You might have heard about this terror attack in Belgium: Two female police officers were killed in Belgium today…Police identified the gunman as Benjamin Herman, a 36-year-old Belgian native who was allegedly radicalized in prison. Herman allegedly approached the officers from behind, stabbed them multiple times and took their guns, officials said. “Two female police […]
Forwards vs. Backs, by Mick Colliss. (All of this snaps into focus for me now that I have a son-in-law who plays rugby, and a fearless, energetic grandson of almost two years who is obsessed with recreational spheroids. Thanks to Brendan Wright for sending it along.)
With “Dear Old Blighty” on the Motus Mentis radar these last days, we have for you a warmly dyspeptic assessment of the recent House of Windsor nuptials. (We thank, once again, our e-pal Bill Keezer for the link.) A sample: Both Harry and Meghan seem personable young people but the role of a royal is […]
There is something unspeakably sad about watching a great nation in terminal cultural collapse — especially when it is the nation that gave birth not only to the place one calls home, but also to one’s own parents. The U.K., having over the course of half a century slowly plucked out its own bones, now […]
Tommy Robinson, the patriotic English gadfly who has had the audacity to advocate, over the past several years, the preservation of the British Isles as an ethnic homeland for the British people, has been arrested for standing outside an English courthouse to live-stream the trial of a Pakistani child-grooming operation. The government, not content with […]
National Review is essentially the official organ of what is often called “Conservatism Inc.” these days, but there are still worthwhile things to read over there. Here are two. First, Charles Cooke, who has been consistently excellent on gun-control topics, rebuts an Op-Ed in the New York Times that tries to tie the Second Amendment […]
You may recall a fellow by the name of Chris Langan (I wrote about him here, back in 2009). He has one of the highest IQs ever measured, but after a hard early life has lived quietly, without attracting much attention. Yesterday I stumbled on a link to a page on the Q&A website Quora, […]
A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump can’t block Twitter users from following him. Here’s a key excerpt from the ruling, by Judge Naomi Buchwald of New York’s Southern District: We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account — the “interactive space’ where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President’s […]
I’ve been unexpectedly busy over the past few days, with little time for writing. I do have something substantial for you to read, though: an essay by the late Joseph Sobran on the nature of conservatism. It was written in 1985, and bears the title Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow. I’ll quote the […]
The brilliant but relentlessly optimistic Steven Pinker offered today a link to a brief article about a new cross-cultural study of human morals. The article, which you can read here, lists seven moral rules that seem to be universal to all cultures. They are: 1) Love your family. 2) Help your group. 3) Return favors. […]
It was only yesterday that I mentioned Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, Suicide of the West, and mentioned in passing Paul Gottfried’s critique of Mr. Goldberg’s earlier money-maker, Liberal Fascism. Well, just today Professor Gottfried has published a review of Goldberg’s book over at VDare — and as you might imagine, it is not favorable. Read […]
From Spandrell: here, here, and here are three posts outlining an idea — “Bioleninism” — that seeks to explain the steady movement leftward of political systems, and the shift, beginning in the 1960s or so, from economic to cultural Marxism as the vehicle for that movement. The model seems coherent and plausible. It also has […]
Jonah Goldberg has a new book out, called The Suicide of the West. (I don’t know why he felt he had to swipe the title of James Burnham’s monumental assault upon the modern liberal order, but it would’ve been nice if he hadn’t.) I haven’t read the book, but I know Jonah Goldberg’s oeuvre well […]
I’m driving all day, but for now here’s a brief item on the political consequences of shifting American demographics. Rising diversity at national scale increases tribalism, destroys cohesion, diminishes liberty, and fosters divisive competition that throughout history always tends toward fission and violence. What fools we are.
Houseguests this weekend. Back in a bit.
Next stop on the road to Utopia: if the NAACP has its way, you will have your thoughts examined on suspicion of “implicit bias”. (This is because you might, in the tenebrous recesses of your reptilian brain, harbor the monstrous notion that some things are generally different from others, in ways that occasionally matter.) “The […]
President Trump yesterday announced that the U.S. would no longer consider itself bound by the deal his predecessor had made with Iran. His critics, both here and abroad, are writhing and hissing like Gollum with the Elven-rope around his neck: To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, only someone with a heart of stone could witness their pain […]
I commented a few days back about “incels” having risen to virality (though not, of course, to virility, which would make the whole topic moot). A point I didn’t make, though, was that the collective shudder on the Left at the sight of these wretches, and the equally collective wish to make them go away, […]
From ‘Mencius Moldbug‘: Since the reality of political history is that all polities of nontrivial size are controlled by organized minorities, all nontrivial democracies are pseudo-democracies. They are all different, however, since every organized minority is different. Every government flavored with democracy is irredeemably foul, but broadly the 20th-century pseudo-democratic regimes can be separated into […]
My friend Bill Vallicella, having read our recent post and comment-thread on Rod Dreher’s essay on Marx (see Bill’s recent post on the same article, here), noted my formulation of the consistent principle of our opponents in the current culture war: Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always. (The […]
The term of the moment is “incel”, which is short for “involuntarily celibate”. It rose to virality after a young man associating himself with the “incel” movement ran down a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto last month. The young-adult liberal website Vox explains the term here. There is now a bit of a reaction underway […]
I’ve just read a response by Rod Dreher to a recent NYT op-ed, by Jason Barker, praising Karl Marx. Mr. Dreher grants to Marx a correct understanding of the revolutionary power of capitalism: Capitalism ”” for Marx, the merchant class (the “bourgeoisie’) were the carriers of capitalism ”” turns everything into a market. Capitalism is […]
Here’s something worth reading: an interview with the anonymous traditionalist “Wrath of Gnon”. (For those of you not familiar with the neoreactionary term “Gnon”, you should imagine it as meaning something almost exactly congruent with Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings“: the enduring truths of Nature, or Nature’s God, that periodically render a pitiless judgment […]