thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb A commenter, apparently an American Jew long resident in Italy who can view America (and Europe) as both insider and outsider, has posted a lengthy ramble about America, Americanism, modernity, and related topics. His ramble raises some interesting issues, but two that seem especially worth commenting on are whether advanced liberalism, the currently ascendant … More ...
Student free speech cases like “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” strike me as rather silly. Schools always try to bring students to think and act in some ways rather than others. That’s why they exist. To do so they maintain controlled environments and clear hierarchies of authority. In particular, they prescribe the topics of … More ...
Senator Obama, whose own church seems quite ready to accentuate differences, repeats the common goodthinker’s complaint that
Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart.
The change is not so mysterious. In the 60s or thereabouts governing elites decisively rejected their … More ...
I don’t know much about the topic in its specific sense as a theory opposed to Darwinism. Some ideas associated with it do seem to make sense. It seems to me, for example, that mathematical analysis and basic physics and chemistry ought to set outer bounds on what random variation and natural selection can do, … More ...
I’m about half-way through Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru (available free online). It’s a great book from the great age of New England letters. His account is still considered quite accurate, or so it seems, and he presents it in the form of a clear, vivid and impartial narrative based on the … More ...
Steve Sailer notes something notable:
… More ...In the past, typically, happy talk was the style of the insecure middle of the social scale. Those who wished to be seen as above status concerns espoused frankness … A really odd thing about American culture today, however, is that as you go up the educational and social
I’ve noted that an implicit motivation for promoting mass third-world immigration is divide et impera: as Federalist 10 makes clear, the more people, and the more diverse they are, the higher the position of those on top and the less likely those down below will be able to get together and cause problems … More ...
A study from the Barna Group has turned up some interesting info on the numbers, lifestyles and self-perceptions of American atheists and agnostics, and how they contrast with those of active Christians. The most striking findings are:
Back in the ’60s people used to go off to look for America. The idea was that you’d drive your car across the country or hitch a ride on a freight train with your guitar or something and then you’d meet the people and find out how wonderful and democratic America is or whatever. Off … More ...
I’ve been reading some intellectual and cultural history lately, James H. Billington’s The Icon and the Axe and part of Vernon Louis Parrington’s The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America 1860-1920.
I’m an American who knows very little about Russia. That might be one reason I thought the Billington book on Russia was really … More ...