thoughts in and out of season
Dear Mr. Kalb and Fellow Readers,
Does philosophy help us decide what to do about Iran’s nuclear weapon’s program? Yes. Kill or be killed. This is not a philosophy we are used to hearing. We are used to hearing well-structured arguments against violence and war; these arguments are overwhelmingly liberal. For example, the liberal objection … More ...
A reader wrote to comment on my essay on Traditionalism and the American Order, saying that I overstate the liberalism and understate the traditionalism of the American order. My response:
… More ...I don’t think I said that the U.S. as it has existed has been basically a product of liberalism or that it was stable
There’s a recent piece at View from the Right pointing out that while the call of Harvard academic Noel Ignatieff to “abolish the white race” sounds radical, it is really no different than the usual liberal and even mainstream conservative position that we should all work toward a state of affairs in which race doesn’t … More ...
Paul Belien has a log entry up today in which he cites a few of the latest instances of the post-modern attack on Christianity by Europe’s élites:
A Swedish jeans manufacturer calls religion “a force of evil” and has designed a jeans brand with an anti-Christian logo: “Bjorn Atldax has designed a jeans brand … More ...
I have been reading Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism,” within which is a section on the affinity of the Western elites for the mob and the mob’s values (or anti-values), goals, and methods. By “mob,” Arendt means those who, by choice or circumstance, stand outside civilized society and against the most basic values of civilized … More ...
The Terror still threatens us all. Islam and liberals seek to destroy the ruling class in the West: Christians. Robes Pierre and his thugs sought to destroy the ruling class in the West: St. Louis King of France and his followers. The lunatics dared to blame the aristocracy for all the atrocities committed by thugs. … More ...
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 ...
