thoughts in and out of season
The death of Jerry Falwell, and the Pope’s recent visit to Brazil, suggest some thoughts about “gaffes.”
One of the events that defined Falwell in the mainstream mind was his notorious attack on a purple handbag-carrying cartoon character as a homosexual. A problem with the story is that it never happened. That doesn’t seem … More ...
Here are some quotations from well-known feminists that would be startling if we weren’t so used to the same sort of thing:
It is important to remember just how barbarous and cruel the Taliban were. Yet it is also important not to use their example to obscure or deny the common thread of
Why is so much of pop culture so stable? Young people have listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles since around 1963 and still find them up-to-date. “Hip” and “cool” are still hip and cool, and they’ve been mass-market for 50 years. On slightly more substantive matters, we’re still stuck at bottom with ’60s political … More ...
The generation gap was a big thing back in the ’60s. It seems that in France they have multiple generation gaps (see the table below on the right). It’s been called a split into two tribes of young and old, but the situation’s obviously a lot more complex than that.
So what explains it? Dunno, … More ...
Michael Blowhard moseys though a discussion of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, notes that part of his argument (the part MB likes), boils down to “Why, that’s how things have always seemed to me!”, and then asks “What do people really find appealing about Western-style monotheism? What emotional/imaginative thing does it serve?” Why, in other … More ...
Kathy Shaidle has been grousing that none of the young guys killed in the West Virginia Tech shooting did anything to resist getting blown away and young conservative guys are defending them.
She touches on part of the explanation in her most recent comment, to the effect that you don’t have to be a … More ...
My publisher tells me they want my book to be a bit more coherent and a little less vague, so I’m busily unscrambling arguments, tightening up prose, and adding examples and such. As a result, posting is likely to be sporadic for a while.
In the meantime, I was inspired by Michael Blowhard’s link to … More ...
Steve Sailer has a couple of interesting pieces on Obama and his identity issues. Reminds me a bit of someone I once knew, a black man with a Christian mother and Muslim convert father whose marriage broke up over religious and other incompatibilities. He was intelligent, extremely disciplined, attentive to what others were looking … More ...
A basic question that’s attracted surprisingly little discussion in spite of its obvious social importance is why so many people not only let religion slide practically but deny it as a theoretical matter. Their apparent claim is that one part of a universe that arose by chance and means nothing can interpret that universe correctly … More ...
Anthony Esolen visits one of the few surviving men’s colleges and finds it a hotbed of benign timocracies. Fine upstanding young men, sense of honor, all that sort of thing. From his account it seems that education really can make a difference, and people can bounce back and start acting normal again if given … More ...