thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb I’m not sure it was worth the effort putting Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi together for the joint exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe the thought was that neither is worth a major exhibit alone, but if you put them together Orazio provides artistry and Artemisia notoriety and then you’ve got something.
It’s not that Artemisia … More ...
Does it make sense to talk of PC liberalism as a grand conceptual system that’s inevitable because of something in modern thought? Isn’t it just the way things happen to have turned out? For example, some people view multiculturalism as Hitler’s bequest to us—if there had been no Nazis, they say, there would have been … More ...
Some conventional wisdom on the scandals in the Catholic Church: Church Itself Sowed Seeds of Scandal. It’s by a man named Oliver McTernan who ought to know what that wisdom is—after 30 years in active ministry promoting social justice he’s now an associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs.
… More ...“The other [image of
Since homosexuality is a topic these days I thought I’d sketch some objections to it:
Toward a Newer Right: the Right has always been a response to the Left, an attempt to maintain traditional affirmations in the face of leftist negations. As a result the Right, although essentially positive because it wanted to preserve something, has appeared negative because its main activity has been opposing leftist initiatives.
Sorry for continuing with the topic of sexual abnormality, but it’s one the world is presenting to us just now. Also, it’s difficult to analyze adequately and so has some intellectual interest. Here’s a worthwhile article, “The paradox of the postmodern pedophile”—all other aspects of normality are being defined out of existence, so why … More ...
Hegelian-sounding aphorism of the day:
Leftism asserts the negation; liberalism negates the assertion.
Thus, the Left is communist and wants to destroy the heritage of the past. It asserts that the past must be negated. Liberals, on the other hand, are anti-anti-communist and simply deny that the heritage of the past should be asserted.
Why … More ...
Strange: in the land that gave us Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park, getting up on a soapbox, quoting the Bible and saying “stop homosexuality” is now a criminal offense.
The movement of modern life is still evidently toward the “left”: toward hedonism, rationalism, egalitarianism, technocracy, making man the measure, eradication of any sense of the transcendent, and all the other things we have come to know so well. Seems bad, if you happen to be an antimodernist and right-winger.
Still, overall formulations leave things … More ...
More on Le Pen, for those who want to keep track of what’s doing among the Euroids: “How Le Pen can win”, from UPI. It goes into some of the complexities of French politics. Note that in contrast to the “extreme-right” Le Pen, the followers of the Trotskyite mole Jospin are “moderate Socialists.”