Reason gone mad
I gave a talk about reason, scientism and liberalism at a recent conference put on by the Roman Forum. Here’s a *.pdf of the talk’s written form.
James Kalb
Benedict on immigration
Here are the Pope’s remarks to reporters on the papal plane on his way to the United States that became an issue in a recent entry :
… More ...Beltramo: I’ll ask the question in Italian, but we would love to have just a greeting in Spanish. With the enormous growth in the Hispanic presence, the Catholic
The outlook for the bobo ascendency
One issue raised by Brooks’s “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians, his new hip yuppie ruling class) is how long they’ll last in power. They do have some advantages:
- They control the commanding institutions, and since the most influential of those institutions depend on skill at manipulating symbols, it seems likely that will last.
- Mass education,
Social life as a tale told by an idiot
I continue my investigation of current ideals of life, with Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks and Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. (The former author is the NYT columnist, the latter a couple of youngish socialist Canadian … More ...
Email to an immigration restrictionist
I noticed a blogger denouncing the Pope for unspecified comments on immigration during his current visit to America, and sent him the following email:
… More ...Dear Mr. Lillpop,
What did the Pope say that you object to?
So far as I can tell from Joe Guzzardi’s piece at
http://vdare.com/guzzardi/080418_pope.htm
all the Pope did was (1) say
Cool cats and gentlemen
“Coolness” is an odd sort of thing. It’s a little ridiculous for someone over the age of 40 or so to notice or comment on it. He should have something better to do, people will say, and he’s going to get it wrong anyway.
Still, it’s an ideal of life that does have some authority … More ...
Finding reason in an unreasonable world
What do you say in response to a theory of things that is simplified to the point of absurdity: that asserts that existence is an illusion, or physical objects do not exist, or language is all a rhetorical power-game, or mathematical objects are only physiological states of someone’s brain? Some possibilities:
- Argument. It’s illuminating to
One skeptical viewer
I just watched 12 Angry Men, supposedly one of the top 100 movies of all time, on DVD. Before watching it told my wife that I thought based on reputation that it was going to be “improving.” Now that I’ve watched it I suppose I must be improved.
Movie-wise, it’s not exactly up there … More ...
What does it mean to speak of God?
You might as well ask what it means to speak of any other basic reality. What does it mean to speak of time, space, number, particularity, universality, good, evil, or other minds? We use such concepts, and accept and comment on the things they denote, but explanations of exactly what they are never completely satisfy.… More ...
The eternal return of the same?
The discussion of the once and future paleoconservatism continues at Taki’s Magazine, with contributions from Daniel Larison and Richard Spencer. Larison seems to think that the new will be much the same as the old, while Spencer seems to identify with a sort of rambunctuous and generally nationalist individualism that perhaps can fuel … More ...