thoughts in and out of season
Der Untergang des Abendlandes seems to be accelerating:
Steve Sailer’s got a good article about bigshot Harvard social scientist Robert D. Putnam. Putnam’s the guy behind Bowling Alone, a famous article (and then book) that documented the decline of civc engagement in America. More recently, as Sailer details, he’s published a study showing that more ethnic diversity means less social trust, … More ...
For those who liked my gloom-and-doom entry last month, here’s something even gloomier and doomier from the late John Attarian: Requiem for the Right.
A quote from Le Corbusier that proves the man’s intelligence: “The core of our old cities, with their domes and cathedrals, must be broken up and skyscrapers put in their place.” (Cited in A Humane Economy, 85.) Say what you like, he knew his stuff. The urban environment is the setting for the rituals … More ...
On the face of it, these pro-homosexualists who don’t like “prejudice” have a point: Mixed message, and Two speeches, two days apart. If it’s true, as the Pope supposedly said, that we should all strive to “overcome preconceived ideas and prejudices, tear down barriers and eliminate contrasts that divide … so as to … More ...
Someone just did a survey of under-10-year-olds in England, and found they thought that celebrity was the best thing in the world, followed by good looks and wealth. That fills in the picture presented by the survey of teenaged girls last year that found that 63 per cent wanted to be glamour models, while 25 … More ...
Still, in spite of the gloom and doom of the last posting, life goes on, and no cloud but has a silver lining. For example, a big benefit of the recent scandals in the Catholic Church and growing anti-religious trends in Western life is that they’ve squashed a lot of the happy talk the Church … More ...
First it was the French Jews, then the Dutch, then the Germans, all people with fertility rates well in the red, who were reported to be leaving their homelands. Now it seems it’s the British too: Almost one in 10 British citizens living overseas. In the meantime the flow of Third World immigrants … More ...
When I passed through the Houston airport recently they kept threatening over the PA system to arrest anyone who made jokes about airport security. Since that’s where we are, it’s hard to believe many people will take complaints from the airport imams seriously. The Muslims still seem rather ham-handed manipulating public views. Maybe they should … More ...
In my last post I suggested that liberalism intrinsically causes crime, because the strong impulses, weak intelligence and spotty human attachments that make a man criminal are supported by basic liberal principles (making preference the standard of the good, reducing reason to the service of desire, turning autonomy into an ultimate standard). I then suggested … More ...