thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Among the claims Professor Bellesiles made in his Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture — a book once acclaimed and now thoroughly discredited — was that there was no significant market for guns in early America. Clayton Cramer, one of Bellesiles’ most effective debunkers, describes the results of a quick look at … More ...
So far as I can tell, this is business as usual in the defense of “affirmative action”:The Evidence of Things Not Seen. A University of Michigan study finds serious problems with racial preference programs. The summary is later rewritten to put a much more positive spin on the findings, the University uses it … More ...
Liberalism proposes to make social life rational and equal. To that end, everything habitual, irregular, particular and opaque to liberal reason must be done away with as bigoted and oppressive. The things to be abolished include family life in any traditional sense, with its associated habits, attitudes and institutions, and ethnic distinctions, with the particular … More ...
More tolerance: in Virginia, the Boy Scouts are going to get rid of Robert E. Lee. America’s history must be abolished, because her great men aren’t good enough for us any more. Since this is America, outside the big cities, and in the South, the event is played down—it’s just the “right thing … More ...
Commentaries on the war for the transformation of human life and attainment of absolute politically-correct purity:
A friend suggests similarities between Jaysongate at the New York Times and the pederasty scandals in the Catholic Church:
… More ...The Times first simply ignored the offenses of a journalist that touched the core of his profession. When the senior executives were forced to confront the situation, they believed Blair had been cured and then merely
Why is “McCarthyism” such a dirty word, when no-one seems to know exactly why, and there really were commies under every bed? Communist influence was real and dangerous, and a “witch hunt” may not be so bad when there are real witches. So one moral of the story is that it’s always good … More ...
Some reasons I prefer the kind of Church the traditional Latin Mass suggests to the kind of Church that—to my eye—appears to have come out of Vatican II:
The new world of tolerance just keeps a-building: in England two social workers lost their jobs because they thought adoptions by homosexual couples (which became legal last November) were a bad thing. It’s not clear from the article whether social workers are required to believe in the wisdom of every legal adoption, or only those … More ...
Notes from the religion beat of the newspapers of the New York Times Company: