August 30, 2017 – 11:44 am
Here’s Hanson again, with some comparative analysis.
August 29, 2017 – 11:01 pm
Sorry it’s been so slow around here. It’s August, when I always take it easy a bit — but I’ll confess that I’m also getting a little spooked by the extent to which we are all (and I’m no exception) living more and more of our lives online. Our attention, which is more precious than […]
August 23, 2017 – 4:40 pm
Victor Davis Hanson (my emphasis): For the last decade, we were lectured that the arc of history always bends toward our own perceptions of moral justice. More likely, human advancement tends to be circular and should not to be confused with technological progress. Just as often, history is ethically circular. No Roman province produced anyone […]
August 23, 2017 – 2:40 pm
Our discussion of “white supremacy” continues, over at Bill Vallicella’s place.
August 22, 2017 – 12:49 pm
I don’t like the tropics; they’re too profuse. Anything goes, completely unchecked. Give me the North. Each winter Life’s follies, feints, and flourishes are weighed, measured and tested. The ones that make it back the following year need to show something serious: at best, ingenuity, but at the very least, genuine toughness. Everything in the […]
August 22, 2017 – 12:09 pm
For nearly all of us, a gravestone or other physical memorial is in any real sense as temporal, as evanescent, a thing as we ourselves are. For when such memorials no longer serve as a token, reminder, or feeble proxy for the deceased in the minds of those who knew them, they simply display a […]
August 20, 2017 – 8:39 pm
Here are two syllogisms about race. The first: (1) All human groups have identical statistical distributions of cognitive, behavioral and personality traits. (2) Human groups, when considered as groups, have measurably different life-outcomes and levels of success in our societies. (3) Given (1), these different outcomes can only be due to wholly exogenous factors, such […]
August 20, 2017 – 2:24 am
It would be an awfully suspicious coincidence if Truth turned out to be exactly what we think it ought to be.
August 18, 2017 – 9:36 pm
I had sad news today: my old friend and colleague Jason Corsaro died yesterday of cancer. I’m not sure of his age, but he must have been about my age, 61. Jason and I came up together as assistant engineers at Power Station Studios (now Avatar); he was promoted to full engineer just before I […]
August 18, 2017 – 5:03 pm
Last week a Google engineer expressed, in a perfectly reasonable memorandum about human diversity, the view that the company had become a left-wing monoculture in which dissenters actually might have to worry about being fired. For publishing this essay, he was fired. Now Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has announced that the company is giving a […]
August 18, 2017 – 2:15 pm
Our e-pal Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has a post up about “white supremacy”, a loosely defined term that is very much en vogue just now. Dr. Vallicella quotes Robert Paul Wolff: Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White Supremacy. White Supremacy is a policy of domination and economic superiority of Whites in […]
August 16, 2017 – 10:26 pm
I’ve said quite enough about Diversity lately, so here’s statistician William Briggs to help shoulder the load.
August 16, 2017 – 4:03 pm
A comment on Charlottesville: this sort of chip-on-the-shoulder activism is a no-win for the Right. It attracts too many of the lowest, stupidest, and most undesirable elements, and as we have seen, it results in officially sanctioned violence. I remember a slogan from back in the Vietnam War era: Fighting For Peace Is Like Fucking […]
August 16, 2017 – 2:02 pm
What never seems to occur to those who anathematize and seek to bury the past is that they in turn prepare the future for their own erasure. The result is a sullen and solipsistic presentism in which, as Burke foresaw, men become nothing more than “the flies of a summer”.
August 16, 2017 – 10:12 am
It is a great temporal vanity to see, in the study of history, only the present struggling to be born. It is, quite literally, preposterous.
August 15, 2017 – 4:18 pm
Pax Dickinson gives his eyewitness account of what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday, here. [A quibble: Mr. Dickinson writes that the chaos created by the police stand-down (and the apparently deliberate throwing-together of the “Unite The Right” demonstrators with the hungry Antifa mob) “ultimately led directly to the vehicular incident that killed a woman […]
August 12, 2017 – 10:15 pm
Four years ago, I wrote the following thing: America’s ideological landscape is like the continent itself: transected by deep fault-lines at the irregular boundaries of rigid plates. Though crushed tightly together, these great masses seek to move in different directions, and so they strain relentlessly against one another. The pressure builds, and builds ”” until, […]
August 10, 2017 – 3:29 pm
Have a look at this time-looping defense of abortion, by Princeton professor Elizabeth Harman. Somewhere in the back of my mind I just can’t help forming a sneaking suspicion that Professor Harman arrived at her conclusion first, rather than being dragged to it by the irresistible force of her argument.
Every Tuesday evening, in the ten o’clock hour of his program, radio host John Batchelor discusses Russia with Stephen F. Cohen. Dr. Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, and is a rare voice of sanity in this time of anti-Russian hysteria. Mr. Batchelor’s show is always worth listening to — […]
More than a few readers have complained to me about the “Captcha” used to screen comments here. I’ve just installed a new one that, for most of you, shouldn’t be visible at all. I hope it works well enough that I can keep using it.
I’ve just read an article at Crisis magazine called The Day the Music Died. (Hat-tip to Bill V.) From the article: When pursued to its logical conclusion, multiculturalism leads to monoculturalism, and eventually to a monochrome society. That’s because without a common culture to unite them, multicultures break down into competing subcultures. When this happens, […]
In this week’s podcast, John Derbyshire makes the case for a severe throttling-back of immigration. Listen here. The comment-box is open for discussion.
August 4, 2017 – 12:54 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, we have an essay by David Gelernter on the “Resistance” to Donald Trump, a term embraced even by some “conservatives”. We read: I’d love for him to be a more eloquent, elegant speaker. But if I had to choose between deeds and delivery, it wouldn’t be hard. Many conservative […]
August 3, 2017 – 11:18 pm
Here’s a savory morsel: a class-action suit, filed by Democratic voters, against the DNC and the gratifyingly beleaguered Debbie Wasserman Schultz for their conspiratorial malfeasance during last year’s primary season. Thanks to our indefatigable JK for the tip.
There was a bit of a ruction today in the White House press room, between Trump adviser Stephen Miller and CNN’s Jim Acosta. Acosta was taking the Trump administration to task for proposed immigration restrictions, in particular the frightful idea that an English-speaking nation might give preference to immigrants who can speak English. (Before I […]
August 2, 2017 – 11:27 am
From my pal Dennis Mangan: a warning about industrial seed oils (which are everywhere in the modern American diet). Here.
I’m saddened today to hear of the death of guitarist Chuck Loeb. I hadn’t seen Chuck in many years (we worked together on many records and other sessions back in the 80’s and 90’s), but he was one of the finest musicians I ever knew, and a good man besides. He was only 61. Chuck […]