January 20, 2020 – 4:51 pm
Martin Luther King — or, at least, the man as publicly imagined — would be aghast if he saw how the politics of collectivist grievance-bloc identitarianism — ‘Bioleninism’, to give a nod to the subject of our previous post — has come to dominate American life in the decades since he died. People should be […]
January 20, 2020 – 3:05 pm
Spandrell’s blog, Bloody Shovel, has been moved from WordPress.com to its own domain. This was a wise move – Spandrell has been an influential writer on the reactionary Right for years now — see, for example, his important essays on ‘Bioleninism‘ — and a host like WordPress might have shut him down at any time. […]
January 18, 2020 – 12:32 pm
In a comment on our previous post, Professor J.M. Smith said: Our society is shot through with an incredible amount of intelligence, but a great deal of it seems to work in service of things that are low and stupid. Think of someone snap-chatting selfies using a smartphone and the internet. The end of their […]
January 16, 2020 – 5:59 pm
Ross Douthat published a wistful column at the New York Times the other day, lamenting the death in academia of the Western canon of literature. At the heart of the problem — and the problem itself is, as Chiang Kai-shek once said in an analogous context, a “disease of the heart” — is the death […]
January 14, 2020 – 11:47 pm
Over at Unz Review, Steve Sailer comments on Baltimore’s homicide statistics, in which 303 murders were committed with handguns, and only 9 with long guns (the stats lump together rifles and shotguns, so the number of rifles used was almost certainly fewer than 9). Blunt objects and knives each were used in more murders than […]
January 13, 2020 – 4:51 pm
As they all said, in bone-chilling unison: this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
January 12, 2020 – 1:50 pm
It was with terrible sadness that I learned today that Sir Roger Scruton has fallen from the ramparts at age 75. He was a man of incomparable culture, erudition, discrimination, and integrity. Not only has Western civilization lost one of its greatest defenders; it is also as if a magnificent library has just been burnt […]
January 10, 2020 – 11:08 pm
Women and demographic minorities living in the modern West inhabit the least racist, least sexist society that has ever existed. They have greater liberty, and a broader scope of opportunity, than they have ever had anywhere on earth. Yet to listen to public discourse, or to look over any university’s curriculum, would give a newcomer […]
January 9, 2020 – 10:04 pm
“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen […]
January 8, 2020 – 1:45 pm
In a recent poll, men were almost twice as likely as women to be able to locate Iran on an unlableled map. The overall success rate was a dismal 28%. By sex: 38% of men got it right, and 20% of women.
January 7, 2020 – 5:24 pm
Sanitation. (Hat-tip: Twitter follower @BirddogJones.)
January 6, 2020 – 7:57 pm
Here’s a thing Donald Trump and I have in common: we both had Scottish mothers — mine from Glasgow, and his from the Hebrides. Here too is a thing that the Scots and many of the peoples of the Middle East have in common: they are tribal societies from remote places. In such circumstances — […]
January 6, 2020 – 12:34 pm
Lewis Amselem, a.k.a. “Diplomad”, has put up a rousing post on the Soleimani hit. Best of all, I think, was the bit at the end: Now is the time openly to tell the Iranians that we do not want war, but they should want it much less. We should openly tell them that we will […]
January 5, 2020 – 11:45 pm
I hate awards shows, and never watch them (full disclosure, though: when I was nominated for an engineering Grammy in 2004, I did go) — but I rather have to hand it to Ricky Gervais for tonight’s monologue at the Golden Globes, which was splashed at once all over social media. You can watch it […]
January 4, 2020 – 8:13 pm
In a recent post, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the answers that scientific materialism has offered for some difficult questions. One of these questions is about the astonishing fine-tuning of the physical constants of the natural world: To understand this it’s important to keep in mind what’s called the “Anthropic Principle”. This is the […]
January 3, 2020 – 9:43 pm
Everybody’s abuzz about this Qassem Soleimani business. I don’t have much to say about it, but I’ll say this: First, it’s amusing that some parties seem so persnickety about the legality of striking down a man who made his career in terrorism and assassinations all over the globe. Second, I’m having a hard time seeing […]
January 1, 2020 – 12:37 pm
Buckle up, everybody – I have a feeling 2020 is going to be an eventful year. “Interesting”, even.
December 28, 2019 – 9:33 am
Taking a little holiday break. Back soon.
December 23, 2019 – 6:13 pm
I’ve just read a fine paper by Nathan Cofnas, a doctoral student in philosophy at Oxford, on the censorship. suppression, and misrepresentation of scientific and philosophical inquiry into the heritability of intelligence and the statistical distribution of intelligence in different human populations. The gist is this: that a great deal of evidence has already been […]
December 20, 2019 – 6:34 pm
Some good news: a major MS-13 bust in Long Island.
December 19, 2019 – 6:39 pm
Looking out over the rubble of our political system today, I’m reminded of a post from 2015, in which I argued that the political struggle of Right versus Left is not a contest of different policy preferences, but something far more basic, and more universal, even than human existence itself: the struggle against entropy, against […]
December 17, 2019 – 2:30 pm
A theme of some recent posts here has been the limitations of reason. Reason is a machine: if properly maintained and frequently inspected, it does what it does well enough, but like any machine it can only do some things and not others. Moreover, it is in the nature of this machine not to deal […]
December 14, 2019 – 11:50 pm
I’ve just read Propaganda (1928), by Edward Bernays. Bernays, who died in 1995 at the uncommonly advanced age of 103, was the founder of the modern era of marketing and public relations. (Some would call this a “science”, as it does have an empirical and experimental side.) Bernays makes clear his opinion that the great […]
December 14, 2019 – 4:49 pm
Wellfleet Harbor this afternoon:
December 12, 2019 – 10:10 pm
Outstanding news: it looks like the Right has won a major victory in Britain’s national elections today.
