It’s also “crystallized common sense” that the sun circles the earth. I see it with my eyes every day!  What could be more “common sense” and “tradition”!  Any other view must be dismissed as “untried”, “novel”, and “counter-intuitive”.  Why, what fools Copernicus and Galileo were!

Well said.

Another corollary to this, is the annoying tendency for Christian apologists to excitedly cite science or law, as if true authority resides outside the Church.

The natural science, in its domain, functions quite a bit differently tha social science.  I do think it’s funny, though, that the folks all excited about evolution are so willfully ignorant of the insights of genetics and neuroscience on racial differences.

PS Incidentally, Mr. Physics, perhaps you know since there is no proper third point of reference and both the Sun and Earth are floating in space, that it’s equally accurate to say the Earth revolves around the Sun, as it is to say the Sun revolves around the Earth.  In a sense, they both revolve around one another.

We should not embrace raw consequentialism either.  What we know to be true is not the only consideration in right action, be it personal or corporate. Calling raw consequentialism what we’ve traditionally known isn’t conservatism, it is just less rigorous scientism.

While it is true that Americans’ appetite for risk and debt has increased, much of that appetite was already there, it just wasn’t fed as well - meaning much of the increased debt level has resulted simply because it became easier for some Americans to borrow more. 

This is partly a result of money from places like China flooding into the country.  It is also the result of what you discussed in your post, i.e. the discarding of old prejudices that kept many people from being granted credit in the first place (witness the explosion of “sub-prime” borrowers"). 

Unless the government decides to bail everyone out, lenders will re-learn at least this aspect of tradition.

Good article.

@ Mr Cundiff

Question for you:  How has civlisation been bettered by heliocentrism and the partisanship derived from the Galileo affair ?  How does heliocentrism help us save our souls and keep peace in our families ?  What does it have to do with morals and doctrine, and how does it affect social stability and uphold good customs ?  In so far as the movement of the sun and the earth is a completely academic question—for navigators at sea still rely on good ol’ geocentric tradition—who should care about it but a very small minority of physicists and astronomers ?

Every day, I become more enamoured with geocentrism because of the sentiment; as a bonus, it enrages the worldly to doubt the movement of the Earth.  Why would it matter if I decided to be a geocentrist ?  “Only fools who do not use their reason hold that position, which contradicts all scientific evidence and is based on superstition and obscurantist scriptural literalism !” Believe you me, the necessity of making this silly stigma to serve a certain agenda likely had more to do with the universal acceptance of heliocentrism than the studies of scientists did.

Galileo rashly disobeyed a direct command from his superiour without a grave reason.  Until he recanted, he was indeed a fool.

@ Charles, You wrote, “Believe you me, the necessity of making this silly stigma to serve a certain agenda....”

Who had the agenda?  What was it?

You also wrote, “How does heliocentrism help us save our souls and keep peace in our families ?  What does it have to do with morals and doctrine, and how does it affect social stability and uphold good customs ?

How does geocentrism advance those goals?

Other than, “Ignorance is bliss”

There you have it, folks!  The Sun revolves around the Earth (Ptolomy and Mr. Roach), melanin in the skin is destiny (ol’ Al Rosenberg and Mr. Roach), Astrology is really cool (ol’ Dolf), the head is just a tower to cool the blood (Aristotle), women have more teeth than men (Aristotle), Elk in the Black Forest when they fall over can’t get back up again (J. Caesar), rubbing a rabbit’s foot will bring good luck, the value of a product is based on how much labor goes into it (Rodbertus and his understudy ol’ Karl), water runs up hill because “up” and “down” are relative concepts (the Sophists and Roachian thinking), the Earth is flat, unicorns abound, there’s a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, Bigfoot is alive and well and living in Schmittville Missouri, space aliens abducted Elvis, and if you step on a crack you’ll break your mother’s back.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto!

“It’s also ‘crystallized common sense’ that the sun circles the earth. I see it with my eyes every day!”

