thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb How come “anarchotyranny”
only appears 39 times in the Google index?
UPDATE: Good news: “anarcho-tyranny” appears 15,000 times. Still not enough, but better than 39!
To expand on the topic a little, the expression—however spelled—refers to a state of society in which government goes after nontraditional offenses like racism more vigorously … More ...
What must it be like working in a profession in which a pleasant out-of-her-depth fantasist like Elaine Pagels or a thuggish hack like Houston Baker (see this discussion) are named-chair superstars at top universities?
It appears that in Professor Pagels’ case there’s a certain amount of snickering, so academics don’t lose their critical abilities … More ...
Insistence on ethnic diversity means trouble in activities where the nature of the activity goes with radical distinctions of status and reward. Here are some examples from today’s Drudge Report: top chef attacked as “racist”, Duke professors seek to defuse anti-lacrosse team ad. The problem won’t go away. Different groups aren’t going to … More ...
Here are a couple of comments on another weblog that touch on something I wrote and raise a point worth discussing:
… More ...[Participant A:] There is a subtle, all pervasive form of control that perhaps has no precedent in human history. Like Orwell’s state, liberalism changes the way people view reality itself, it changes the language
I went to a conference this Saturday put on by some academics and noted (as one might expect) that there’s a definite orthodoxy that provides the assumed background for discussions. For my own purposes I decided to summarize the orthodoxy, and here’s what I came up with:
A standard jibe from proponents of “gay marriage” is that marriages don’t eat each other up, so John and Mary’s can’t be affected by Ron and Barry’s. As one blogger puts it, “I can’t help but feel sorry for people whose families are so fragile as to be destroyed by someone else’s decision to make … More ...
An example of how tolerance and diversity mean universal suppression: firemen forbidden to put pictures of loved ones, flags on lockers. Several weeks ago a sexually offensive slogan was found on the outside of a fireman’s locker. Management didn’t want it there—for starters, it could expose them to a lawsuit for sexual harassment—but … More ...
Wilhelm Roepke’s book A Humane Economy is intended to lay out the conditions for the existence and well-being of a free economy and indeed a free society. Those conditions are rather demanding. Here are some quotations:
… More ...The market economy, and with it social and political freedom, can thrive only as a part and under the
Der Untergang des Abendlandes seems to be accelerating:
I hadn’t paid much attention to 9/11 conspiracy theories, even though I’m somewhat fond of conspiracy theories as a literary form, but a couple of friends were interested in them and they’ve popped up on usually-respectable websites, so when one traddish Catholic friend asked me my opinion I put together a couple of longish responses. … More ...