thoughts in and out of season
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 ...
An example of how tolerance and diversity mean universal suppression: firemen forbidden to put pictures of loved ones, flags on lockers. Several weeks ago a sexually offensive slogan was found on the outside of a fireman’s locker. Management didn’t want it there—for starters, it could expose them to a lawsuit for sexual harassment—but … More ...
Wilhelm Roepke’s book A Humane Economy is intended to lay out the conditions for the existence and well-being of a free economy and indeed a free society. Those conditions are rather demanding. Here are some quotations:
… More ...The market economy, and with it social and political freedom, can thrive only as a part and under the
Der Untergang des Abendlandes seems to be accelerating:
I hadn’t paid much attention to 9/11 conspiracy theories, even though I’m somewhat fond of conspiracy theories as a literary form, but a couple of friends were interested in them and they’ve popped up on usually-respectable websites, so when one traddish Catholic friend asked me my opinion I put together a couple of longish responses. … More ...
I just finished reading The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, by George H. Nash. It’s out now in a new 30th anniversary edition, although the text hasn’t changed much if at all since 1976 except for the addition of an epilogue.
The book covers the familiar ground. The postwar conservative movement was … More ...