thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb The major German media have announced that they are abandoning a language-reform program that the government has been pushing the past 6 years. They’re returning to the old way of writing (not to Fraktur, the old black-letter script they used before the war, but to immensely long words, lots of commas, and the double … More ...
The ABA already has rules that keep judges from belonging to organizations that think there are differences between men and women that matter in personal and social interactions and that adjust their practices accordingly (that “discriminate based on gender”). Now they’re talking about extending that rule to organizations that believe sexual oddities and perversities could … More ...
Modernity attempts to achieve control through formalization. The great triumphs of modern natural science have come from exact measurement and mathematical modelling. Similarly, modern political and social systems substitute the simple and abstract concept of preference—the tendency of actors to choose some things over other things—for the more complex and subtle concept of the good. … More ...
A blurb from the “Inside” box on the front page of today’s New York Times, the “newspaper of record” and the publication that defines reality for our ruling class:
… More ...“With a mixture of annoyance, fear and loathing for an aniticipted [sic] swarm of visitors, many New York residents are planning to steer clear when
A friend sent me a copy of a note he had written arguing against the neoconservative claim that the liberalism dominant today in the academy, the Democratic Party, and the New York Times is the illegitimate result of smuggling (bad) Leftism into (good) pre-60s liberalism. My response:
… More ...I agree with your overall argument. The distinction
Here’s a review by Joseph Stromberg of A. J. Conyers’ The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit. The book’s been out for a while now, and I haven’t read it yet but should. It seems to feed into the developing critique of the standard liberal view that the … More ...
The uniform view of the cultural Left—which includes everything that counts as mainstream from the standpoint of our bureaucracies of truth—is that nods by Republican leaders toward traditionalist cultural concerns prove that the GOP has been hijacked by fundamentalist wackos. That’s not rhetoric and spin, things really look to them that way. It’s clear … More ...
One of my main points here at Turnabout has been that if government sells itself as neutral administration and adjudication, then ultimate power belongs to whoever gets to say what knowledge is. Another has been that officially-recognized knowledge today is a matter of “expertise”: the views of self-contained bureaucracies of knowledge arrived at in accordance … More ...
From the time of Bacon and Descartes, modernity has aimed at simple powerful principles that can be fully grasped, made completely evident, and used for comprehensive control of phenomena. As a result:
It’s a mistake for conservatives to stake their case on the appeal to freedom and equality as ultimate principles that is the stuff of political rhetoric today. The appeal is self-defeating, both for conservatives and for anyone intelligently attached to those goals. Their logic is innately unlimited, and the attempt to put them into effect … More ...