Monthly Archives: April 2014

Check Your Privilege

The best thing I’ve read all week. Here.

The Penny Drops

It appears as if reality may slowly be impinging upon the consciousness of David Brooks. In today’s column, he laments that the abstract world order he had hoped for seems to be slipping away, yielding to older and more organic forces. We read: “The ”˜category error’ of our experts is to tell us that our […]

Do The Right Thing

Just in case, loyal Readers, you happen to be looking for a fat tax write-off; and supposing also that you’ve been troubled lately by how hard it is for aging, pallid reactionary male bloggers just to get around without being interfered with by resentful Progressive mobs, here’s the perfect way to kill two birds with […]

Exhibit A

One more from the UK: the Daily Mail reports that modern humans are weaklings compared to our early ancestors. They might be on to something.

Those Guys

NRO’s Jim Geraghty attended the National Rifle Association’s annual convention last week in Indianapolis, and today he summed up his impressions in an excellent post. I had begun to cull some excerpts, but really you should go read the whole thing yourself. It’s here. Best line: “Hi, I’m here to change your culture!’

Holger Danske Stirs

After yesterday’s depressing post, here’s some good news from across the pond: the anti-EU party UKIP has surged to first place in the runup to to next month’s elections. Suddenly, all over Europe, the spell is breaking.

And So It Goes

Once, Winston Churchill was the voice of England, the defender of “the island race“. My parents, who grew up in Britain, remembered hearing him on the radio during the Blitz. They told me that, more than anything else, it was his lion’s heart (and his lion’s roar) that gave the sturdy people of that battered […]

Notice

This morning I dropped a post I had written late last night, something I rarely do. When I got up and reread it, it just seemed too morose. As news unfolded later in the morning, I was glad I had done it for another reason: it would have led to more bickering than I have […]

Goodbye, Rigor

Hello, … well, something very different indeed. Here’s an article about what college “debate” has become.

Nationalism vs. Empire

In his latest column, Patrick Buchanan argues that what confounded the Soviet empire, and what will keep Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions in check today, is not sanctions or military threats, but a rising tide of nationalism. We read: Before we start sending troops back to Europe, as we did 65 years ago under Harry Truman, […]

C.I.V. — A Case Study

In a splenetic comment to an earlier post, a reader presents us with a clinical example of what I have called Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus: an AIDS-like memetic infection that attacks the social organism’s immune system, rendering it incapable of making essential discriminations — in particular, exactly those self/other distinctions that any organism must make to […]

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This

Here’s a fine online edition of Philogelos, the world’s oldest joke book.

Gee, What A Coincidence

Megan McArdle comments on the Obama administration’s conveniently timed revamp of insurance-data collection: I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report […]

Settled, Schmettled

Here’s a calm and reasonable article about “climate change”. The author is Lennart Bengtsson, an impeccably credentialed climate researcher. We read: More CO2 in the atmosphere leads undoubtedly to a warming of the earth surface. However, the extent and speed of this warming are still uncertain, because we cannot yet separate well enough the greenhouse […]

Endangered Species

Here’s a good piece by Jon Hinderaker on the Bundy affair.

And Then My Heart With Pleasure Fills

It’s just spring here in Wellfleet, and suddenly there are daffodils everywhere. I love daffodils; they seem perfect to me. They sing of warm spring sunlight, and cool clear air, and dark fertile soil, and of beauty unvanquished. I’ve always thought that daffodils are pure joy. I’ve written in these pages, from time to time, […]

Hate Speech

I just took an online survey called “How Stereotypically White Are You?” It offers a hundred criteria, and asks the respondent to check all that apply. Most of them were things like “Have you ever listened to John Mayer while hooking up with someone?” (The sort of questions I might have asked — “Have you […]

How Heartbleed Works

A simple explanation from Randall Munroe.

Yikes!

We’ve been hacked, it seems. Perhaps it’s that ‘Heartbleed’ business, although my understanding was that Bluehost, my hosting service, had not been affected. Thanks to Matt Walker for leaving a comment on one of the (now deleted) spam posts to tell us that our RSS feed is corrupted also. Our in-house team of cyberterrorism experts […]

C.I.V.

Brandeis University has rescinded its decision to award Aayan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree at this year’s commencement. You might have thought that a Jewish liberal-arts institution that was sufficiently impressed by Ms. Ali’s advocacy of women’s rights to offer her this honor wouldn’t be put off by her outspoken criticism of a culture that […]

Phase Transition

A story that’s making the rounds today concerns trending changes in the way people read. Here’s the lede, from today’s Washington Post: Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, […]

Creative Destruction

My Android phone just had a stroke, and I had to do a factory reset. I lost all my applications, which meant I had to go rummaging around to replace them. It’s turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I’ve found some nifty new ones, and after blasting away all the cruft that […]

Okay…

Too much social/political stuff lately. Will lay off for a while.

Another Witch-Burning

This time it’s Javascript inventor Brendan Eich, who failed to pull his neck in quickly enough as the Overton Window sped leftward. He was defenestrated today as head of Mozilla, for supporting a rational ideological position that every society on earth — and even Barack Obama himself — defended until just a couple of years […]

Charles Murray Responds to HuffPo Vituperation

Recently the Huffington Post took a big swipe at Charles Murray, with all the intellectual rigor we’ve come to expect from the blank-slate universalist Left. The argument appears to be that he’s a racist, sexist old white guy, so everything he says must, a priori, be false, and therefore beneath refutation. (When an idea is […]

Links

— Zoomable panorama of the Milky Way. — “Wrong again, dear.” — What women want. — :-( — Privilege!. — How the blow-fly flies. — Biohazard. — Now that’s a rat. — Mate In 10! — Warning: major time-sink. — WWI as bar-fight. — How is this man alive? — Aesop updated. — Good clean […]