thoughts in and out of season
The disappearance of politics in today’s world reflects the disappearance of resistance to rational hedonism. “Give ’em what they want” has become the grand principle of what passes for public life. To put it formally, only a few crazies now dispute that the final goal of … More ...
The attempt to base social order on human will dominates public life today to the point that objective moral order has become unthinkable. Technological hedonism, the rational organization of all things to give each man what he wants, is universally accepted as the guiding ideal.
The current situation has grown up in stages. The First … More ...
The goals and ultimate destiny of the European Union have been variously explained. The uncertainty is not altogether accidental, since the plan of the EU Founding Fathers was to bring about European unity by indirection. The strategy is a good one; it is hard to criticize what has no accepted description. Those who favor the … More ...
Thomas Chittum, a former rifleman in Vietnam, the Rhodesian Territorials, and the Croatian Army, has written something of an underground classic that predicts the devolution of an increasingly multicultural America into racial partition and bloody civil war.
The analysis is … More ...
A correspondent asks:
What should the mainstream conservative movement be doing (that it’s currently not) that would help society? How might Buchanan and paleocons become formidable?
My reply:
… More ...I don’t have any magical solutions. It seems to me the most important battle the paleocons and people like Buchanan should carry on is at the level
La Civilt� Cattolica, the semi-official Vatican magazine, has published an important article on Christians in Islamic Countries that points out a truth that recently has dared not speak its name: Islam is an aggressive religion that aims at the acquisition of universal dominion by force and oppresses Christians (and others) who live in Islamic … More ...
Conservatives can be divided into (1) pessimists, who think the trend is down, down, down, and (1) optimists, who think things aren’t so bad. The pessimists point to things like Grutter, Lawrence, and the business-as-usual attitude of most mainstream conservatives to those decisions. The optimists point to things like practical limitations on the … More ...
An oddity of modern life is that experts run everything, nothing they do works, and obvious repeated failure makes no difference. Education and liturgy are everyday examples. Students learn nothing and act badly, people abandon the mass and faith, but no matter how bad things get nothing can be done. After all, the responsible way … More ...
Turnabout is:
As many have observed, liberalism creates a sort of inverted reality in which everything is the opposite of what is claimed: