thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb How can current public discussions of race be explained? Why the belief that sick and evil motives are everywhere, polluting whatever they touch? Why is defense against accusation impossible, so that suspicion and conviction are the same?
Part of the answer, surely, is bad conscience. The absolute irrelevance of race to any legitimate concern may … More ...
Social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has two unmarried daughters in their thirties and has written a book about their problems: Why There Are No Good Men Left. The basic problem, she seems to believe, is a sort of mechanical lack of opportunity. Young women today are raised to find careers rather than husbands. When … More ...
Some medical bits confirming once again that sexual oddities go together with behavior that is otherwise disordered: Gay, Bisexual Women Take More Risks Than Gay Men, and Drugs, Unsafe Sex Common Among Men Living as Women. They seemed worth mentioning as somewhat relevant to the recent insistence by the American Psychiatric Association that … More ...
The admiration of the rich and famous for a left-wing tyrant: Critics assail Fidel Castro’s grip on Hollywood celebs. Why is mass-market entertainment and fashion left-wing? In part it’s because pop culture likes the exotic, miraculous and sexy—that’s what pleases the public—and a Caribbean Marxist paradise run by a personally magnetic strongman fits the … More ...
Merry Christmas!
From all of us at VFR
An update on what school textbooks are saying these days, published by the liberal-but-somewhat-populist New York Daily News: Schoolbooks are flubbing facts.
On the occasion of a long-time colleague’s hundredth birthday Trent Lott paid a compliment that suggested that Federally-mandated integration had been a mistake, and that some other way forward would have been better—perhaps one that preserved at least the legality of voluntary separation. The response of many people, including some prominent in the conservative movement, … More ...
Religion is inevitable. A religion is an understanding of what is real, together with conclusions for the basic principles of morality. Any such understanding can reasonably be called a religion, since it provides an account of ultimate reality that is not fully demonstrable but gives answers regarding ultimate questions by which we live.
Each of … More ...
Patty Murray provides a textbook example of the use of divisive rhetoric as a diversion from issues by her denunciation of the use of divisive rhetoric as a diversion from issues. She says something utterly brainless about Osama and gets complaints. Her response? To lecture us about those “on the extreme fringes of society … More ...
Let sleeping dogs lie, be culturally sensitive, and above all don’t rock the boat: FBI investigators were ordered to stop Clinton-era investigations into suspected terror cell linked to al Qaeda. It’s hard to push an investigation forward when the higher-ups, for whatever reason, don’t want it to happen. And it gets even weirder when … More ...