thoughts in and out of season
I just finished reading The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A. J. Conyers. It’s a book-length treatment of a constant theme here at Turnabout, that “tolerance” as a principle—the demand that standards other than money, power and the like be treated as purely personal commitments … More ...
It seems there are pleanty of people speaking out about their sexuality. However, there seems to be an uneven representation of sexual morality views on some popular websites. For example, SexEditorials.com has a lack of moderate and conservative views on sexuality even though they allow all points of view on their site. I wish I … More ...
Not a book everyone would find useful or interesting, but I’m getting something out of it: Ride the Tiger, by Julius Evola.
The author calls the book “a survival manual for the aristocrats of the soul,” although in concrete fact I’m not sure there is such a thing in his sense. Still, it’s … More ...
The deconstruction of race, gender and whatnot rolls on:
Following Great Britain’s lead in setting up an Orwellian, surveillance-camera-ridden society (see here: http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=08032002-020813-4448r , and check out these chilling, official British government posters boasting of their “watchfulness”: http://www.samizdata.net/~pdeh/Big_Brother_is_watching_sml.jpg
http://www.samizdata.net/~pdeh/watchful_eyes_bus_03_sml.jpg
http://www.samizdata.net/~pdeh/Croyden_500_CCTV_sml.jpg ), Chicago has now decided to follow suit, creating a linked network of over 2000 surveillance cameras: http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/print_090904_ap_ns_camera.html
Perhaps I’m naive, but I find … More ...
Given the threats that exist, a defense budget of 50 Billion Dollars(or less) is sufficient.
Getting rid of 80% of our current military hardware would end the crime of replication of roles and missions.
We need intelligent, slimmed down and very professional military. 100,000 men should do it!
People who haven’t dealt much with difficult family members and co-workers are sometimes puzzled when someone takes an utterly indefensible position, insists it’s beyond question, and refuses to budge. The strategy’s rational in the right setting, though. If someone who can’t simply be gotten rid of (wife, brother, colleague, pastor, CBS news, whoever) insists that … More ...
I started reading the stuff about the CBS documents on W’s National Guard service, mostly because the situation seemed so odd. The best thing I found on the issue of authenticity is the Flash overlay between a CBS document and the same thing produced by MS Word using default settings. (I’m told versions by people … More ...
Right-wingers are alarmed by totalitarian features of advanced liberalism: its insistent universalism, its theoretical coherence and simplicity, its resolute suppression of alternative principles of social order, its principled rejection of common sense, inherited ways, and the very concept of human nature. In the long run, they ask, how much difference can there be between “inclusiveness”—putting … More ...
Isn’t the claim that we have “democracy” a bit of a fossil? It may have been arguable in 1840 that the goal was popular rule, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense today: