thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Michael Blowhard moseys though a discussion of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, notes that part of his argument (the part MB likes), boils down to “Why, that’s how things have always seemed to me!”, and then asks “What do people really find appealing about Western-style monotheism? What emotional/imaginative thing does it serve?” Why, in other … More ...
Kathy Shaidle has been grousing that none of the young guys killed in the West Virginia Tech shooting did anything to resist getting blown away and young conservative guys are defending them.
She touches on part of the explanation in her most recent comment, to the effect that you don’t have to be a … More ...
My publisher tells me they want my book to be a bit more coherent and a little less vague, so I’m busily unscrambling arguments, tightening up prose, and adding examples and such. As a result, posting is likely to be sporadic for a while.
In the meantime, I was inspired by Michael Blowhard’s link to … More ...
Steve Sailer has a couple of interesting pieces on Obama and his identity issues. Reminds me a bit of someone I once knew, a black man with a Christian mother and Muslim convert father whose marriage broke up over religious and other incompatibilities. He was intelligent, extremely disciplined, attentive to what others were looking … More ...
A basic question that’s attracted surprisingly little discussion in spite of its obvious social importance is why so many people not only let religion slide practically but deny it as a theoretical matter. Their apparent claim is that one part of a universe that arose by chance and means nothing can interpret that universe correctly … More ...
Anthony Esolen visits one of the few surviving men’s colleges and finds it a hotbed of benign timocracies. Fine upstanding young men, sense of honor, all that sort of thing. From his account it seems that education really can make a difference, and people can bounce back and start acting normal again if given … More ...
Here’s some more moaning about These Young People Today, where “today” means recent decades going back God knows how long: The Closing of the American Mind Revisited. The piece is prompted by the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s book.
Like most complaints about These Young People Today it’s really about the consequences of the … More ...
The 70s were called the “me” decade, but it appears that we’ve built on the foundation they laid. College students’ scores on a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory have been rising steadily since testing began in 1982, with the proportion of high scorers rising from half to two-thirds. The study worries that narcissists “are … More ...
Several items that touch on the current effort to turn the whole world into a unitary rationalized industrial scheme:
More news from the Sex Front that for some reason I’ve been covering a lot lately: