Tea at Trianon: Liberal Science

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Liberal Science

From Matt Walsh:

I have a headache just from writing that last paragraph. I need a nap and a shower and a rocket ship to a planet in a distant galaxy. But this is what the Left calls “science.” And the “science” at work in the pregnant man story is even more perverse than it first appears. Just think about it: In the Left’s version of things, a woman with a baby in her womb is a man, but the baby in the womb isn’t a person. All it takes for the woman to be a man, despite lacking every physical qualifier, is that she wants to be one. But the baby, despite having every physical qualifier necessary to be a human, still does not get to be one. That’s how we end up with a “man” carrying around in “his” womb a mass of magical tissue which will become a person at some undetermined point through some process nobody can explain. She’s a man even though she’s a woman, and she gave birth to a person who wasn’t a person until he was born, even though he’s the same person after birth that he was before. (Read more.)