Brent Hamachek, author of Dissidently Speaking: Change the Words. Change the War. and vice president and associate publisher for Human Events Media Group, said he hopes his new book will challenge the way Americans think and motivate individuals to stop saying “it is” and instead start asking, “is it?”
Hamachek said his book challenges the “things that people have generally accepted about structures in the world around them.”
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Mark Pulliam, a retired attorney and Misrule of Law blogger, to the newsmaker line to discuss how the Blount County Public Library is becoming overrun with homeless people.
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According to Hans Rosling “Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.” The American Psychological Association indicates the use of fear to influence behavior is effective, especially among women. For fear to be a successful change agent, it must be viewed as a legitimate warning about what will happen if behavior does or does not occur.
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“We must never,” Bismarck is said to have warned, “look into the origins of laws or sausages.” Sage advice, I’ve always thought (and no pun intended with that “sage”)—but how much at odds it is with the dominant current of modern thought, which is to say Enlightenment thought.
Immanuel Kant, a great hero of the Enlightenment, summed up the alternative to Bismarck’s counsel when, in an essay called “What is Enlightenment?,” he offered Sapere Aude, Dare to know!, as a motto for the movement. Enlightened man, Kant thought, was the first real adult: the first to realize his potential as an autonomous being—a being, as the etymology of the word implies, who “gives the law to himself.” As Kant stressed, this was a moral as well as an intellectual achievement, since it involved courage as much as insight: courage to put aside convention, tradition, and superstition (how the three tended to coalesce for Enlightened thinkers!) in order to rely for guidance on the dictates of reason alone.
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by Christopher Roach In some ways, Todd Henderson is living the dream. He has worked as an engineer, a management consultant, a practicing lawyer, and ended up as a professor at his alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School, focusing on business regulation and securities law. Now he can add mystery novelist to his curriculum vitae with his debut thriller, Mental State. The story, as well as the publication’s reception, sheds light on the sometimes toxic culture of our elite and their institutions. For all the talk of “engagement with ideas” and “encouraging critical thinking,” elite universities are more rigid and conformist today than perhaps any previous time in our history—yes, including the dreaded 1950s. Henderson’s thoughts echo those of another University of Chicago professor who some 30 years ago noted we were experiencing the Closing of the American Mind. By Chicago’s standards, Henderson is a man of the Right. In reality, he is more in keeping with the law school’s traditions of law and economics and libertarianism, made famous by two prolific and influential emeritus professors, Richard Posner and Richard Epstein. Unfortunately, Chicago is now becoming less distinguishable from peer institutions, not least in its demand for…
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