thoughts in and out of season
The single most suggestive thing I’ve read about the sexes is this press release from some neurologists. Basically, it says that intelligence in men mostly matches up with gray matter in the brain and intelligence in women with white matter. So when men and women feel the uncontrollable urge to put the word “brain” in … More ...
Within living memory it was possible to talk about the sexes in an intelligent and civilized way. As proof here are some pages from The Viking Book of Aphorisms, edited by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger. The collection was published in 1962, the year before sex was invented (according to Philip Larkin… More ...
What’s with the sexes these days?
Questions about sex and the sexes are never really answerable, but people do notice things, and some of them seem illuminating, so an occasional comment is in order.
Everybody seems to agree there are problems today. Men and women have always complained about each other, but there seems to … More ...
A correspondent referred me to a post by a “progressive Christian” blogger as a sign of a new frontier in inclusiveness. The post picked up on another blogger’s claim that “the self is inherently violent.” The example used was blogging, which involves self-assertion that comes at the expense of other bloggers. So it seems that … More ...
My friend Nikos Salingaros, together with Mark Signorelli, develops and adds to some thoughts he and I kicked around in an interview and a short essay we did together last year: The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism. The basic argument is that artistic modernism is antihuman, tyrannical, and nihilistic in its essence, and must be … More ...
On other fronts, Larry Auster posted a comment by me on a comment by Robert Spencer on a comment by Larry on a comment by Spencer on a canceled concert in Indonesia. How’s that for intertextuality? (The comment by me does have an actual topic, social understandings of the good.)
An old libertarian friend, Todd Seavey, posted an entry in his blog regarding The Works of Joseph de Maistre that complained about Maistre and mentioned me, so in response I posted a couple of comments that I think make sense even apart from the original setting. The point at issue, as you will see, was … More ...
The question seems important, since where liberalism comes from affects how we should deal with it and where it is likely to go. Many right-wingers, for example, think of it as psychological or instrumental: people are liberals because they feel this way or that, or because they want to get money, power, status, or whatever. … More ...
I have another column, this one on liberal and Catholic conceptions of the good and the just, at Catholic World Report.