thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Do the best things always come first? Every movement seems to produce its classics at the beginning like Athena springing full-grown from the head of Zeus. (Sorry if that’s too high-flown!)
That applies to modernity too. For us the seventeenth century is the century of genius, because it was when modernity achieved full development in … More ...
What kind of conservatism is needed today? Whatever it is will have to be different from that of the past. Conservatism as such is simply the desire to keep what’s good in an existing way of life. Conservatives today, however, have seen liberalism transform the world they once loved beyond recognition. What can there … More ...
What kind of conservatism is needed today? Whatever it is will have to be complicated, or at least different from that of the past. Conservatism as such is simply the desire to keep what’s good in an existing way of life. Conservatives today, however, have seen liberalism transform the world they once loved beyond recognition… More ...
Apparently, Le Pen said on one occasion:
… More ...Do you want me to say it is a revealed truth that everyone has to believe? That it’s a moral obligation? I say there are historians who are debating these questions. I am not saying that the gas chambers did not exist. I couldn’t see them myself. I
The Left continues all-victorious because the serious issues were conceded long ago. “Inclusiveness” and “tolerance,” taken seriously, radically weaken all institutions other than universal markets and universal rational bureaucracies. Nonetheless, it is now fundamental that they are necessary basic standards for any tolerable society. Rejecting them has become unspeakable, and for most people unthinkable; all … More ...
There’s a deep connection between PC liberalism and Nazism. A single movement of thought, the abolition of the transcendent, leads to them as its two ultimate possibilities. Nazism therefore clarifies to liberals their understanding of what the alternative to their view really is, within the world of thought they inhabit, by perfectly displaying that alternative.… More ...
More on the mantra about the absence of any relation between homosexuality and pedophilia.
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