thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Here’s another way to state the problem with liberalism: Judith Sklar speaks of the “liberalism of fear,” Leo Strauss says modern politics tries to build solidly by aiming low, and I say moderns try to come up with machines based on principles that can be fully grasped and give reliable results. Put those points together, … More ...
Old friends continue to complain that I’m not making sense. Here’s a comment on my most recent post from a second friend (who cc’d the first friend):
… More ...“You wrote: ‘Liberalism is basically the abolition of the transcendent.’ That drastically overstates it though. If liberalism were the abolition of the transcendent then most ordinary people would
A friend complains about the following passage in my last entry:
… More ...[L]iberalism insists that everything is either a private taste or something that can be handled adequately by either contract or a bureaucratic administrator. As a result, it can’t handle the most basic issues—life, death, sex, religion and so on. Liberals have to pretend there
In the left-hand column I’ve added a feed for Blogsfor Terri.com, a sort of clearing house for people concerned about Terri Schiavo. From videos it appears she’s not in a “persistent vegetative state” as defined by Florida law. The local courts have been ruling she has to go, though, with the support of the … More ...
During the Middle Ages Europe was loosely organized politically—there was no conception of state sovereignty—and it recognized a universal Church that in principle was superior to political authorities and in practice could sometimes influence and so limit them. In early modern times Europe moved from that state of affairs to one in which the … More ...
The ever-active Steve Sailer has an explanation I hadn’t seen before of why Larry Summers crumpled immediately in the face of unprincipled abuse from academic female PC profiteers. To present the explanation in my own way and with my own additions: Sailer picks up the Bell Curve point that in a technocracy high-IQ people run … More ...
Canadians mostly oppose the same-sex revolution, but it appears that none of their official leaders are willing to stand up to it. In fact, recent events on Ontario, which involved pushing radical redefinition of marriage through the Legislative Assembly in three days, with all-party collusion and without a single recorded vote, suggest they’re all eager … More ...
Here’s a worthwhile article by monarcho-symp Rothbardite PC victim Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism. The point of the article is that there is no “Disraelian,” “big government,” “social nationalist” or even “compassionate” conservatism, at least not today and not as the last is now understood. The basic problem is that you aren’t … More ...
Building on a foundation laid by the Massachusetts “gay marriage” decision, and perhaps the Larry Summers smackdown, some students at Harvard are working with an official university body to do something about the problem of heteronormativity—the tendency some people still have of speaking as if male-female relations set some sort of sexual standard. The … More ...
Have emperors always gone about in their new birthday suits? Maybe there are always contradictions between obvious realities and the official stories everybody reputable agrees to. Or maybe there’s something about an expertised formally educated mass-media society, in which something can only become a fact or issue if the right people recognize it as such, … More ...