thoughts in and out of season
I just finished reading Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. The point of the book is that the West—Greece, Rome, and the societies founded on the ruins of the Roman Empire—has always been superior militarily because of a Western way of war that emphasizes decisive shock … More ...
The kind of principles that now govern news coverage: Guidelines for Countering Racial, Ethnic and Religious Profiling, adopted by the Society of Professional Jounalists shortly after September 11. Some basic rules: don’t call Islamic terrorists “Islamic terrorists,” constantly remind the reader of bombings by white supremacists, and if you have to show a U.S. … More ...
A lifelong Jewish Republican complains about Socially acceptable bigotry: A primer in discrimination against us GOPers. Meanwhile, an exhibition of anti-Catholic “art” at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton draws comment from NRO on the theme of They call it art: The last acceptable prejudice.
The pieces are more interesting for their facts … More ...
Get the State out of intimate personal relations—so goes the slogan. The real point of social liberalism, however, is to abolish intimate personal relations, or at least denature them and make them incapable of interfering with anything serious. Hence the sex ed that trains children to think of sex as a consumer good, the redefinition … More ...
Joe Guzzardi at Vdare put together an interesting assemblage of stuff about “diversity” in business and scholarly efforts to find out whether it does anything for the bottom line. Seemingly it doesn’t—the main study cited concludes that it can’t be shown to hurt or help much, although the finer print refers to problems created by … More ...
The conviction that there’s something odd and repellent about making distinctions on grounds of religion, race, sex and the like calls for explanation. How come no one used to think it’s a problem and now everyone does? And why are such distinctions so much worse than distinctions based on the fact that someone’s a fundy, … More ...
“Affirmative action” means that if blacks fall short it’s the fault of whites, so it’s only fair to take the benefits of success from whites and give them to blacks. Our established intellectual, moral and religious leaders—including the bishops—all say that’s just and moral, so one is reluctant to argue the contrary. Still, the system … More ...
Wittgenstein notoriously argued that a private language is impossible. The problem is that if I am the sole authority for the meaning of a word there is no way to distinguish a case in which I am using it correctly from one in which I am not. If that’s so, though, the word can’t … More ...
There’s no substitute for seeing what’s there: Cardinal Arinze’s comment at Georgetown sparks protest. Mention that homosexuality mocks the family, and a theologian can’t bear to share the stage with you and 70 of her colleagues sign a letter of protest. In a way it’s all to the good—the more direct personal experience those … More ...
Among the claims Professor Bellesiles made in his Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture — a book once acclaimed and now thoroughly discredited — was that there was no significant market for guns in early America. Clayton Cramer, one of Bellesiles’ most effective debunkers, describes the results of a quick look at … More ...