thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb A first-rate summary of why making individual autonomy the ultimate political standard doesn’t work: The Tyranny of Liberalism And Its Evil Root: Individual Autonomy as the End of the State. Sample quote:
… More ...“[N]o polity could be grounded in an ideology, which is nothing more than an aspect of a cultural inheritance about which one
I just finished reading The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A. J. Conyers. It’s a book-length treatment of a constant theme here at Turnabout, that “tolerance” as a principle—the demand that standards other than money, power and the like be treated as purely personal commitments … More ...
Not a book everyone would find useful or interesting, but I’m getting something out of it: Ride the Tiger, by Julius Evola.
The author calls the book “a survival manual for the aristocrats of the soul,” although in concrete fact I’m not sure there is such a thing in his sense. Still, it’s … More ...
The deconstruction of race, gender and whatnot rolls on:
People who haven’t dealt much with difficult family members and co-workers are sometimes puzzled when someone takes an utterly indefensible position, insists it’s beyond question, and refuses to budge. The strategy’s rational in the right setting, though. If someone who can’t simply be gotten rid of (wife, brother, colleague, pastor, CBS news, whoever) insists that … More ...
I started reading the stuff about the CBS documents on W’s National Guard service, mostly because the situation seemed so odd. The best thing I found on the issue of authenticity is the Flash overlay between a CBS document and the same thing produced by MS Word using default settings. (I’m told versions by people … More ...
Right-wingers are alarmed by totalitarian features of advanced liberalism: its insistent universalism, its theoretical coherence and simplicity, its resolute suppression of alternative principles of social order, its principled rejection of common sense, inherited ways, and the very concept of human nature. In the long run, they ask, how much difference can there be between “inclusiveness”—putting … More ...
Isn’t the claim that we have “democracy” a bit of a fossil? It may have been arguable in 1840 that the goal was popular rule, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense today:
A commenter asks those who post here “What does your ideal America look like?” The question’s worth discussing.
From the standpoint of specific practical political goals, I don’t really have an ideal America. No society is ideal, since every society depends on the cooperation of imperfect human beings. The specifics of what’s good politically depend … More ...
In America politics is more and more a matter of social metaphysics: