thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb We’ve had a little back-and-forth on the modern state and what to make of it, so I thought I’d put together some notes for whatever anybody can make of them:
For those who want to keep tabs on where things stand, here’s a video (22 min. and 50 MB) of the speech by BNP leader Nick Griffin that’s getting him prosecuted for “using words or behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred.” The speech is more vehement than Enoch Powell’s so-called “rivers of blood” speech … More ...
In France, an MP is fined and denounced vehemently for criticizing homosexuality, and the Culture Minister wants him kicked out of the party. In this country we mostly don’t fine people for saying the wrong thing, we just re-educate them or put them in therapy. And then there’ll always be an England, … More ...
A neat dramatization of digital privacy concerns: The Google Robot FAQ (Last update: November 1st, 2030).
A reader wrote to comment on my essay on Traditionalism and the American Order, saying that I overstate the liberalism and understate the traditionalism of the American order. My response:
… More ...I don’t think I said that the U.S. as it has existed has been basically a product of liberalism or that it was stable
There’s a recent piece at View from the Right pointing out that while the call of Harvard academic Noel Ignatieff to “abolish the white race” sounds radical, it is really no different than the usual liberal and even mainstream conservative position that we should all work toward a state of affairs in which race doesn’t … More ...
John Rao, whose NYC lectures on Church history I mentioned a while back, has a new website that includes his writings he thinks worth making public. They touch on some of the same issues I write about, the bizarre inversions of pluralism for example, but in a more outraged, partisan, stylish, distinctly Catholic, and … More ...
The smart guys say that since the Wars of Religion politics has been able to build solidly because it has aimed low, at stability and prosperity rather than any transcendent good. It turns out there’s a problem with the strategy: if the Good is excluded from public life the low eventually becomes very low indeed. … More ...
What is tyranny? There are obvious examples, but like other obvious things it can be hard to say what’s there when you press the point. Is PC tyranny? The patriarchy? Determinate being as such? All those things can seem horribly oppressive depending on which way you’re pointed. Like every other judgment, a judgment that something … More ...
