Reason & Reality - ILANA MERCER

“Language mediates thought—and actions. You cannot express or develop worthwhile thoughts without a command of the language.”—ILANA MERCER, “U.S. Kids Can’t Read, Write Or Do Math, But Are No. 1 In Critical Race Theory,” October 14, 2021.
“The Argument from Freedom means arguing not over the contents of Mein Kampf or McElligot’s Pool, but for their publication irrespective of their content. Which is why I say freedom’s argument is an argument from process, and not content.”—ILANA Mercer, “The Wussification Of The West: Will We Ban Shakespeare For Othello And Shylock?“, March 11, 2021.
“A theory, of course—any theory—is always an abstraction, removed from reality. A good theory cleaves to reality as much as possible, describing and presaging it. A bad theory superimposes a new reality on real events. Critical Race Theory does one worse: It rapes reality and loots it.”—ILANA Mercer, “Institutional Critical Race Rot,” September 17, 2020.
“Voicing an opinion is not the same as advancing an argument.”—ILANA Mercer, “Conservative Kids Must Learn Before They Lead,” The Quarterly Review, November 1, 2019.
“If a calamity is predictable it is also preventable.”—ILANA Mercer, “Progressive Crazies Are Getting The Kids Killed,” Townhall.com, January 4, 2019.
“Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources—one’s life and property—are best invested.”—ILANA Mercer, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011, pp. 41-42)
“Casting fact and objective truth as no more than a perspective is a handy bit of intellectual egalitarianism: If nothing is immutably true, then all positions are but a matter of preference and can claim equal validity.”—ILANA, The Daily Caller, “Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good” (January 13, 2017)
“Mythical thinking thrives in a culture that eschews objective truth: ours.”—ILANA, The Daily Caller, “Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good” (January 13, 2017)
“Where once there was an understanding that a reality independent of the human observer exists; students are now taught that truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position—or lack thereof—of persons or groups in society.”—ILANA MERCER, The Daily Caller, “Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good” (January 13, 2017)
“The gold standard for stupid is this Republican riff: ‘Government would work much better if it were run like a business.’ It is in violation of the Law of Identity. A is A. Things are what they are. Government is government; it is not business. The task of a rational man, advised Ayn Rand, is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.”—ILANA MERCER,
“Why Government ‘Care” Will Never, Ever Work,” October 25, 2013
“Consider: Medicine uses the same principles to explain health and disease. Conversely, the pseudo-science of psychiatry and its legions of followers use one set of principles to explain rational behavior; another set to explain irrational behavior. When a person does something ghastly, psychiatry concludes, post hoc, that he has ceased being a morally responsible agent, and herewith acquired a disease. Do we ever seek chemical causes for positive and extraordinary actions? No. As the benefactor of mankind does good things, we attribute his actions to choice. As a murderer like Adam Lanza perpetrated evil, we attribute his deeds to causes: to a diseased mind or an inattentive mother.”—ILANA (December 21, 2012)
“The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after evil deeds have been committed (reasoning backward is an error of logic). Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. Left-liberals of this mindset (among them most conservatives, who are now liberals in all but name) acknowledge human agency and free will if—and only when—adaptive actions are involved.”—ILANA (December 21, 2012)
“Words are symbols. They are used as agreed-upon conventions to make sense of the world. What happens when these constructs no longer corresponded to the things they are supposed to describe?”—ILANA, “Loughner, Language, and The Big Lie,” January 14, 2011
“We are all equally exposed to the Big Lies pushed by the country’s so-called cognoscenti. The political class has manufactured a parallel universe for us to inhabit. We are, however, all free to refuse to occupy it.”—ILANA, “Loughner, Language, and The Big Lie,” January 14, 2011
“The Left treats ‘The Rich’ as a reified, rigid state-of-being. Ayn Rand and all men and women of reason understand that ‘rich’ is a work in progress. Achieved through voluntary cooperation, riches are a reward for work well done.”—ILANA (August 17, 2012)
“One cannot properly undermine a claim by undermining the motives or character of its claimant. That’s a variant of the ad hominem fallacy. The same holds for charges of hypocrisy—the kind Rick Perry leveled at Mitt Romney for employing illegal workers. Such accusations amount to an ad hominem fallacy; Perry’s rabid personal attack did nothing to shake Romney’s position on illegal immigration (as unclear as that may be).”—ILANA (October 21, 2011)
On conspiracy theories: “Imputing garden variety government evils to conspiracies is based on the following faulty premise: Government generally does what is good for us (NOT). So whenever we think it is failing in a mission it fulfills so well (NOT), we should look beyond the facts for something more sinister (NOT).”—ILANA (August 26, 2011)
“Policy by definition addresses the collective, not the individual. Duly. The reality-based libertarian will seek to minimize political overreach, not mandate heaven on earth.”—ILANA (January 15, 2008)
“Reality: the rational man’s anchor.”—ILANA (June 15, 2007)
“The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality.”—ILANA (The American Conservative, January 16, 2006)
“Unvarnished objective reality is morality’s best measure; and human action the ultimate adjudicator of moral worth.”—ILANA (January 13, 2006)

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