Another Headache of Irrationality

We care little about how our beliefs are formed, yet we are passionate about them when anyone calls them into question. Our self-esteem is threatened, not the ideas themselves.

Few spend any time and energy on analyzing how we know our most basic and valued convictions are true. In fact, we have a natural repugnance to doing so. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when these assumptions are openly doubted leads us to seek some excuse for continuing to believe them. So most of our so-called reasoning about basic convictions is just finding arguments for continuing what we already believe.

Adapted from James Harvey Robinson, 1912

The Key to Blaming

"Those who point their arrogant, prideful finger away from themselves, want you to look away from what they’d rather not have you see–themselves. A timely reminder on both the establishment media and political fronts."

Tammy Bruce
July 28, 2008

More Suffering, Please!

"If we believe in the redemptive power of suffering, then we should not only not lessen suffering, but increase it! Pushed to this limit, practical ethics becomes a consistent cruelty."

Friedrich Nietzsche
"On Ethics", 1868

Haunted Monologues

We ourselves sift our thoughts with severity
and consider it an advantage to be criticized.

How can anyone who does not withstand
criticism know they are right?

Richard Wurmbrand

Author of Tortured for Christ

Tough Love

In this labyrinth of daring knowledge,
one must never spare oneself.
Harshness must be among one's habits,
if one is to be happy and cheerful
among nothing but hard truths.


Friedrich Nietzsche
Why I Write Such Excellent Books
Bonn, 1888

Sheltered Hypocrisy

"Once the Republican ticket was defeated, the time had passed for ad feminam attacks on Palin. Hence my surprise and dismay at Dick Cavett's Nov. 14 blog in the New York Times, "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla," which made a big splash and topped the paper's most-read list for nearly a week. I have enormous respect for Cavett: His TV interviews with major celebrities, which are now available on DVD, set a high-water mark for sheer intelligence in that medium that will surely never be surpassed.

However, Cavett's piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her "frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences." He called her "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High," "one who seems to have no first language." I will pass over Cavett's sniggering dismissal of "soccer moms" as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.

I was so outraged when I read Cavett's column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

In sonorous real life, Cavett's slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English -- registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?"

Camille Paglia
Salon Magazine
December 10, 2008

Superficial Tranquility

"Anyone who has studied ancient history knows that great civilizations, from Egypt and Persia to Rome and Byzantium, broke down in stages separated in some cases by many superficially tranquil decades. Because of the unprecedented fragility of our intertwined power grid and complex transportation system, the technological West is highly vulnerable to sabotage and chaos."

Camille Paglia
Salon Magazine
December 10, 2008