thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Meanwhile, at the birthplace of American liberty, Colin Powell gets 100,000 bucks and a gold Liberty Medal in exchange for a speech in which he “called on Americans to live up to their national ideal of liberty by confronting poverty, bigotry and inequality as the nation pursues its war on terrorism.” Powell “focused on … More ...
Human rights just keep rolling: EU Parliament Votes To Establish Europe-Wide Right to Abortion . The resolution is non-binding, but nonetheless indicative. One interesting point is that it relies on The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for the legal framework justifying assertion of the right. According to the … More ...
Could a free people conceivably accept the civil rights laws? Here’s a report from the front: “Specially Ill-Educated”, on the effects of the Federal command to “mainstream” students with behavioral disorders. If a kid kicks and bites but doesn’t injure people seriously it’s been decided in Washington that local educators can’t remove him from … More ...
A Zogby poll confirms the obvious: students are taught to believe “diversity” outranks ordinary honesty, which is mostly relative to personal and cultural standards anyway. They learn that business is a profession in which an “anything goes” attitude is uniquely likely to lead to success. And 97% of college seniors agree that their studies … More ...
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 ...