thoughts in and out of season
It’s hard to make out exactly what’s going on, but it appears that in the Australian state of Victoria if you give the term “jihad” its usual meaning and say Muslims believe in it, you’ll be taken to court for “religious vilification” and the Catholic Church will take the side of your prosecutors.
Nobody’s ever good enough: Gandhi attacked as racist in South Africa.
The culture of therapy calls for some explanation, and there’s a new book out in England that claims it’s the natural consequence of the collapse of the Left. The Left claimed that everyone could get what he wants through social engineering. That turned out to be impossible, so a whole industry has grown up … More ...
The Queen of England has decided she needs to investigate the stuff Tony Blair’s been telling her about the proposed EU constitution: Queen raises fears over EU constitution. It seems she’s concerned about the effect of Article 10, which gives EU law primacy over the law of member states, on her position as sovereign. … More ...
Wendy McElroy gives some startling statistics on the decline of marriage in her piece on The Marriage Strike (by men who don’t much like what current family law has to offer them). During the first half of the ’90s the marriage rate dropped from 9.8 to 7.6—I had no idea there had been such a … More ...
I’m not impressed by the argument that America is good because it’s free, equal, democratic and prosperous, or because a lot of people from all over the world want to move here. There are good things to be said about America on those grounds, but they can also be said about other Western countries, and … More ...
Statements in a radio interview given by Anglican bishop Martin Reynolds display the essentials of liberal antihomophobia: Anti-gay archbishop Jensen likened to Hitler. According to Reynolds, the claim that deviant sexual intercourse is bad, so homosexual couplings aren’t equivalent to marriages and those who affirm such things in their lives shouldn’t be pastors of … More ...
In spite of hate speech laws the mainstream press is probably a bit freer and more diverse in Britain than America. Here, for example, is a reasonably straightforward article on reparative therapy for homosexual orientation—something you’re not likely to see in the national press here. For those who pursue it, more often than not … More ...
For another example of what looks like a gathering counterattack against technocracy by actual scientists, see Understanding the Derrida virus by the physicist, mathematician, and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros. (I’m in the acknowledgements, which rightly suggests that I have a great deal of sympathy for what Professor Salingaros has to say.)
A summary of recent research, Hardwired to Connect, shows that even if you put all this stuff about traditional morality and spiritual values to one side, and just look at biochemistry, children still need something very like the authority of family and local religious institutions. It’s useful to keep these things in your back … More ...