… A political strategy that depreciates the value of ideas in favor of some vague notion of the superiority of common sense and homespun, simple virtue undermines the foundations of democracy, the standing of the nation in the world, and the economic and technological prospects of a country.
From: Madison Powers at CQ Politics. But read the whole thing. It’s not all on one side!
There is always profit for politicians in pandering to the short term interests of the voters. That’s because there are enough voters who simply don’t understand their long term interest or who don’t care enough about the future to take it into consideration. The stimulus package is one such case of pandering, and all the…
Recently I’ve had several different things remind me of what I perceive to be a serious problem with numbers in this country. This can have a severe impact on one’s personal life, but also on church and social policy issues. I recall when I argued some academic affairs committee into allowing me to count a…
I’m not going to be blacked out here, but I thought I’d just mention that I also oppose the bills (PIPA, SOPA) that are going through congress. Our representatives simply have no idea whatever what a reasonable burden is. Their view is that if a multi-billion dollar corporation or a large government agency could handle…
I want to recommend a story from MSNBC that illustrates how many officials and private individuals managed to respond to Hurricane Katrina. The key element in their response was thinking outside the box, or to use the term I used in my previous post, they were architects of the spaces. The article is Surviving the…
The other day I was browsing through my Facebook feed, which I do only occasionally, and becoming more and more annoyed at the politics posts. It’s not that I don’t care about politics; I do. It’s that I don’t like very much of what anyone says about politics on social media. As I browsed, I…
Ed Brayton promoted a discussion I had with another commenter on his blog, and that has generated yet another discussion of whether religion and science are incompatible. A certain number of folks believe they are not, and that religion should fade away as science rules all. For some unfathomable reason, I disagree. One of the…
I think one reason common sense and virtue have such appeal is that they are so often lacking; another is that no set of grand ideas is can do anything but backfire if they lose track of common sense and virtue.
Far be it from me to rain on the Idea Parade, but when ideas lose sense of common sense and virtue, what you’ve got left is ideology …
Take care & God bless
WF