thoughts in and out of season
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 ...
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
