Same for Ron Paul. He didn’t mind endorsing the writer of Creature of Jekyll Island, a man of dubious character.
I stumbled on G. Edward Griffin’s website last year, which is the whole reason I became interested in Austrian economics and the Mises Institute. While Griffin is certainly a “fringe” character, he appears to back up controversial claims with research and evidence. The Creature was also praised by Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute, which is unsurprising since the books presents a compelling case for free markets and sound money.
What about Griffin’s character or views do you find dubious?
^ This. As a Christian, I find Ussher’s Chronology (one of the main theological texts that attempts to show a “6,000 year old earth”) to be a huge theological fallacy as a whole. At its very theological core, it is erroneous hypothetical garbage that says nothing about the Bible. So to see Christians go so far as to deny the rigorous scientfic process so many scientists spend their entire life dedicating themselves, close their ears, and treat them with disrespect I find to be one of the most non-Christian acts ever.
Methodological dualism is to accept the empirical method for the natural sciences…yet this is how they treat that method and the results that come from it?
Regardless of my own beliefs on the existence of a soul, op is right, isn’t Lew Rockwell a political site?
I have different comment though. I find it very ironic how the words “survival of the fittest” or social darwinism is thrown at the free market, but at the same time, didn’t Marx respect Darwin, as well as some other socialists? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Marx wanted to dedicate a book to Darwin but Darwin declined that particular “honor.”
So I infer from that that the answer to your question must be yes, he did.
Because it discredits the whole lewrockwell.com operation and alienates a lot of readers who stand to learn about economics/politics and are put off by this.
Essentially, mixing in things like this forces other libertarians to disassociate from them and create their own site/information networks. So are they going to evolve or die out?
So why don’t you take the article down point for point? Refutation works much better than ad hominems.
Or are you just taking the fact that it’s ‘creationist drivel’ on authority? Yes, let us act like those in the dark ages who thought that they knew beyond a reasonable doubt that the sun revolved around the earth.
We ought to persecute those that don’t follow along with consensus, am I right?
I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade here. I just want to keep things in perspective.
His central thesis is that there is some kind of categorical difference between human animals and other animals. All the things he mentions however are blatently false. So that leaves him with no argument against evolution. He also tries to invoke the concept of soul, without ever defining it, which is un-scientific as can be, yet totally standard for religious people.
Even the most basic look into the theory of evolution debunks all the straw-men that Sobran brings up in his article.
This hasn’t made many waves because they didn’t actually create synthetic life. At most, it amounted to incredibly indepth recombinant DNA cloning–nothing that really hasn’t been going on in insulin factories for many decades. It’s a highly glorified plasmid…
Now, if they had synthetically created a cell membrane and then placed synthetically created DNA within it an caused it to thrive, grow organelles, etc…then we’ll talk about creating synthetic life from nothing but “four jars of chemicals”.
Oh come on Niels. If you put something goofy up on vforv, does that discredit voluntarism or alienate the growth of ideas?
You look at who he is not catering to, not who he is. You’re also maintaining an impossible standard for Lew, that he has to bear the cross for the entire reputation of libertarianism and anarchism. Which we both know is nonsense. Lew Rockwell represents only Lew Rockwell, and LRC represents only LRC.
Voluntarism is about tolerance, is it not?
No one is being forced to do anything. You are responsible for your decisions.
And what is wrong with more than one center of ideas? What is wrong with them dying out, or encouraging others to create new networks?
Why are many methodological tools of economics treated as broader philosophical or scientific ideas? Often, it is the opponents of “vulgar bourgeois economics” who dislike the supposedly greedy individualism or the supposedly pseudo-theological dualism, except they were intended as methodological.
But sometimes, even the proponents start making it non-methodological.
This Darwin piece is one example. Because many strands of human thought rely on the idea of man being responsible for his actions, some feel we must reject even the scientific notions that possibly make man deterministic and natural. Hence, if a theory of evolution contradicts human action in any way, it must be rejected!
But there is the other extreme: you have seen the disastrous effect of the pseudo-science used by the local Marxist, Robheusdens, who tried to use physics to validate labour theory of value; yet, if his point, “There is no free will”, were true, then it is true. But that simply does zero, and only zero, for economic analysis, because we know what Black, Scholes, and Merton did to economics through mathematics.
PS: You guys should really see the elementary linear programming problems that communists draw out to make their plans of organized communes. You just know they have made too many assumptions and made too many simplifications for those linear programming problems to ever be implemented. It’s pitiful that they think communism will succeed through high school algebra.
As with anything, these resources are scarce. When you are running a site that has lots of good libertarian resources and is known, then you carry the responsibility to keep it reputable and retain a level of rigour.
If Mises.org started posting horoscopes and dailys about the power of prayer, should we be silent out of ‘tolerance’ or should we be critical?
So now you want a say in how Lew manages his scarce resources?
Have critics ever changed the world?
As MrSchnapps indicated, these are opportunities known as teachable moments if you feel you have a case to make. I just don’t see criticism, boycotts, complaints, etc as market solutions. Compete with better ideas!
That’s why M. Rockwell, in his managerial genius, had the sense of adding such thing into LRC, as separate form the LvMI website. He trying to get to two, quite different, target groups.
Because evolutionists are annoying. If you read the “anti-evolution” articles on Lew Rockwell they are very rarely such. They do not go after evolution as much as its militant and hysterical proponents.
You are not supposed to actually ask very specific questions about evolution either to try to challange it or just to play devil’s advocate. Else you quickly find yourself tagged as a fundamentalist religionist when that is exactly how they behave.