thoughts in and out of season
Liberalism governs by pretending not to govern, and claims to do the opposite of what in fact it does. An example touched on in recent discussions is multiculturalism, which claims to celebrate all cultures—that is, all informal and inherited ways— but in fact empowers each of them to deprive the others of all significant influence. … More ...
I thought I’d post a recent to-and-fro from rec.arts.books. (I still look at the discussion groups on USENET now and then, and occasionally post something). It’s the answer I always give to a question people ask repeatedly. I’m not sure whether that makes it a golden oldie or a snooze, but it’s my weblog … More ...
Here’s a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) podcast on Radical Orthodoxy that includes extended soundbites from John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. What they say sounds sensible enough to me, although they’re academics so it’s all quite theoretical and respectable-sounding, and Milbank at any rate has an ingrained attachment to socialism.
In a way, their views seem … More ...
I’ve noted that an implicit motivation for promoting mass third-world immigration is divide et impera: as Federalist 10 makes clear, the more people, and the more diverse they are, the higher the position of those on top and the less likely those down below will be able to get together and cause problems … More ...
A recent philosophy grad asks about the Euthyphro Dilemma (so called from the Platonic dialogue), and whether it shows that religion and morality are unrelated:
… More ...The dilemma is as follows: is good simply whatever God commands us to do, or is there some external standard of goodness that God must adhere to when he
Here’s a talk I gave on June 2, 2007 as a member of a panel at the annual meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters (a new organization for conservative scholars):
… More ...We’ve all been talking today about where we are and what to do about it. I’ve been asked to sketch those issues with
Immigration is is not the only issue that suggests rather strongly that the claim we live in a democracy is mostly propagandistic. To my mind it seems obvious that our government is more technocratic than democratic. It’s a complicated world today, with a complex and largely hierarchical organization, and in such a setting the views … More ...
Several items that touch on the current effort to turn the whole world into a unitary rationalized industrial scheme:
A few years ago then-Cardinal Ratzinger took part in a public dialogue, later expanded into a book, with neo-Frankfurt School hot dog Juergen Habermas. In the course of the discussion Habermas was asked “how should believing and unbelieving citizens treat one another?” His answer was quite interesting in its way:
… More ...The understanding of
I hadn’t thought about Jeffrey Hart since as an undergraduate I used to see him walking around the Dartmouth campus looking irascible. While paging momentarily through my alumni magazine before tossing it out recently though I ran into a profile of the man by former student James Panero (now of The New Criterion). The … More ...