thoughts in and out of season
Which will win: the American tendency to make free speech absolute, or the globalization of human rights and the tendency to make tolerance and inclusiveness greater absolutes? I’ve thought the latter will win, and we’ll end up with the anti-“hate” censorship you find in Canada and Europe. A recent case seems to point that way. … More ...
It’s hard not to be pleased by reports that weekday newspaper circulation is falling around 5% a year, and music CD sales plunged more than 20% in the last year alone. Broadband net access is killing the established media, with no end in sight. Who needs the newspaper or music industries when better and … More ...
A recent development in Britain suggests one side of “human rights” in today’s world: Home Secretary threatens to suspend human rights laws after terror suspects go missing.
“Control orders” in Britain restrict movements and contact with other people for terror suspects who cannot be brought to court. They replaced detention without trial, which was … More ...
A reader sends in a link to a collection of recollections of the ’50s by ordinary British people, put together (of all things) by the BBC. The recollections are mostly extremely favorable. The reader speculates
… More ...Letting these comments be posted could just be a sign of pluralist confidence. Pluralists may see themselves in a strong
Frequent commenter MD has posted an interesting account of the views of Jacques Lyotard, a prominent postmodernist, on knowledge in postindustrial society. It’s an interesting situation Lyotard describes, one that seems to me more hyper- than post- modern and industrial. The basic idea, I suppose, is that man is rational and social. It follows that … More ...
Why is so much of pop culture so stable? Young people have listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles since around 1963 and still find them up-to-date. “Hip” and “cool” are still hip and cool, and they’ve been mass-market for 50 years. On slightly more substantive matters, we’re still stuck at bottom with ’60s political … More ...
Kathy Shaidle has been grousing that none of the young guys killed in the West Virginia Tech shooting did anything to resist getting blown away and young conservative guys are defending them.
She touches on part of the explanation in her most recent comment, to the effect that you don’t have to be a … More ...
Anthony Esolen visits one of the few surviving men’s colleges and finds it a hotbed of benign timocracies. Fine upstanding young men, sense of honor, all that sort of thing. From his account it seems that education really can make a difference, and people can bounce back and start acting normal again if given … More ...
Here’s some more moaning about These Young People Today, where “today” means recent decades going back God knows how long: The Closing of the American Mind Revisited. The piece is prompted by the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s book.
Like most complaints about These Young People Today it’s really about the consequences of the … More ...
The 70s were called the “me” decade, but it appears that we’ve built on the foundation they laid. College students’ scores on a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory have been rising steadily since testing began in 1982, with the proportion of high scorers rising from half to two-thirds. The study worries that narcissists “are … More ...