You do not. What you see is the sun rising in the east every day. That the sun rises in the east is an inductive proposition; a truth known by induction. That this is because the sun circles the earth or because the earth circles the sun is not something that can be known by induction, but rather only deductively, through its proper causes.

When Mr. Roach talks about things known by tradition, he’s talking about inductive truths: e.g. the fact that abstinence taught in the context of Christian truth reduces the rate of teen pregnancy and sexual diseases. We know this is true because we have 2000 years of experience to back it up. The effort to supplant such truths with “studies” (controlled exercises in induction) is nothing but an attempt to eliminate alleged errors due to bias.  Supposedly, modern science and scientists not being susceptible to bias, their results are more accurate than the experience of millions upon millions of people over the course of 2000 years.

(Of course, there’s also the fact that what works or what is true in a Christian culture may not work or be true for a secular one. To that extent, modern studies can have some merit. Nevertheless, they are completely incapable of telling us, for example, whether our society should be Christian or secular, which is an underlying question that must be answered first.)

Consider all the ways we know a neighborhood is “bad”: quality of real estate, the clothing of its denizens, the number of aimless young men, the presence of dirty cars, the loudness of music, the number of police, the number of young children with tired-looking single mothers, the presence of Newport t-shirts, boarded up businesses, its reputation, etc. -=Roach=-

You forget the poor tired lloking old women wearing depends and spandex riding those dirty buses to spend their social security checks at the casino with all those aimless old men looking for a young waitresses ass to cop a feel of. Fear the depends!!

My car is dirty, Im a bad bad bad man!! Fear me!! And look, my clothes, stained with wheel grease from a 250 brake assembly from a large commercial jet aircraft I changed at work!! Fear the real knowledge you instinctly have, Fear the dirty bad man!!! I have Skydrol stains on my pants, real knowledge, run for your lives, fear the working man!!!

Sir, the question, whether capital punishment is a deterrent or not, has been answered in the great british experiment of the late eighteenhundreds. It is not.
Legally prescribed punishment acts as a deterrent, if it is seen as hurtful in relation to the profit inherent in the prohibited act and if there is perceived high probability of punishment. The british, in the course of a few dozen years got rid of capital punishment for almost all offenses thus punished in the late eighteenhundreds - because it did not work “pour encourager les autres”. Talking of studies: why don’t you study, where this deeply cynical expression came from?
There is a sufficient number of countries without capital punishment where the murder rate is lower than in certain countries with capital punishment to exemplify that point. Not killing criminals does not mean letting the off free either - other punishments are deterrent enough.

More and more I am amazed by what can be said by Takimag’s authors. How about a lectorate to deter the worst excesses of “common sense”? Perhaps some peer review before publication?

Karl Mannheim correctly argued that the founders of sociology, and a fortiori social science, were Justius Möser, Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Friendrich Gentz, von Haller, Adam Müller, de Bonald, Le Play, Emile Keller, La Tour du Pin, Max Weber, and Auguste Comte, the last a favorite of Maurras.  Through in Mannheim himself, Robert Nisbet, and Charles Murray. Wow!  What a bunch of Commies!

“Who had the agenda?  What was it?”

The ideological children of the Enlightenment, whose purposes it served to make a caricature of the Church as an obscurantist and fanatical product of a barbarous time dubbed ‘The Dark Ages,’ wrote post facto commentaries on the Galileo affair because it served their purposes.  They employed vivid imagery about the Inquisition and extravagant rhetorical devices ("monkish power” “fanaticism") to buttress their dubious claims of representing ‘progress’ and man’s salvation in liberty.  The Galileo affair was just another event twisted and exploited for agitprop.  Voltaire and divers idolaters of saeucular sciences are guilty of this.  See: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Liberals generally.  They posit something of a Whiggish meta-narrative, exploiting the emotions of the uninformed, to veil their godless materialism.  All the better to con the world and stab her in the back unawares !

