A German newspaper editor, Anna Sauerbrey, posted a chilling opinion piece in the New York Times the other day. It illustrates with depressing clarity a recurring theme of this blog: the necessarily destructive effect of multiculturalism upon human societies. Her piece begins: In Germany, a big question is back on the table: What is German […]
Here’s a question for abortion absolutists: A woman wishes to write a book about abortion. In order to give her work perspective and authenticity, she decides to become pregnant in order to experience an abortion herself. Being of independent means, she will pay all of the medical expenses. Is there anything morally wrong with what […]
From the mail, yesterday: Not quite what the Framers had in mind, I think.
We have house-guests this holiday weekend, and it would be unsociable of me to roost at the computer. Back next week. The floor is yours, if you like.
Ah, what a lovely morning. Why? Well, it’s a balmy spring day here in the Outer Cape, where the air is fresh and fragrant, the little birds are singing, and the trees are stretching their new leaves in the golden May sunshine. Even better, though, a new report from the State Department’s Office of the […]
Well, maybe some mainstream conservatives are actually beginning to. Here, for instance, is Rod Dreher, rising from the fainting couch (h/t to Porter): The media have soft-pedaled this thing, but when it gets right down to it, all the diversity rhetoric in the world is not going to matter when a man recognizes that in […]
An entertaining item by Milo Yiannopoulis, here. My own feeling about this: Facebook can do what it likes, and anyone on the Right who expects fair treatment from Mark Zuckerberg is a fool.
Paul Gottfried has a new book out. I’ve mentioned Professor Gottfried here before (in particular, I strongly recommend his books Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy and After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State); his latest is called Fascism: The Career of a Concept. The word “fascism” has become little […]
Retweeted today by Christina Hoff Sommers:
Bernie Sanders has suggested that Hillary Clinton is unqualified for the Presidency. As you might imagine, I didn’t need much persuading, but after seeing this tweet, I’d say the case is closed:
While taking a three-mile constitutional this afternoon (we of the American Right never, of course, forget the importance of constitutionals), I had a listen to John Derbyshire’s latest Radio Derb podcast. It was a particularly good one, with fine segments on immigration, automation, and social engineering. You can listen to it here, or read it […]
When you are spending other people’s money, there’s very little incentive to cut costs. With a hat-tip to Michelle Malkin, here’s a splendid example: a million-dollar coin-toss. If ever there was a huge, complex, brittle, and unstable system in need of a reboot, well, folks, you’re living in it.
Just a few months ago we mentioned Judge Richard Leon, of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Back then we praised him for putting the kibosh on a sneaky little maneuver by the DOJ regarding voter ID. Well, this patriotic magistrate deserves our kudos once again: he has just ruled against […]
A good piece by Heather Mac Donald, here.
Inequality is intractable. I’ve written about this often. Innate inequalities — the unequal distribution of superior qualities — naturally create social and economic inequalities, and the only way to level these natural differences is by the creation and imposition of new inequalities of power. It follows, then, that a social movement (or, properly understood, a […]
(1) One of the most important ways that cultures differ is in their normative biases. (2) When composing a multicultural Venn diagram, the intersection can only contain non-contradictory elements of the cultures being combined. (3) Norms are often contradictory in a way that, say, food is not. (Food, and music, the most commonly cited blessings […]
Here’s another video clip: a hair-raising tornado chase.
Great, simple video here from a young Swedish woman.
Our recent post, Douthat and Reaction, featured a link to a video clip of a young woman disrupting a speaking event at the University of Massachusetts. She is seen flailing her arms and shouting obscenities — in short, having a child’s temper-tantrum. The video clip has gone “viral”, and its star has been the object […]
Here’s a gratifying item from today’s news: The Citadel Denies Prospective Student’s Request to Wear Hijab Whether this will stand — and whether it is actually an early indication of some kind of limit having been reached at last, or simply the corpse of the West giving a little twitch — remains to be seen.
You’ve probably heard of Bayes’s Theorem, but if you’ve yet to get your head around it, here’s a nice visual explanation, including a simple Bayesian explanation of the perplexing “Monty Hall problem” (which we last discussed in here way back in 2009). (Also, from the same website, here’s another Bayes tutorial.)
Ross Douthat of the New York Times has been nibbling, lately, at NRx’s red pill, and has recently written both a column and a blog-post on neoreaction that seem at least partly sympathetic. For a man in his position, that is, as Orwell reminded us, a “revolutionary act”: to the extent that the movement has […]
Our newest commenter, Jacques, is holding my feet to the fire once again in the comment-thread to our recent post on the “Black Pill”. (These things tend to scroll down and disappear, so I thought I’d mention it; J. is prying open some old (i.e., eternal) questions I haven’t written about in years.)
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is in fine form this week. Yesterday he published an excellent meditation on free will, and today he’s breathing fire upon the political Left: It is hopelessly naive to think that we can have comity without commonality… we have reached the point where we agree on almost nothing and that […]
In case you missed it: Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry posted an item a few weeks ago linking to a forceful essay by Mario Loyola on climate-change activism. The Loyola essay is behind a paywall at The American Interest, but that publication offers non-subscribing visitors one free article a month, so you ought to be […]
From Stephen Hsu’s blog, here’s a video of an hour-long panel discussion with Dr. Hsu, Steven Pinker, and Dalton Conley on the subject of genetic engineering and the heritability of human traits, particularly intelligence. This topic is a minefield in the West, and so great care is taken, and necessary pieties uttered — and some […]
Yet another outage today with my hosting service. Apologies to all.
