Monthly Archives: January 2012

Twilight Of Big Blue

January 4, 2012 – 11:19 pm

Here’s something I meant to post a few weeks ago, when President Obama was delivering that Osawatomie speech. It’s an essay by Walter Russell Mead, in which he examines the persistent Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian threads in American political history, and argues that after a long period of Hamiltonian ascendancy, the time is right for the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

One Size Fits All?

January 4, 2012 – 1:18 am

In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion, Jihad | Comments (25)

Please Remain Calm

January 3, 2012 – 10:15 pm

This in the mailbag from our old friend David Pauley: Freeman Dyson on catastrophes, real and imaginary.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (0)

Enunciatory Modalities

January 2, 2012 – 11:05 pm

With a hat-tip to Bill Valicella, here are some prize-winning examples of spectacularly bad writing.

By Malcolm | Posted in Language | Comments (4)

Well, I’ll Be

January 2, 2012 – 5:21 pm

Nearly a year ago, as the uprising in Egypt was gaining traction, I wrote: The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan’) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (25)

Again?

January 1, 2012 – 4:30 pm

Last January we noted in these pages a mysterious event at Beebe, Arkansas: thousands of red-winged blackbirds had fallen out of the sky on New Year’s Eve. An excerpt: It seems that thousands of red-winged blackbirds (and as far as I can tell, only red-winged blackbirds) fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)