thoughts in and out of season
More signs of the times:
Here’s a claim that 99.8 percent of FCC indecency complaints were filed by a single activist group. The facts seem a little confused, but the evident general inactivity on the conservative side of the issue is the sort of thing the “conservative trend” in American life amounts to. The truth is that there isn’t … More ...
The ’60s, bracketed as they were by the school prayer and abortion decisions, stand for definitive public rejection of the transcendent in favor of a wholly this-worldly understanding of reality. In the absence of a superior point of reference, the social order became the ultimate moral reality and human choice the ultimate authority. For … More ...
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 ...
According to a generally thoughtful and well-informed conservative weblog, Power Line, a recent poll shows
… More ...“Americans believe by a 62 percent to 26 percent margin that American society ‘is generally fair and decent.’ This strikes me as a bit alarming. I’m pretty sure that such a survey taken 45 years ago, when I first
An example of leftish puzzlement about religion and politics that’s more intelligent and well-meant than the sort of thing one sees in the New York Times:
… More ...The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first
Leftist blogs say the election turned on “gay marriage,” the prominent rightist blogs say it didn’t (Kos and Little Green Footballs provide an example). The election was close, and turned on any number of things. The reason for the dispute over this particular point, it seems, is that leftists believe the interpretation irrefutably discredits … More ...
“Faith schools”—those with a definite religious orientation—have been something of an issue in England the past several years. The issue comes out of the secular and multicultural commitments of the British state. The problem is that secular multicultural education is always bad, at least on any large scale, because schools of that kind can’t … More ...
This is an interesting story, given the sensitivity in the American mainstream media to concerns about anti-Semitism in general and to complaints that things are “run by Jews” in particular: Will Oscar Listen? The article, on the Academy Awards, is quite forthright on the point that Hollywood’s “Jewish roots” are the reason The Passion of … More ...
“Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” once won a New Republic contest for the most boring conceivable headline for a New York Times editorial. With that in mind, here are some Canadian initiatives the Times would no doubt find worthwhile: