What Fr. Ripperger raises first is the use of emotion in place of argument. By invoking emotional activity, as he notes, those attempting to...

We begin to find a criticism of sophistry in Plato, but much of it is delivered by Socrates in his arguments with the famous Sophists. In th...

Now let us take up from the beginning the question, what the accusation is from which the false prejudice against me has arisen, in which Me...

Dad29 sent me this lecture by a Catholic Priest, Fr. Chad Ripperger, on the use of sophistry in political argument. The good father rather ...

In a meditation on what he describes as a "long-ago" post -- he means 2016 -- JM Smith of the Orthosphere discusses the importanc...

I am a free speech absolutist, as I generally am about basic rights: 1A or 2A or 4A, all of them all the way. However, the government is not...

For the first time in 200 years(!), Tennessee has tried to execute a woman. They failed . Pike herself wanted other options. Through her at...

Ronald Reagan famously declared that 'freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.' Christianity might be luckier: it ...

The headline finding : more Republican young men blame women for their problems than Democratic young men. Among Republican young men, it...

Tennessee wasn’t entirely burned down anyway.  UPDATE: This fellow came to burn a little more of it. I don’t know who he is, although he des...

I’m going to Tennessee in the morning. Hopefully they don’t burn the place down. 

El Camino SS. That’s a Studebaker, in case you’ve never seen one. Hot rods. One of my favorite aspects of this annual heritage festival is t...

This week is the Mountain Heritage Festival. Tomorrow’s the big day, which I’ve written about before. Tonight there’s a free concert. 

One of the most useful tools of antidemocratic Democratic politics is the consent decree . The way this works is that some state or local p...

A plausible theory; certainly at least part  of the explanation. When an AI system solves a difficult mathematical problem, the usual explan...

The United Nations, generally a useless joke of an organization in practice, has a powerful opening line in its founding document :  WE THE ...

Heavy thunderstorms started here in the middle of the night, and have carried on through the morning. Season changes sometimes have this sor...

Giving an interview to a journalist can ruin your life, but especially if you're some poor delivery driver in China. I assume the journ...

There's a lively comment section down below on AI that deserves a follow-up to draw out some metaphysics. The 20th century thought it wa...

The autumnal equinox will be, locally, a little after sunrise on Tuesday. This is therefore the last weekend of summer. For Tolkien, embedde...