The
Rational Argumentator
Fashionable Fallacies (#13-18)
“Tm more experienced than you.
Thus, what you say must be untrue.”
Fuming with spite, reactionaries rise
And with false righteousness proclaim these words.
Farewell, Invention! This is your demise
If rites expired can resurrect the age of herds.
#14
The cases most confounding, sickening, and sour
Are when destroyers claim to aid what they devour.
Take progress: leftists shower it with praise
While hungering its factories to raze.
Take liberty: it existentialism exalts
While blaming on free markets all of mankind’s faults.
Take science: greens declare it paramount
While stifling development and innovation’s fount.
Take love: the theocrats wish it to spread
By telling us to blindly love the things we dread.
To whom should the reactionary’s name belong
But them, for savage, stagnant, leveling caves who long?
#15
Persons of lust will claim with inflamed zeal
That romance out of marriage poses great appeal.
To comprehend their blunder, plainly let me state:
They crave a salad having not a plate!
#16
Our era’s “common sense” has so far run amok
To deem bureaucracy eternal as a rock.
But Reason never shall from superstition’s vines break free
Until its hatchet cuts down statism like a tree.
#17
“Popular wisdom’s” ludicrous; I laugh, for one,
When hearing that “there’s nothing new under the sun.”
Did ancients fly in airplanes,
Upon a hundred stories stand?
Did savages know Newton’s Laws,
Or the discoveries of Rand?
Did the arrested Eastern lands
Bring forth untiring robots’ hands
Or antedate what Edison had done?
Of course, some aspects are not new:
Bureaucracies prescribing men their due,
Men wriggling, twisting to redundant drums,
Spite-driven, bleating mobs from slums,
Archaic dogma that ambition numbs,
The old mimicked by many, newness forged by few,
Of whose ambrosia mediocrities reap crumbs,
Which folksy moralists teach as eternity to view.
#18
“If we abandon regulation,
We shall return to the primeval age.”
Why does it not spark indignation
That socialists can this deception stage?
Does the industrialist’s top hat mimic savage dress?
Do cloning and space tourism constitute regress?
Or is this claim a rationalization
To substitute for skyscrapers a bamboo cage?
G. Stolyarov II is an actuary, science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, former weekly columnist for GrasstopsUSA.com, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov’s new blog, The Progress of Liberty, offers a combination of commentary, multimedia presentations, educational materials, and suggestions for effective activism in favor of individual freedom. Mr. Stolyarov also publishes his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. He holds the highest Clout Level (10) possible on Associated Content. Mr. Stolyarov has also written a science fiction novel, Eden against the Colossus, a non-fiction treatise, A Rational Cosmology, and a play, Implied Consent. You can watch his YouTube Videos. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.
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Learn about Mr. Stolyarov's novel, Eden against the Colossus, here.Read Mr. Stolyarov's comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.