thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Boys who are abused are much more likely to become violent criminals if they have one version of a gene associated with chemical balances in the brain than another: Bad behaviour linked to gene. In principle, the finding is not particularly startling. Common sense has always told us that background and temperament account for … More ...
Rights grow ever more equal: a man pulled a knife on his wife, their pit bull attacked him, and he stabbed the dog to death. Result: 90 days for the attack on the woman, 2 years for the attack on the dog. The sentences run concurrently, so the assault on his wife was a … More ...
Scandinavian social democracy keeps rolling on: Norway sets 40% female quota for boardrooms. Publicly-owned companies have to comply in one year, privately-owned ones in three. The quotas expand the 40% rule for government posts that has existed since the Norwegians got their first female prime minister in 1981, a lady who has since become … More ...
For those interested, First Things has published a useful rebuttal of the factual basis of Daniel Goldhagen’s notorious essay in The New Republic, “What Would Jesus Have Done?” [The Goldhagen essay is not available on-line.] The author’s final point seems well founded: “The New Republic owed its readers, and more importantly the Catholic … More ...
It may be true—I believe it is—that American society is mostly good, if only because no society could last a day that wasn’t mostly good. Still, if that’s true then it must be possible for a society that’s mostly good to be pointed in a radically wrong direction and to adopt a fundamentally evil system … More ...
Autonomy means “self-rule,” and liberalism makes it the supreme political goal. The coherence of classical liberalism depends on its ability to find a meaning of autonomy that promotes discipline and small government. On the face of it, that should be easy. After all, ruling yourself is a discipline, and external government is its negation. The … More ...
Paul Craig Roberts has a useful column summarizing recent studies on the relationship between guns and violence. Not surprisingly, the studies show that widespread gun ownership reduces violent crime by enabling law-abiding citizens to respond appropriately—that is, immediately and forcibly—to violence and the threat of violence.
So why the widespread vehement opposition to private … More ...
In the course of a somewhat rambling discussion of the ways of bureaucrats Gary Aldrich tosses off an interesting observation: “TIPS is what the federal government does when it knows what to do, but cannot do it out of fear of being accused of racial profiling.” I think there’s something to that. The Feds can’t … More ...
The science of family life continues to make huge strides: Study Looks At Women, Marriage And Divorce and discovers that shacking up and premarital pregnancy make for shaky marriages. How revolutionary! Similar findings may eventually lead scholars to propose sophisticated theoretical concepts like “commitment and integrity” and “moral orientation,” or maybe eventually even “virtue and … More ...
Those eager for one more essay, comment or whatever on what liberalism is may want to know that my note Liberalism: Ideal and Reality, from the Winter 2002 Telos, is now online. It was published with a reply from Paul Gottfried, to which I’ll reply in some forum in due course.