thoughts in and out of season
I just went to a concert put on by a musician who lives in the neighborhood that put me in mind of a comment I made a while back on a William Wegman exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum:
… More ...He has loads of talent and industry, he seems like a perfectly normal guy, and his stuff
When “freedom” means fluid standards and relationships, it puts everything up for grabs. When everything is up for grabs the grabby get everything. Tastes differ, but that doesn’t seem so great to me.
For some reason grabbiness is thought a specifically capitalistic vice. In fact, the point of private property is that it limits grabbiness … More ...
After public complaints, the German government has finally pulled a sex-ed booklet that promoted conduct that came close to incestuous pedophilia. Since this is a G-rated weblog, you’ll have to click on the links to get the details, which were startling enough to make me go and find the booklet itself. Not surprisingly, the … More ...
Liberalism governs by pretending not to govern, and claims to do the opposite of what in fact it does. An example touched on in recent discussions is multiculturalism, which claims to celebrate all cultures—that is, all informal and inherited ways— but in fact empowers each of them to deprive the others of all significant influence. … More ...
When people at the New York Times, even those very who are very senior, open up and tell us how they feel about something I’m mostly impressed by how thoughtless, uncritical, and confused they are.
One recent example was Linda Greenhouse’s blather, in a speech on the occasion of some award she got … More ...
A result of the abolition of culture through commercialism, ideology and modern understandings of justice and rationality is that people get deprived of worthwhile ideals of conduct. From the standpoint of the New York Times and the weblog Gene Expression, it therefore appears that the choices for young people are (1) nerdishness, which is … More ...
Bonobos seem to be going the way of the Samoans and Mayans. It seems that exotic groups who live in some far-away tropical paradise and are renowned for their peace-loving and sex-positive ways tend to fall from grace on further investigation.
I thought I’d post a recent to-and-fro from rec.arts.books. (I still look at the discussion groups on USENET now and then, and occasionally post something). It’s the answer I always give to a question people ask repeatedly. I’m not sure whether that makes it a golden oldie or a snooze, but it’s my weblog … More ...
Islam continues to fascinate. Whatever the value of suggestions that it emphasizes will over reason and therefore leads to mere assertion and violence (I think there’s a lot to that view), it seems clear that discussions about it mostly generate more heat than light.
To my mind it seems important to discuss something as … More ...
Here’s a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) podcast on Radical Orthodoxy that includes extended soundbites from John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. What they say sounds sensible enough to me, although they’re academics so it’s all quite theoretical and respectable-sounding, and Milbank at any rate has an ingrained attachment to socialism.
In a way, their views seem … More ...