thoughts in and out of season
What would be necessary for the rebirth of traditional society?
Traditional society is society oriented toward transcendent good. The two are inseparable. To say a good—the good life, say—has a transcendent element is to say we can’t make what it is altogether explicit or know it sufficiently on our own. If that is so, however, … More ...
A liberal might object that my complaints about liberal intolerance and tyranny are really only complaints that liberalism is the political outlook on which Western institutions are now based. As such, it does what any dominant outlook does: it defines itself as truth and other outlooks as deceit, malice or ignorance, and then acts accordingly. … More ...
Evidently a book to read if you want a closeup view of malfunctions built into advanced liberalism: Coloring the News, by William McGowan. Nat Hentoff, the reviewer, doesn’t see it that way of course. He thinks of inclusiveness as incomplete rather than self-contradictory, even though pursuing any goal—even “inclusiveness”—requires that many things be excluded.
Religion leads to violence. Dogma divides, experience unites. We hear such things all the time, but are they true?
The answer isn’t obvious. There have been religious wars and persecutions, but also non-religious and anti-religious ones. It was secular ideologies, after all, that led to the political catastrophes of the last century, and the most … More ...
It’s not just the unabomber and the guy who killed Fortuyn: environmentalist terrorism is real.
More adventures with the N word: in Idaho, you can go to jail for saying it. Not up to the Dutch standard, but getting close!
Here’s another aspect of liberal tolerance and freedom: The secret lives of loss for women after abortion, by Melinda Tankard Reist (who has a book on the subject). A woman now has the right to be left on her own in the situation that most obviously connects her to other people.
Lest we forget, here’s a catalogue of statements about Jenin from what is laughingly called the British quality press. The writer himself goes a bit over the top, though, when he says
… More ...this misreporting was an assault on the truth on a par with the New York Times‘s Walter Duranty’s infamous cover-up of the
What happens when a black woman got stabbed to death in a small Indiana town in 1968? Just what you’d expect:
… More ...For nearly 34 years the outside world assumed that the killer was from Martinsville, with its Ku Klux Klan past, and that the police had covered up for the murderer.
Martinsville, which according to
Is liberalism politically necessary, because there’s too little agreement on basics? That’s what is said. Any attempt to enforce non-liberal views, special recognition of a particular religion for example, would be hopelessly divisive and require unacceptable coercion. Religious establishments have been in decline for a long time, and serious attempts to re-impose them today soon … More ...