{"id":5109,"date":"2010-11-30T00:02:19","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T00:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5109"},"modified":"2010-11-30T00:04:49","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T00:04:49","slug":"5109","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/5109\/","title":{"rendered":"Cranks Without Power"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mr. Hume:\u00a0 I\u00a0saw <a href=\"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5107\">your post<\/a> about John West&#8217;s ISI article &#8220;Darwin, Scientism, and the Misguided Quest for Darwinian\u00a0conservatism&#8221; just as I finished reading the two new biographies of Galileo. (For review in the <em>New Criterion<\/em>. The biographies are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Galileo-John-Heilbron\/dp\/0199583528\/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1291073934&amp;sr=1-3\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Galileo-Watcher-Skies-David-Wootton\/dp\/0300125364\/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1291073934&amp;sr=1-7\">here<\/a>.\u00a0 The reason for there being new biographies this year is that it&#8217;s the 400th anniversary of the publication of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.liberliber.it\/biblioteca\/g\/galilei\/sidereus_nuncius\/html\/sidereus.htm\"><em>The Starry Messenger<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 which, incredibly it seems to me, is not on gutenberg.org.)<\/p>\n<p>Well, reading West after spending a week in Counter-Reformation Italy, I am just very glad that nitwits of that particular strain no longer have any power center in Western society. I&#8217;ve met West\u00a0\u2014 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/05\/05\/us\/politics\/05darwin.html?pagewanted=print\">debated him<\/a>, in fact\u00a0\u2014 and found him a monomaniacal crank of the less interesting sort.<\/p>\n<p>We shouldn&#8217;t be smug, though. Authoritarian power centers with the ability to stifle dissent from orthodoxy are not exactly unusual in human affairs. <em>Magna est veritas et praevalebit<\/em>, but sometimes it takes a century or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mr. Hume:\u00a0 I\u00a0saw your post about John West&#8217;s ISI article &#8220;Darwin, Scientism, and the Misguided Quest for Darwinian\u00a0conservatism&#8221; just as I finished reading the two new biographies of Galileo. (For review in the New Criterion. The biographies are here and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/5109\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5109"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5116,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5109\/revisions\/5116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}