“How does geocentrism advance those goals?”

That is my point exactly.  How does heliocentrism advance those goals ?  The question has been completely blown out of proportion.  I say, mind those who blew it so.  Just how the stars and planets move is truly an irrelevant question that does not affect our daily lives—after all, one could still navigate using the geocentric model.  So what was to gain in creating such partisanship and division over the issue ?  Personally, I suspect that there is some ulteriour motive that drives all the senseless fuss.

I am disposed to geocentrism as an admittedly contrarian position.  I aim to eschew concern for scientific theories on matters of dubious importance pursuant to spiritual growth.

Stopping immigration saves jobs and increases wages.

So, re/ tradition… I hope nobody here is claiming that they figured out on their own that the Earth revolves
around the Sun?

@ Charles, You wrote, “I am disposed to geocentrism as an admittedly contrarian position.  I aim to eschew concern for scientific theories on matters of dubious importance pursuant to spiritual growth.”

Those may be two of the most eloquent sentences to ever appear on this site.  While I do not share your conclusions, I commend you on your explanation.

“ ‘up’ and ‘down’ are relative concepts (the Sophists
and Roachian thinking)”

I’d venture to say, dipshit, that the entire U.S. astronaut corps would be inclined to agree with Roach and the Sophists on that one.

I’d pay money to watch G.S. swim Niagra!  Put then because science means nothing to our sophists and intellectual Luddites, the law of gravity must not exist either and Newton was a fool along with Galileo and Copernicus!

by the way, another social scientist, a political scientist, has for a first name “Paul” and last “Gottfried”. How Roach must hate him!

OK, shithead.  Let’s try this again.

If you are floating in deep space, where the fuck is down?

By the way, this particular neo-Luddite has a degree in aeronautics and completed the coursework for a minor in physics.

And spent one semester tutoring college physics, and is currently a physics tutor for a private school.

Not that I get off on credentials like you do, nor that these credentials are sufficient to get me a slot on the editorial board of Scientific American… but they most certainly are sufficient for affirming that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about when you burble self-importantly about Copernicus, Newton, and Galileo.

Take a deep breath and repeat after me, Sid:

THOSE CHINAMEN ARE NOT UPSIDE-DOWN.

For terrestrial purposes, a geocentric world is perfectly valid. Sidereal tables, drawn by competent scientists, still list the times for “sunrise” and “moonrise.” For extra-terrestrial purposes, we use a heliocentric model. The truth is indeed fixed and immutable, but our relation to it is relative. “Relativity” always implies a fixed and immutable point. For Einstein’s theory, this was the speed of light. What we see depends on where we stand.

For the person who mocked the Labor Theory of Value, at least get its origins right: it is not from Marx, but from Smith and Ricardo, and before them it is implied by Aristotle and Aquinas. And nobody held it in the form you quote it.

You guys are killin’ me.  What a thread.  Only at Takimag can you consistently find intellectual demolition derby like this.  I mean, you knew?  Chinamen aren’t upside down??

Hilarious stuff.

Charles, I think you just persuaded me.  I am now a geocentrist. 

And Mr. Prößdorf, Sir- your name alone commands respect.  Thank you for making such an eloquent point.

Numbers matter and you use math to understand numbers because numbers are part of math.  Example.

Suppose US population stabilizes at 300 million and immigration is 2 million per year.  Suppose people live 75 years so 4 million die per year.  Then there must be 2 million births.  2 million births over 4 million deaths is 1/2.  So the genetic survival ratio per generation is 1/2.  In 4 generations you have 1/16 of the starting genes.  To avoid this, immigration has to be zero.

You have to use math to understand numbers.  You can’t use your emotions to substitute for numbers.  Your emotions don’t tell you your choices, it tells you what to do after the math tells you your choices.  Stop all immigration.  That means close to zero, like less than 25,000 per year.