thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Here’s a worthwhile account of the Islamophobia panic among British elites. The panic is quite comprehensible—in times of stress a society needs to reaffirm its core beliefs, and Western political life is now based on what the article calls “a profound distrust of the public – a fear that base sentiments lurk under the surface, … More ...
Why are the people at The New York Times convinced they can advise Musharraf how to achieve stability and progress in Pakistan? I would think the man’s situation demands more than blandly self-assured comments about promoting democratic institutions and making people aware that violence causes problems. Apparently not, though—we live in a global age, and … More ...
The Tate Gallery has paid £22,300 for 30 grams of merda d’artista. The artist, apparently an honest and talented man, canned the stuff and sold it for the price of 30 grams of gold to express his utter disgust with the art world. A couple years later, in 1961, he died of drink. At … More ...
Equal justice under law: EEOC directs agents to ignore Supreme Court ruling on back pay and other remedies available to illegal alien employees. In the meantime they’re looking into ways to comply verbally, for example by awarding “restitution for unpaid work” instead of “back pay.” Quite right, too. As we’ve noted before, rooting out … More ...
What kind of conservatism is possible today? Conservatism has always emphasized tradition. Since the goods tradition promotes can be difficult to articulate—if things were otherwise the goods wouldn’t have to be embodied in tradition but could be taken straight—and since the opponents of tradition refuse to admit the reality and value of traditional goods, the … More ...
And here’s a characteristically thuggish piece by New York Times diversity hire Brent Staples on the Jefferson/Hemings issue we’ve discussed before. He manages to grind a surprising number of his many axes, which argues a certain skill, but he seems to have no notion that things are true if they’re true and false if … More ...
An interesting article: Genes show Welsh are the true Britons. The historians have gone back and forth on this, but it now appears that the Angles and Saxons did ethnically cleanse the native Britons.
It’s interesting those guys are still there: The Children of Israel. I don’t often go near Times Square these days, and it’s been couple of years since I’ve seen them, but they really are as bad as Mr. Goldblatt says.
In the most basic ways, “Western Civilization” no longer works. Some illustrations: More Englishwomen staying childless to advance their careers, while Sweden looks for social policies to boost the birthrate while keeping female labor fully and equally available as an economic resource. The policies just don’t work—after a brief rise Sweden’s birthrate is back in … More ...
In a very idle moment (I was looking at an interactive map showing blogs located near my subway stop) I ran into the following horrible quote from Peggy Noonan:
… More ...…[T]he essence of American patriotism is a felt and spoken love for and fidelity to the ideas and ideals our country represents and was invented