thoughts in and out of season
John Rao, whose NYC lectures on Church history I mentioned a while back, has a new website that includes his writings he thinks worth making public. They touch on some of the same issues I write about, the bizarre inversions of pluralism for example, but in a more outraged, partisan, stylish, distinctly Catholic, and … More ...
The smart guys say that since the Wars of Religion politics has been able to build solidly because it has aimed low, at stability and prosperity rather than any transcendent good. It turns out there’s a problem with the strategy: if the Good is excluded from public life the low eventually becomes very low indeed. … More ...
What is tyranny? There are obvious examples, but like other obvious things it can be hard to say what’s there when you press the point. Is PC tyranny? The patriarchy? Determinate being as such? All those things can seem horribly oppressive depending on which way you’re pointed. Like every other judgment, a judgment that something … More ...
Hegelian-sounding aphorism of the day:
Leftism asserts the negation; liberalism negates the assertion.
Thus, the Left wants to destroy the heritage of the past, and so assert that the past must be negated. Liberals, on the other hand, simply deny that the heritage of the past should be asserted. (If you want an example, liberal … More ...
So far as I can tell, the Catholic Church has always said officially that if you’re what’s called “gay” you shouldn’t become a priest. Also, at the highest levels the Church has always been independent enough to say, perhaps after hemming and hawing and various delays, what they think is so on important issues. That’s … More ...
A correspondent passed on the following comment by another reader of my essay “The Tyranny of Liberalism”:
… More ...I read the first part of the article, but I am not going to read the rest, though I did skim through it. It is so bad that it is not worth the time. The first part
I thought I’d post a couple of comments I made at Brussels Journal about the slow-motion war being carried out by European elites against their own societies and people. The first is more or less self-explanatory:
… More ...Just a minor rant on “multiculturalism”:
Naturally, it can’t exist as a situation in which several cultures exist intermingled
Guys like Julius Caesar and Hegel got places by dividing things into three parts, so I thought I’d do my own three-part division of liberal tyranny:
Dear Mr. Kalb and Fellow Readers,
Here is a three-day old e-mail from NewsMax that evidences Ann Coulter’s hilarious gift to tag people and make it stick:
[Open quotes.] Back in 2003 Johnny Depp said, “America is dumb, it’s like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive.”
Depp … More ...
Dear Mr. Kalb and Fellow Readers:
Daniel Pipes is a respected pundit that has engaged in nominalism, which was pointed out by by Lawrence Auster at View From the Right. Mr. Pipes says, “Islam can be whatever Muslims say it is.” Last read, 11-22-05 http://libertyandculture.blogspot.com/2005/11/is-islam-racism.html
Why? Is he so anti-Christian that he embraces the enemy … More ...