thoughts in and out of season
A few days ago I called Houston Baker a “thuggish hack,” and mentioned him as an example of “the lost honor of academia.” It seems to me that the information readily available on the internet supports those views (examples can be found here and here). Still, I was struck by how bad his situation … More ...
In an email discussion with Larry Auster (reproduced toward the end of this entry at his weblog) I suggested that our rulers would always give way to the group that combines maximum ability to disrupt with a colorable claim to leftish legitimacy, simply because things are easier that way. That’s the basis of European pre-emptive … More ...
I’ve been having trouble with the “theme”—the part of my blogging software that extracts the content from the database and lays it out on the screen. The latest problem, which doesn’t seem easy to solve, is the disappearance of posters’ names from comments. So I’ve replaced the theme I was using with another one. No … More ...
How come “anarchotyranny”
only appears 39 times in the Google index?
UPDATE: Good news: “anarcho-tyranny” appears 15,000 times. Still not enough, but better than 39!
To expand on the topic a little, the expression—however spelled—refers to a state of society in which government goes after nontraditional offenses like racism more vigorously … More ...
What must it be like working in a profession in which a pleasant out-of-her-depth fantasist like Elaine Pagels or a thuggish hack like Houston Baker (see this discussion) are named-chair superstars at top universities?
It appears that in Professor Pagels’ case there’s a certain amount of snickering, so academics don’t lose their critical abilities … More ...
We’re all familiar with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and their staunchly anti-religious views.
How about Sam Harris, author of best-sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation”? You may have heard of him from newspapers or cable TV coverage.
Dawkins says that Harris’s book “The End of Faith” should replace Gideon’s … More ...
Insistence on ethnic diversity means trouble in activities where the nature of the activity goes with radical distinctions of status and reward. Here are some examples from today’s Drudge Report: top chef attacked as “racist”, Duke professors seek to defuse anti-lacrosse team ad. The problem won’t go away. Different groups aren’t going to … More ...
Here are a couple of comments on another weblog that touch on something I wrote and raise a point worth discussing:
… More ...[Participant A:] There is a subtle, all pervasive form of control that perhaps has no precedent in human history. Like Orwell’s state, liberalism changes the way people view reality itself, it changes the language
I went to a conference this Saturday put on by some academics and noted (as one might expect) that there’s a definite orthodoxy that provides the assumed background for discussions. For my own purposes I decided to summarize the orthodoxy, and here’s what I came up with:
A standard jibe from proponents of “gay marriage” is that marriages don’t eat each other up, so John and Mary’s can’t be affected by Ron and Barry’s. As one blogger puts it, “I can’t help but feel sorry for people whose families are so fragile as to be destroyed by someone else’s decision to make … More ...