I’ve written often about the many isomorphisms between society and thermodynamics (see, for example, here, here, and here). The subject came up again in the comment-thread to our previous post. Our reader Robert, a.k.a. “Whitewall”, noted the ceaseless efforts of the political Left to “force change where no change is needed or even wanted.” He […]
I’ve often mentioned a popular neoreactionary metaphor, the “red pill” (in fact I did so just two posts ago). Now, with a hat-tip to the latest edition of Nick Steves’ weekly roundup, we offer you an essay by Brett Stevens about another existential medicament: the black pill. What is the black pill? In a word, […]
April 27, 2016 – 11:09 pm
While we in the moribund West gabble self-congratulatory nonsense about the “right” and “wrong” sides of history, China — which doesn’t bother with such rubbish — is rapidly reconfiguring itself. It has always been aware of the risks that Western infection brings, and so it is clamping down on foreign influences, and on the free […]
April 26, 2016 – 10:05 pm
Today I read an item in The Atlantic about an amusing story from the UK. Apparently Her Majesty’s Government has commissioned, at great expense, a state-of-the-art climate-research ship. The vessel needed a name, and so the public was asked to provide one. They did. The winner of the poll, by a large margin, was “Boaty […]
April 25, 2016 – 10:51 pm
I’ve mentioned the fossil-fuels advocate Alex Epstein several times in these pages, most recently back on April 13th. Here he is making his case last week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Note in particular the odious, and evidently wholly unlettered, Senator Barbara Boxer mocking Mr. Epstein (at 7:20, and again at the […]
Time to start betting back to regular operations around here, I think. It was good to take some time off, and I thank all of you who visit here regularly for your patience. I’ll confess that it’s been a little harder lately for me to keep to daily blogging; I’ve had many distractions, and I […]
Need a few days offline, folks. Back later this week, or early next.
With a hat-tip to our reader Henry, here is a link to a video of an Ohio State University employee explaining to a group of student protestors that if they do not vacate the building they are occupying, they will be arrested and expelled. It’s a beginning, and a welcome one, although in my opinion […]
April 13, 2016 – 12:14 pm
We note, as always on this date, the natal day of Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, F.W. Woolworth, James Ensor, Butch Cassidy, Sir Arthur “Bomber’ Harris, Robert Watson-Watt, Samuel Beckett, Harold Stassen, Stanislaw Ulam, Eudora Welty, Howard Keel, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Ken Nordine, Don Adams, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Seamus Heaney, Paul Sorvino, Jack Casady, Tony Dow, […]
April 13, 2016 – 12:03 pm
Over the transom today came a link (thank you, Bill K.) to Diplomad’s latest salvo: At War with the History of Mankind. Dip makes the point that a central tenet of modern Leftist ideology (which is, as I and others have argued at length, essentially a cryptoreligious belief-system) is to make Nature sacred, and mankind […]
It’s “Equal Pay Day”, so here’s a video by Christina Hoff Sommers on this evergreen gripe.
April 11, 2016 – 12:48 pm
“What a curious world this is!” thought Alice. “Everything is upside-down and backwards!” “We are ruled by the oppressed, the only sin is to believe in sin, the only tradition is the destruction of tradition, ‘anti-racism’ means loathing white people, and ‘education’ means un-learning one’s culture!” She nibbled thoughtfully on the little cake the Mad […]
In his book Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Douglas R. Hofstadter discussed the idea of “recursive acronyms”. He gave as an example the acronym TATO, which stands for “TATO And TATO Only”. The expansion goes like this: 1. TATO 2. TATO And TATO Only 3. (TATO And TATO Only) And […]
Our previous post — a link, with excerpts and brief commentary, to an essay by Dennis Prager on how leftism and statism step in to fill the void left by religion — seems to have left some readers puzzled. Here are some further thoughts of my own: The religious impulse, the need for sacred objects, […]
Dennis Prager published an insightful item yesterday, entitled “A Note to Conservatives Who Are Secular”. We read: The vast majority of leading conservative writers, just like their liberal colleagues, have a secular outlook on life. With few exceptions, the conservative political and intellectual worlds are oblivious to the consequences of secularism. They are unaware of […]
In 1968, the Fair Housing Act made it the law of the land that owners of property could not refuse to sell or rent it on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. In 1988 the list was expanded to include family status and disabilities. Absent from this list of criteria was […]
We haven’t said much about the situation in Europe lately, but with warmer weather coming, “migrant” flows will increase, and the social and political climate is going to heat up as well. Already, as we see here, the Schengen idea is becoming unsupportable. I will be in Vienna in July. I wonder what things will […]
Our reader Henry has sent us this interesting item, in which we learn that fishes and quanta have more in common than we thought.
A black-capped chickadee, to be precise. (Beech Forest Trail, Provincetown, MA, last Thursday.)
Commenter “Jacques”, last seen (by me, at least) over at Maverick Philosopher, has joined our recent thread on consciousness and intentionality. (Discussions on older posts can often go on unsuspected by other readers, so I thought I’d mention it. Also, it’s a nice change from the grim topics we usually handle around here these days.)
Here’s a nice visualization of sorting algorithms. (If you’re interested.)
March 31, 2016 – 11:29 am
Here’s the latest really cool thing that you absolutely must have. It just stands in your room, listening to everything you say, and transmitting it over the Internet to… someplace. It’s only $129, and it’s “always getting smarter”! Crisp Dolby Sound! Everybody’s going to want one. Don’t be left out!
March 31, 2016 – 11:02 am
And, as the old song goes, you can get it if you try. Story here. This should be instructive! (Economics 101: If you subsidize something, you get more of it.) P.S. Nick Land comments here.