The Cross Section - RMB Blog

If you are saying to yourself, "who is Tony Timpa and who cares?"  That's exactly the point!  But you should care, because what we learn about his story  will teach us about the death of George Floyd, about the state of policing in America, and the state of our news media. The short version of the story is that he died in police custody in Dallas, TX in August 2016.  He had schizophrenia and depression.  He wasn't taking his medication. But he did have an active cocaine habit.  Obviously, he had some serious problems going on.  One night while in public he had a sense that he was out of control.  He felt frantic and had trouble thinking, but he knew he needed help, so he called 911.  The details after that are blurry but what is certain is that police restrained his hands and feet.  They put him face down on the ground and one officer kneeled on his back for close to 14 minutes.  At some point before the officer got off of him, Tony...

 So if humans are merely a collection of DNA strands, what should govern the way those humans who are in power treat the humans who aren't?  If there is no human nature which fundamentally defines what a human is, what limits should those in power have on their plans for other humans? Francis Schaeffer answers those questions in Chapter 12 titled, "Manipulation and the New Elite."  He spends several pages going through an article written by Francis Crick who with a team discovered DNA and recorded its double-helical structure.  This was exactly how Crick saw humans, nothing more than complicated connections of DNA strands.  His beliefs about what was good for humanity stemmed from that reductionist, materialist philosophy.  Schaeffer in the first half of the chapter describes the philosophy of Determinism which Crick and other elites held, er hold today.  He spends the second half describing the starting line from which elites, motivated by Determinism...

                          Supreme Court Building in D.C. Chapter 11 picks up right where chapter 10 left off.  Schaeffer doesn't move to a different era in history or subject matter.  Instead he continues the story of how our society changed as the world view of our political and intellectual leaders became dominated by existential modern philosophy. Remember the story so far.  Reason and logic were abandoned by philosophers in their search for universals: meaning, values, and morals.  Scientists retained their reliance on objectivity and reason, but reduced all of life to molecules and machinery within a materialist world view.  So for some time in the West there was this dichotomy between philosophy and science.  Philosophy meandered in the realm of the illogical and absurd.  Science analyzed the mechanical nature of human biology while denying the spiritual asp...