thoughts in and out of season
I just finished an advanced review copy of The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist, by Robert R. Reilly. It’s a clear and informative book that quotes lots of primary sources and deals with basic issues in an intelligent way.
Like any book it has certain limitations. … More ...
A blast from the past: a group of working-class Catholic mothers, protesting against an obvious gross violation of Catholic social teaching regarding subsidiarity and the primary authority and responsibility of parents for the education of their children, pray the rosary on their knees. Then the cops go after them. The local bishop must have … More ...
[The following is the first of what will likely be a sporadic series of longish entries.]
Liberals believe that the benefits of society should be equally available to all. They have recently come to hold that it is a basic responsibility of government and indeed all institutions to make them so. Failure to do … More ...
Some commenters at Alternative Right have seconded the complaint of the European New Right that Christianity is responsible for our current metaphysical problems. The reason, they say, is that Christianity separates soul and body, universal and particular, Christ and Caesar. The result in each case is that the latter gets debunked in favor of the … More ...
My comments on what an “alternative right” might be have provoked enough comment at Alternative Right to call for continuing the discussion.
Jack Donovan has called for a rag-tag alliance of right-wingers, Richard Spencer for a coalition against bad things. Both can serve a function, and I agree with the project. Still, the direction of … More ...
The respectable right is respectable because it accepts the principles of liberalism and can’t offer serious resistance to liberal conclusions.
That’s why a less respectable “alternative right” is needed. But what is the alternative that would do better? People have been looking for a good way to resist liberalism for a long time, and judging … More ...
I’ll be crossposting Turnabout entries to Alternative Right, an online magazine/weblog swarm that’s sort of a Takimag spinoff.
The stated purpose of the website is “to forge a new intellectual right-wing,” but at present it seems pretty inchoate. The basic issue is that “alternative right” could mean a great many things. If you knew … More ...
Inclusiveness is radically inconsistent with free thought and speech. The problem is quite fundamental. To question the principle of equal inclusion is to put some people’s standing in question and ipso facto to exclude them from full equality with those whose standing is not in question. A regime of inclusiveness must therefore suppress questioning of … More ...
[Inspired by the upcoming debate on the topic.]
My answer, of course, is “no.” It’s obvious if you compare trends in wimpiness and trends in religious belief that the decline of Christianity has turned people into wimps. Nietzsche is big among left-wing academics. Wimpiness is big among left-wing academics. It’s wimps who have superman … More ...
We describe things by their roles, but they are more than their roles. Iron, for example, has a role in the functioning of the human body, the earth, and the universe as a whole. To describe it is to say how it acts in connection with other things. On the other hand, it is also … More ...