thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
It will be interesting to see what happens on this: Vatican prepares draft directives against admitting gays as priests. It seems an issue the Church can’t dodge, but it also seems that the post-Vatican II habit of finding some way to make common cause with every tendency approved by modernity is impossibly difficult to … More ...
It’s not only The Age, it’s also The New York Times that is being forced to recognize the obvious: A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race. It now appears that the data used by Franz Boas, mentor of the notorious intellectual charlatan and sexual adventuress Margaret Mead, did … More ...
It’s an error to think of Gro Harlem Brundlandt as a loner carrying on a one-woman crime wave. It is now clear she has associates: United Nations urges Blair to outlaw smacking.
In a crowded field, one of the dumbest feminist theories has been that the institution presided over by Juno is bad for women. Competent social science normally confirms the obvious, and as to marriage it has now done so, to such an extent that even the lefty Australian paper The Age seems to have noticed: … More ...
Dr. Gro Harlem Brundlandt, notorious enemy of the human race, is at it again, with a report that Violence claims 1.6 million lives a year. The facts cited by the report seem perfectly straightforward: suicide is presently the main cause of violent death worldwide, with murder and war following in that order.… More ...