Practical politics
“Personally opposed” Rocco
Rocco Buttiglione acted in a more principled way than Larry Summers when he said the wrong thing, but was he principled enough? I don’t think Summers would have knuckled under to any pressure group whatever that threatened to make things difficult for him. At Stalin’s show trials the Old Bolsheviks didn’t confess simply because … More ...
The rights of conscience in America today
Here’s the latest on mutual respect and public neutrality, as filtered through what now passes for American public thought: a U.S. appeals court says that law schools, which have never seen a federal antidiscrimination rule on faculty hiring they don’t like, can ignore a federal law that says they can’t discriminate against military recruiters and … More ...
Here and there
A few odds and ends run into on the web:
- This rather amazing article about St. Paul’s School suggests another side of the problems Episcopalians face (and often embrace). Soft religion and soft education do away with things like standards that help people resist temptation. That’s likely to mean institutional corruption of the crudest kind.
The UN as a self-limiting problem
The feature of transnational institutions that will save us from the worst of their ambition to reconstruct us is their irredeemable inefficiency and corruption. It’s not something that will go away because of better management or appeals to abstract global ideals. Management is secondary, and generalized ideals are good fallbacks but can’t carry the … More ...
Yet more on the position of social conservatism
An issue that isn’t raised because public figures don’t understand it won’t get far in a media-drenched age. So an obvious problem for social conservatives is that the articulate classes don’t understand—at all—the issues they raise. Some possible reasons that come to mind:
- Modern intellectual life, education and methods of organization make the
FYI
From the publishing company that gives us the New York Times and the state that gave us “gay marriage” as a constitutional right, lessons from the murder of Theo van Gogh: Madness in Holland. The richness of the text makes comment all but impossible.
Public life continues to dissolve
It’s clear enough that when leftists attack the Right (“bigoted,” “narrow,” “self-righteous,” “irrational,” “divisive,” etc.), they’re talking about themselves. Here’s an example to add to the hatemongering and calls for secession we’ve seen, even from respected Democrats and writers, as a result of W’s election. The president is supposedly a theocrat whose support is based … More ...
More on the values vote
Social conservatives complain that their issues—abortion, “gay marriage” and whatnot—aren’t taken nearly as seriously by politicians on their side as by those on the other side. For Republicans, it seems, those issues are mostly vote getters that can be compromised or negotiated away, while for Democrats they’re religious absolutes that take precedence over everything. Leftists… More ...
Blue constructions and red realities
An obvious lesson of post-election complaints by leftists is that highly-educated and well-connected Blues, including famous commentators on public affairs, simply don’t understand Reds. They haven’t a clue as to how most of their countrymen look at things or why they look at them that way. Hence the fear, loathing and fantasy.
Some explanation of … More ...