{"id":4169,"date":"2013-05-05T06:50:21","date_gmt":"2013-05-05T11:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4169"},"modified":"2013-05-05T06:50:21","modified_gmt":"2013-05-05T11:50:21","slug":"days-of-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4169","title":{"rendered":"Days of Reason"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fig. 1: how to avoid genocide<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Two items today.<\/p>\n

First item, the Mayor of Charlotte, NC, and current Transportation Secretary Nominee, Anthony Foxx declared<\/a> last Thursday, May 2, a Day of Reason and a Day of Prayer.<\/p>\n

Now comes<\/a> the Fox News Crazy, Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America:<\/p>\n

NANCE: Clearly, we need faith as a component, and its just silly to say otherwise. You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism<\/strong>. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust…Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, to iron man: nothing crazier than Thomas Aquinas<\/a> here, declaring reason alone insufficient for human salvation.\u00c2\u00a0 If we have to depend on our own lights, in other words, we’re going to blow it.<\/p>\n

But iron manning this argument hides crucial insufficiencies.\u00c2\u00a0 Moral relativism had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and there isn’t a slippery slope from reason to genocide.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, you can have reasons for genocide, but they’re bad reasons.<\/p>\n

Second item.\u00c2\u00a0 In another almost comical display of incompetence, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University Niall Ferguson lays bare the shortcomings of the work of economist John Maynard Keynes<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Here<\/a> is an account.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., in front of a group of more than 500 financial advisors and investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated.<\/strong> The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s right: Keynes is wrong because he’s gay.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d feel crazy had I used that argument as a fictional example of an ad hominem.\u00c2\u00a0 But alas.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t go often enough to the well from which this sprung<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Check out the link, turns out the “Keynes is gay” charge\u00c2\u00a0is quite the right wing meme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two items today. First item, the Mayor of Charlotte, NC, and current Transportation Secretary Nominee, Anthony Foxx declared last Thursday, May 2, a Day of Reason and a Day of Prayer. Now comes the Fox News Crazy, Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America: NANCE: Clearly, we need faith as a component, and its … Continue reading Days of Reason<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1978,1648,1180,1649,1601,1647],"class_list":["post-4169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-ad-hominem","tag-concerned-women-for","tag-iron-man","tag-john-maynard-keynes","tag-niall-ferguson","tag-penny-nance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4169"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4171,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4169\/revisions\/4171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}