Monthly Archives: August 2026

Times Have Changed

August 31, 2026 – 11:08 pm

Here’s a 1923 SCOTUS case I’d never looked at — United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind — in which the Court had to rule on what constituted a “white person”. Wikipedia summary here.

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

Troller In Chief

August 31, 2026 – 12:24 am

I see that Google Maps now lists Lake Ontario as Lake America! It’s a silly business — it’s obviously just Donald Trump trolling Canadians and the Left (I repeat myself). I had no problem with the old name. But on the other hand, we had to sit back and take it while Columbus Day became […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (4)

A Dose Of Dávila

August 28, 2026 – 7:58 pm

Are you familiar with the reactionary aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila? You should be. Here are a few morsels, to whet your appetite: – “Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.” – “Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (0)

A House Divided

August 27, 2026 – 3:29 pm

Recently there’s been a spate of postings on X from “mainstream conservative” types who are aghast that people on the actual Right have been paying attention to Carl Schmitt. The scoldings generally are of the ad-hominem/genetic-fallacy sort — “Schmitt was a bad guy, and so whatever he says must be bad”, but occasionally also include […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Politics | Comments (7)

Insh’Allah!

August 26, 2026 – 4:43 pm

Here, from The Atlantic, are the opening lines of what its authors surely imagined to be a “scare piece” against the German Right: Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Ourobouros

August 25, 2026 – 2:29 pm

Feminism, especially after the reaction to this Lindsay Clancy case, seems, increasingly, simply to be about the right to kill babies and children. That this is actually a rebellion against the feminine itself is worth noting; it is rage against the very thing that gives the movement its name.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (3)

Say Not The Struggle Nought Availeth

August 24, 2026 – 10:59 pm

“Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.” – Chesterton

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Turtles

August 23, 2026 – 11:21 pm

The great deceit of the age: we hijack axioms and pretend they are theorems, then flatter ourselves on erecting a world that stands on our “reason” all the way to the bottom — as if such a thing were possible. “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Marginalia | Comments (2)

Into The Singularity

August 22, 2026 – 7:54 pm

I believe that that most significant and extraordinary thing that has happened in my lifetime — even more than the great and humiliating rupture of the COVID crimes and lockdowns — is how quickly AI has progressed, how extensively it has already inserted itself into every aspect of our lives, and how blithely we’ve accepted […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (9)

Passing Away

August 21, 2026 – 10:32 pm

Something I never fully appreciated when I was younger was how much of the past completely disappears. It was doing it all along, of course, but my window of personal acquaintance with time was short enough that most of the things I was aware of were still within their own window of currency, and the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Ruminations | Comments (2)

Placeholder

August 20, 2026 – 11:21 pm

The sluice-box is empty tonight, so here’s a photograph I took a few weeks ago:

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (0)

The Roche Limit

August 19, 2026 – 11:19 pm

In the aftermath of yesterday’s primary elections, as I watch the Democratic Party tear itself in two, I’m reminded of a post I wrote nine years ago as this was all beginning to happen. An excerpt: The leftmost edge of the Left has accelerated sharply leftward in recent years. This has exerted tidal stresses on […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (2)

Wiser, Or Just Older?

August 18, 2026 – 11:00 pm

In yesterday’s post I remarked that one of the reasons I’d been slacking off around here was that “I’d begun to wonder if I can really think as well as I used to.” I mentioned Eric Hoffer, who’d wondered the same thing (about himself, of course), at the age of seventy-two. Vito Caiati commented that “As […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Inner Work, Ruminations | Comments (1)

Okay…

August 17, 2026 – 7:47 pm

It’s been a while now, but I think it’s time to try to get things moving again around here. It’s difficult when the Muse goes silent. You freeze up as you approach the blank page. You tell yourself you’ve said everything you have to say, and don’t want to repeat yourself just for the sake […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)