do nothing.”
Y’s solution is that war is enevitable,always has been always will be. Whereas I believe the words of Carl von Clausewitz “war is merely a continuation of politics by other means.”.In other words greedy people acting barbarically.I have a higher cause for humankind Y !
Y’s hero is Ares who was “impulsive,bloodthirsty,raving for a fight regardless of the consequences “. . hmmmmmmmm . . let me see . . who else do I know with those characteristics . . King George 11 or 111,Y will know . . maybe Georgie 43 ?
ps . Y, “ye shall know the truth ,and the truth shall make you mad.”
[…] Arguments — ymarsakar @ 12:17 pm These are two of the comments I wrote at Book’s Nihilism thread (which I strongly recommend for the 40 minute video that analyzes evil and annihilation) In a […]
I ended up writing an even longer comment about entropy and evil than my last one here.
On the other hand, Monsieur Swamp, In the words of Spock,
“Diplomacy is the means by which we prolong a crisis.” I agree with that sentiment, absolutely.
Book, this is possibly the best thing I’ve seen posted on this site. A definite must see. Thank you.
[…] Bookworm Room, “The Scary Nihilism of the Left” […]
re: comment #10
While the definition given for “Liberal” is true, calling Leftists “Liberals” is not.
As John ray says, . . .
“Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that “liberals” will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists”
I’m putting you on my Blogroll during my spring cleaning. Very sensible intelligent commentary.
Hey All,
Truly enjoyed your comments.
Evan (that’s my talk at the Heritage Foundation).