December 11, 2019 – 12:02 am
Here’s an interview given Tuesday by Attorney General Barr. He discusses the Inspector General’s report, and reminds us that it was limited in scope and power, and that the full investigation is the one being conducted by John Durham. (Mr. Barr tells us not to expect anything from that until mid-2020.) Eighteen minutes in, Mr. […]
December 8, 2019 – 5:17 pm
Unless you’re au fait with the musical genre known as “progresssive rock”, you’ve probably never heard of the British musician and producer Steven Wilson. He’s best known as the leader of the now-defunct band Porcupine Tree, but he’s also made quite a few records on his own. I admire his work, which is always good […]
December 7, 2019 – 2:18 pm
Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built […]
December 4, 2019 – 1:37 pm
In a recent item at American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla acknowledges that America is divided beyond the possibility of reconciliation. [R]estoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition […]
December 1, 2019 – 9:11 pm
With the Democratic slate of candidates looking weaker by the day, a lot of people are whispering about Michelle Obama entering the race. She would be a much stronger opponent, I think, than any of the current crop of hopefuls, and the idea of her getting in has some on the Right worried. I don’t […]
November 30, 2019 – 7:03 pm
In the comment-thread of our previous post, J.M. Smith discusses status in academia: I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that […]
November 29, 2019 – 8:50 pm
I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago. There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) […]
November 29, 2019 – 1:52 pm
The other day I was out for a walk in Prospect Park and ran across this: I was reminded of this, which is 39,000 years old: Some things never change, I guess.
November 28, 2019 – 11:42 am
We all have a lot to be thankful for, even in these uncertain times (and when were the times ever not uncertain?). I’m grateful to all of you for reading and commenting. Enjoy this special day — my favorite holiday of the year.
November 27, 2019 – 3:51 pm
Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. “Mencius Moldbug”, has published the second installment of his five-part “Clear Pill” essay series over at The American Mind. The new essay is about how coordinated, pervasive error enters the national culture in distributed, democratic societies — i.e., without the top-down influence of centralized, authoritarian control. The essay is long — in […]
November 24, 2019 – 8:43 pm
Sorry for the thin content here lately. Now and then I just don’t have much to say: I’ve written 5,030 posts over the past 14 years, and sometimes I feel as if anything I’d write would, at this point, just be repeating myself. (And then the muse grants me her favor once again, and I’m […]
November 20, 2019 – 10:38 pm
Staying on message from our Bowie post of a few days ago, here’s a story about Life On Mars — and not just lichens or something, but bugs.
November 19, 2019 – 12:20 am
Steve Sailer famously said that “political correctness is a war on noticing”. There are patterns to reality so stubborn and prevalent that they enable us to make more or less reliable predictions. This is “induction”: reasoning, from accretion of the particular, to general rules that we believe in with increasing confidence as the data accumulate. […]
November 17, 2019 – 12:33 am
A little while back I had David Bowie’s 1977 song Heroes — probably my favorite of all his songs, and that’s saying something — stuck in my head. I thought it might be fun to go downstairs to the studio and see if I could knock it off on my own. Here’s a rough mix […]
November 14, 2019 – 11:23 pm
I see that Pete Buttigieg is now leading the pack of Democratic candidates in polls for the Iowa caucus. I don’t think Mr. Buttigieg, should he win the nomination, will do very well at all against Donald Trump in the general election. It should go without saying that we would not even know his name […]
November 13, 2019 – 10:08 pm
Commenting on our previous item about immigrant gangs in Sweden, and the wave of bombings and shootings they have brought to that previously peaceful nation, reader “Whitewall” offered up this link, from the BBC: Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on? The first subheading asks: Who is to blame? If you thought they might […]
November 12, 2019 – 9:46 pm
Denmark has now instituted border checks with Sweden in response to Sweden’s inability to control its tide of violent crime. According to The Guardian: Denmark has temporarily reinstated checks at its border crossings with Sweden after a spate of bombings and shootings in the Copenhagen area that authorities say were carried out by members of […]
November 12, 2019 – 8:42 pm
I’m back in Wellfleet, after an interesting weekend in Baltimore. It’s snowing here — on November 12th. The temperature is supposed to drop well down into the twenties overnight. I have a feeling, on no particular authority, that it’s going to be a long, cold winter.
November 7, 2019 – 10:40 pm
I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club, and driving back to Cape Cod on Monday. Should get back to business here after that.
November 5, 2019 – 7:06 pm
Michael Vlahos, who for years now has been discussing with John Batchelor the possibility and growing likelihood of a third American civil war, now has a new article up at The American Conservative. He writes about the steps that lead to a crisis of constitutional legitimacy, at which point the outcome is determined by a […]
November 4, 2019 – 5:42 pm
I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Reading in the Kindle makes it possible to highlight passages, and pick them up online (which saves a lot of copying by hand). Here are some of the ones I’ve selected so far: ‣ If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will […]
November 1, 2019 – 10:23 pm
The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium. Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without […]
October 30, 2019 – 4:44 pm
Heather Mac Donald has an article up at The New Criterion about racial preferences in college admissions, with particular attention to a case making its way to the Supreme Court that cites Harvard’s discrimination against Asians. Ms. Mac Donald argues that current SCOTUS jurisprudence on racial preferences is an incoherent mess, and that when the […]