thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb “Jaws dropped” in Pennsylvania legal circles when a lawyer filed a brief comparing ACLU demands that an 80-year-old plaque be removed from a courthouse to the Taliban destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas. After all, everyone knows that radical secularism is not an orthodoxy, removal of a plaque that mentions St. Matthew and the Ten Commandments … More ...
The affirmative-action approach to public safety that has given us Chief Moose and a great many dead bodies becomes formalized: Racial profiling settlement up for vote in Maryland. Under the settlement, troopers would give motorists they pull over a brochure about how to file racial-profiling complaints. There would be a statewide 800 number, a … More ...
The Fox News Tongue Tied Archive, a running compilation of PC oddities, is worth a bookmark. They seem to be changing their indexing, so their blog-style page might be the better link in the long run.
More cannibalism in the news: UK channel 4 to show artist eating dead baby. While some people are complaining, no publicly recognized principle is being violated. After all, cannibalism is a victimless crime in this instance. Further, we’re told by reputable authorities that unborn children have no moral worth, animals and human beings are … More ...
A sexual leftist who calls himself a cultural conservative asked someone on an email list
… More ...Why don’t we ponder what you consider “perfection” when it comes to sex? What are these “standards” to which you aspire? A sublime feeling of oneness with your beloved? A knockout orgasm? Or does “perfection” lie in knowing what you’re
There couldn’t have been anything good or true in Strom Thurman’s views on race in 1948, so anyone 54 years later who says anything nice about his presidential campaign is rightly tarred with sheer unmitigated undeniable evil. If you’re a black sociologist, though, you can come out in favor of overturning Brown v. Board of … More ...
What is knowledge? The question has been supremely important in modern times. Before we could know about the world, it seemed to Bacon, Descartes and others, we should criticize our ways of knowing. Our investigations should free themselves of the things that lead to error. They should be exact and impersonal, based on logic and … More ...
Some thoughts suggested by current discussions of racism and antisemitism:
The natural outlook is that there are a variety of peoples—East Asians, Fukienese peasants, Westerners, Jews, Irishmen—that are distinct enough to possess qualities that might be good or bad. Since qualities differ, it is natural to feel more or less attracted or tied to one … More ...
Here’s a good interview: Fr. James V. Schall on Reason and Faith. He touches on natural law and its critics, modern natural rights, St. Thomas, the Greek thinkers, Leo Strauss and his notion of a standoff between reason and revelation, the flaws of Islam, the current crisis in the Church, and what not else. … More ...
What’s at the heart of the current effort to abolish Christmas? Planned Parenthood’s “Choice on Earth” holiday card, which proclaims death instead of birth and the triumph of the will instead of the Peace of God, may provide a clue.