Monthly Archives: July 2018

Roger Scruton: What Is A Conservative?

July 31, 2018 – 4:50 pm

I’ve just read a brief interview with Sir Roger Scruton over at National Review. (Hat-tip to our friend David Duff.) This caught my eye: [Interviewer Madeleine Kearns]: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative? SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Reaction | Comments (4)

What To Do?

July 30, 2018 – 11:43 am

With a hat-tip to the Maverick Philosopher, here’s an essay by Bruce Thornton arguing that we might as well give up on political debate with the cryptoreligious Left. The best recourse, he tells us, is ridicule. (Hume was right: reason is the slave of the passions.) I agree with Professor Thornton about the futility of […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Politics | Comments (5)

Service Notice

July 28, 2018 – 5:45 pm

Sorry about the scanty output: it’s summer, and I’m on a reduced schedule. I have begun reading The Political Theory of the American Founding, which you may recall from our link to, and subsequent discussion of, Michael Anton’s review. The book directly addresses several questions I have been stewing over for a long time now, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Politics | Comments (0)

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

July 25, 2018 – 2:14 pm

With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s a survey of the blood-soaked political battlefield from Victor Davis Hanson.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Lake Found On Mars

July 25, 2018 – 12:12 pm

Story here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (0)

The Overweening Power Of FISA

July 24, 2018 – 1:48 pm

John Batchelor discusses, with former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, the FISA-court application that got the Mueller investigation started. (The redacted application was finally released this weekend in response to persistent FOIA pressure by Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch.) The interview is in two parts, here and here. Mr. McCarthy writes about the release in his […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

NicolÁ¡s GÁ³mez DÁ¡vila On Reaction And Resignation

July 23, 2018 – 2:55 pm

From “The Authentic Reactionary“, by NicolÁ¡s GÁ³mez DÁ¡vila (1913”“1994): History is a necessity that freedom produces and chance destroys. This is a beautiful formulation: our freely chosen actions put in train an expanding system of consequences that, being beyond the control of any individual and therefore subject to an irreducibly complex web of contingency, lie […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (4)

Racist Thing #105

July 23, 2018 – 12:06 pm

Artificial intelligence.

By Malcolm | Posted in Racist Things | Comments (0)

Round Up The Usual Suspects

July 21, 2018 – 3:06 pm

Today I was sent an article from the New York Times about Susan Unterberg, a philanthropist who supports female artists. The item was sent to me “as another example of how women are underpaid and not supported”. An excerpt: “They don’t get museum shows as often as men, they don’t command the same prices in […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (0)

A Happy Surprise From The Ninth Circuit

July 20, 2018 – 1:27 pm

An injunction blocking a California law that threatens gun owners with fines or imprisonment if they don’t surrender or otherwise dispose of “high-capacity” magazines (the term refers to anything over ten rounds) has been upheld by, if you can believe it, the Ninth Circuit. David French has the details in a column published yesterday. He […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Guns | Comments (0)

Angelo Codevilla On The Helsinki Summit

July 18, 2018 – 10:40 am

Following on our previous post, today we bring you a column by Angelo Codevilla about Monday’s conference in Helsinki. It begins: The high professional quality of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s performance at their Monday press conference in Helsinki contrasts sharply with the obloquy by which the bipartisan U.S. ruling class showcases its willful incompetence. […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Foreign Affairs | Comments (3)

Madness

July 17, 2018 – 6:55 pm

How wearying it is to watch the reaction of the press, and of his political enemies, to President Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin. The hyperbole — “Treason! Pearl Harbor! Kristallnacht!” — would be comical if we weren’t already at about the halfway point on the road to civil war. (This is the same crowd, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Politics | Comments (2)

Get Thee Behind Me

July 15, 2018 – 12:30 pm

I’m still too distracted by my houseful of relatives — four generations in all! — to do any writing, or even to pay any serious attention to the wider world, but I feel it necessary to post something — anything! — to push that smirking, malevolent avatar of villainy down the page. But if I […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

The Screwtape Hearing, or Your Tax Dollars At Work

July 13, 2018 – 1:28 pm

My God, this man:    

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (4)

The Marshmallow Diet

July 11, 2018 – 11:42 am

Over at Kakistocracy, Porter tosses and gores one Jessica Wood, a Ph.D. student at the university of Guelph, who has written a report that arrives at the following conclusion: “We found people in consensual, non-monogamous relationships experience the same levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological well-being and sexual satisfaction as those in monogamous relationships… This debunks […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science, Rubbish, Reaction | Comments (3)

Free Radicals

July 10, 2018 – 12:41 pm

Here’s a good recent item by “Z-Man” on the effects of cultural and sexual rootlessness. Excerpt: Maybe a better way of thinking about the sexual aspect of our cultural crisis is that both men and women are haunted by different specters. For instance, our women are growing increasingly deranged, not because men are wimps, but […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Service Notice

July 9, 2018 – 2:17 pm

If things are a bit quiet here over the next few weeks, it’s because we have a full house — our daughter Chloe, her husband Chris, and our little grandson Liam are here from Vienna to stay with us in Wellfleet for a few weeks, and later this week they’ll be joined by our son […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

What America Isn’t

July 9, 2018 – 1:15 pm

If you are as fatigued as I am by that false and flyblown “nation of immigrants” propagandum, you will read with appreciation this item, by Pedro Gonzalez, at American Greatness.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction, Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (0)

The Magic Feather

July 6, 2018 – 9:37 pm

Our friend Bill Vallicella quoted this, from Michael Anton, on Independence Day: For the founders, government has one fundamental purpose: to protect person and property from conquest, violence, theft and other dangers foreign and domestic. The secure enjoyment of life, liberty and property enables the “pursuit of happiness.’ Government cannot make us happy, but it […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (9)

Right, Tea Break’s Over

July 5, 2018 – 8:48 am

Yesterday, on the nation’s 242nd birthday, I asked if we could set strife aside for a day, and just be grateful to live in such a remarkable nation. It occurred to me immediately after writing that line, though, that simple gratitude for the nation we have is itself a deeply conservative disposition. Joseph Sobran described […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (1)

242!

July 4, 2018 – 11:12 am

Happy Independence Day, America. And to all of you, dear readers, as well. I hope we can set strife aside for a day to appreciate how lucky we are to live in this extraordinary country.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Well, Right

July 3, 2018 – 12:25 pm

Here’s a peppery little post by one Anne Carter on the state of public discourse: Shrieking Monkeys. Ms. Carter is a Southerner, and so, not having been farm-raised in the Yankee waters that our ruling classes have swum in all their lives, she is in a position to notice the moralizing and missionary zeal that […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Religion | Comments (5)

The October Revolution

July 2, 2018 – 12:59 pm

Bernie Sanders Is Not the Left

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

Worlds In Collision

July 1, 2018 – 12:25 pm

Here’s a brief, two-part discussion between John Batchelor and historian Michael Vlahos (of Johns Hopkins) on signs of civil war. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Some previous entries in this ongoing conversation are here, here, and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)