Practical politics

On the whole, I find the Guardian a summation of the worst features of the intellectual Left gone mainstream and become dominant: smug, ignorant, narrow, self-centered, unimaginative, intolerant, and sometimes—whether it’s a cause or effect I don’t know—downright evil. In personal dealings with people who meet that description (mostly not leftists) I’ve noticed that the … More ...

More items on AIDS, the all-purpose, all-political, all-symbolizing disease:

• Michael Fumento points out how grossly overrated and overfunded AIDS is as an American health problem: When Is Enough Enough?
• Meanwhile, Cardinal Trujillo makes another obvious point, that defending normal attitudes, standards and expectations is a much more effective way to fight AIDS than the

Jacques Chirac took time off last week from promoting the EU and UN to worry about the threat posed by US cultural hegemony to the ecology of cultural particularism. A single world culture that chokes out the diversity of local cultures would be a “sub-culture,” he said, and would constitute a catastrophe for humanity.… More ...

The deconstruction of race, gender and whatnot rolls on:

• Not surprisingly, a conference on race agrees it’s a social construct, and also not surprisingly the conclusion is that everybody—especially Americans, who are apparently more racist than other people—has to be re-educated. The scholars are meeting to figure out how to spend $4 million from

People who haven’t dealt much with difficult family members and co-workers are sometimes puzzled when someone takes an utterly indefensible position, insists it’s beyond question, and refuses to budge. The strategy’s rational in the right setting, though. If someone who can’t simply be gotten rid of (wife, brother, colleague, pastor, CBS news, whoever) insists that … More ...

I started reading the stuff about the CBS documents on W’s National Guard service, mostly because the situation seemed so odd. The best thing I found on the issue of authenticity is the Flash overlay between a CBS document and the same thing produced by MS Word using default settings. (I’m told versions by people … More ...

A commenter asks those who post here “What does your ideal America look like?” The question’s worth discussing.

From the standpoint of specific practical political goals, I don’t really have an ideal America. No society is ideal, since every society depends on the cooperation of imperfect human beings. The specifics of what’s good politically depend … More ...

In America politics is more and more a matter of social metaphysics:

• If your position and beliefs incline you to believe that the social world is horizontal and self-contained, and consists solely of the individual and various contractual and legal collectives (e.g., if you’re single, godless, a celebrity, an elite lawyer or

The logic of antidiscrimination law continues to work itself out: scholar proposes compulsory “tolerance” within churches. The argument’s no joke if you’ve thought through the implications of existing legal principles regarding equality of opportunity and access and the separation of religion from public discourse. Whatever the activity, you have to rearrange it to make … More ...