Remembrance of blogs past
Naturally, I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. For anyone who’s interested, here are some thoughts on Catholicism from my other blog:
James Kalb
Play ball!
My first entry! I have another blog, a political one that I share with another editor, which hardly seems the place for random thoughts and ramblings about what after all is my personal situation. I’m a 55-year-old man, married with three children, a lawyer and writer, who is going through the process of … More ...
Watching over the kiddies
No surprise here: hundreds of British child welfare professionals, including police officers, care workers and teachers, have been identified as ‘extremely high-risk’ paedophiles by an investigation into internet porn. If you were a pedophile, wouldn’t a position that gave you access and authority over children—with no one supervising the situation because you are the supervisor—be … More ...
The reform of domestic life
No safe haven for bigotry: Nannies in Britain to sue for racial bias. When you’re choosing someone to be alone with your kids for hours on end day after day, the burden will be on you to prove you acted in a nondiscriminatory fashion. I wonder whether this will apply to sexual orientation too?
Why is the Left groovy?
I ran into a discussion of “why leftism” over at 2blowhards.com that was interesting because it dealt with the problem of the attractiveness of the Left. The discussion ended by proposing that the Right
“Claim art, claim food, claim pleasure, claim generosity.”
My response:
… More ...Good idea, but one that’s hard to carry out.
Art: The
More on antiessentialism
Another thought on that crowd-pleasing topic, “essentialism.” Many claim that Islam and the West can’t be in conflict because there is no “Islam”—just many Islams. If you say something bad about feminism the complaint will be called unfounded because after all there are many feminisms. And if you present some grand theory of liberalism from … More ...
The essence of antiessentialism
Comments about the “clash of civilizations” and such like provoke complaints about “essentialism,” the supposed error or sin of attributing a particular fixed character to a group of people. The thought behind such complaints is that something as complex as a civilization or religion or race must be a heterogeneous collection of things that seems … More ...
The “new immigration” and “family values”
Conservative optimists who claim that the arrival of millions of Latin Americans and orientals isn’t all bad, because after all they bring their family values with them, should consider the case of California, a state in which the “new immigration” has recently made whites a minority. Somehow, the arrival of the Third World hasn’t done … More ...
The ties that don’t bind
Another article from Britain with interesting facts and confused thinking: Singleton society. The same trends that make marriages fragile make close personal connections of any sort increasingly rare and unstable. The scenario plainly won’t last, and we’ll end up Muslims if we can’t come up with anything better. Nonetheless, the author (a sociologist) tries … More ...
A darwinian leftist
There are some interesting things in Unity is Health: An Evolutionary Left, an article by a neo-lefty British journalist who takes the notion of innate human nature seriously. What’s interesting in it is that there is apparently good reason to think that social inequality as such leads to bad health for those at the … More ...