Taking a Risk With Nate Silver

A couple of years after I graduated from college, concerned that my ability to understand philosophy was stagnating, I spent part of a year reading A Thousand Plateaus, the inscrutable magnum opus of French continental philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. The book is hard to describe: Its chapters seem to have very little to do with each other, in turn invoking strange ideas about "rhizomes" and "war machines" and "blank faces." (The chapter I remember best spends a lot of time trying to explain the philosophical significance of the shape of lobsters.)

Why the authors did this is something of a mystery. The most parsimonious answer is that European philosophers are just weird. But a more charitable explanation is that the book is an attempt to describe two different ways of thinking about the structure of the world. Deleuze and Guattari think that almost everyone thinks most everything is structured one way, but they want everyone to at least be able to think and structure the other way. Their weirdness is an effort—however unsuccessful—at trying to change the way their readers perceive the world.

Readers who are scared off by French philosophy should not take this opening digression as a warning against On the Edge, the odd and interesting new book from rogue election forecaster Nate Silver. There are no rhizomes or lobsters to be found here. At the same time, reading On the Edge left me with the same experience of reading A Thousand Plateaus—it felt like the author was, through a series of somewhat disjointed stories and discussions, attempting to change how his readers see the world.

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3 radical thinkers who inspired the tyranny we're seeing in America

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When the legislature becomes a lawful power that can pass bills for the purpose of plunder, tyranny isn’t far behind.

Mark Levin is well aware and knows exactly who and what inspired it.

“Marxism is the most evil of isms,” Levin begins. “The idea that you can camouflage your agenda in populism, the name of the people, inequality, that is the proletariat overthrowing the bourgeois.”

This was popularized by three major political philosophers: Marx, Hegel, and Rousseau.

“Marx figured out how to popularize tyranny. Hegel figured out how to popularize tyranny,” Levin explains, adding, “Rousseau figured out how to popularize tyranny.”

While these philosophers may be long passed, their ideas live on in our current government.

They’re exhibited and carried out by lobbyists, special interest groups, and those whose purpose is supposed to be helping the country and promoting freedom — but isn’t.

Their real purpose, according to Levin, is “to get laws made” and “regulations in place to make them rich.”

Those in government spend more time getting wealthier at the expense of others, attempting to regulate their competitors out of business, and have Congress pass laws to force people to do things like buy electric vehicles.

And this government is growing.

“The bigger the bureaucracy gets, the more centralized it gets, the more powerful Washington gets vis-à-vis the individual, vis-à-vis towns, vis-à-vis the states, the less your vote matters,” Levin says, noting that the evils of Marxism won’t stop until there’s nearly nothing left to fight for.

“It’s as if everybody has to become impoverished and destitute and punished before there’s a chance to eventually turn it around, because this is a cycle,” Levin says, adding, “it’s like a hamster wheel you can’t get off.”


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Levin: Revealing CNN's false claims on 'Christian Nationalism'

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The leftist media has been equating American Christians with “Christian Nationalism,” and Mark Levin knows exactly what they’re doing: fueling hate against Christians and Jews.

“What they want you to think about when they say ‘Christian Nationalism’ is the Klan,” Levin says. “White robes, white people, white hoods, the Klan.”

In a segment on MSNBC, a reporter from Politico discussed the topic, saying that Christian Nationalists “believe that our rights as Americans, all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority.”

According to her, our rights don’t come from God — despite our country being founded by those who believed in natural law.

“Our rights don’t come from God? Oh my goodness,” Levin says, adding that “it would surprise the men at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia at Independence Hall who drafted and voted on and approved the Declaration of Independence.”

“If man has the power to give you rights, man has the power to take them away,” Levin says.

Levin points out that most people don’t choose not to murder because they’ll get in trouble with the government and go to jail, but because it’s simply wrong.

“What they’re trying to do is deny the fact that Judeo-Christian morals and ethics are the basis of the founding of America because they are,” Levin says.


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Glenn: What to do when it feels like the world is falling apart

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No matter where you look these days, you’re inundated with advertisements telling you that you’re not enough and a news cycle that’ll have you feeling like you’ve had enough.

It can feel like the world is falling apart and turning inside out.

Glenn Beck knows this all too well.

“Everything is telling you you’re not enough; and then on top of it, it feels at times like the world is just turning inside out and doing all kinds of things to you,” he says.

The lack of control over what’s going on around you can be overwhelming, but Glenn has a solution.

“We have to accept the things that we can’t change; but we also have to look at the things we can change,” he offers.

He believes that it’s “important to spin things around and maybe think that things aren’t being done to you” but rather, for you.

“It will require sacrifice and suffering and faith and everything else, but maybe, if we choose to see it in a different light, we’ll be better,” he explains.

Instead of focusing on your own issues — your own struggles — you can look to helping others who are going through similar or worse trials.

“If we’re hungry, maybe we feed the poor. We care for the orphan. We protect the widow. We love the stranger. If we’re in such a bad, dark place, wouldn’t it make it easier for us to see others in that place and relate to them unlike anyone else can?”


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The Bumpy Road From Rousseau to Revolution

In this book, Newell, currently a visiting professor at the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, returns to the level of philosophy. He traces the "Philosophy of Freedom" initiated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a reaction against the perceived meaninglessness of "bourgeois" life, and then developed, and radicalized, by his German successors, notably Georg W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger.

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Is More Democracy Always Better?

Tyranny of the Minority is a sequel to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's popular How Democracies Die. In both books the authors address authoritarian threats to democracy. They direct our attention to perils from within—the erosion of democratic norms and institutions by extremist parties that may ascend to power not through military force but through electoral appeals based on grievances, declining social status, and fear and hate of scapegoated groups like immigrants.

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Not So Sweet Prince

It is almost redundant to say that Harvey C. Mansfield is the world's preeminent scholar on the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, certainly in his field of political theory, but recognized as well by such leading historians as James Hankins. In Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating a Modern World, he brings together a number of his essays on Machiavelli. They can be read independently, but their impact is even greater when one reads them in succession.

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The Unfun Couple

In a well-known letter of George Orwell's to Stephen Spender, Orwell tells Spender that before he met him he had put him down as a Communist or Communist sympathizer and "a sort of fashionable successful person," but now that he has met him he has had to change his mind. "Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude," Orwell writes, "because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas." Orwell concludes: "It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to, like the Labour M.Ps. who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more."

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Natan Sharansky Blames Harvard and Yale for Decline of the Free World

Natan Sharansky warned that elite American universities are driving an increase in anti-Semitism and cultural division by spreading "neo-Marxist philosophy in the heart of the free world."

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What Socrates Would Say About Whether To Wear A Mask

Socrates tells the jury that actions born of the fear of death are the most blameworthy, and our world today is in desperate need of that message.