December 24, 2013 – 5:25 pm
We’ve already discussed the Duck Dynasty brouhaha at sufficient length (and then some), but I wouldn’t want you to miss Bill Vallicella’s recent post about it: Some Points on Homosexuality in the Context of the Culture War.
December 19, 2013 – 12:22 pm
The big news story of the day is that a good-natured Christian man from Louisiana has expressed an opinion that, while in full concordance with traditional Christian beliefs, is, in eyes of the modern Cathedral, a grievous heresy. (If “no news is good news”, I suppose we should all be relieved.) You can read about […]
December 17, 2013 – 11:34 pm
James Taranto had a very good piece in his daily Best of the Web edition yesterday, but before I could write it up, my pal Mangan beat me to it. So go and find it at his place.
December 12, 2013 – 5:57 pm
Well, political junkies, here it is: Politifact’s Lie of the Year. (One could bicker about which year it really belongs to, but it’s certainly a whopper, and had a major effect on the course of events.) Of course there are far bigger specimens out there — submerged monsters big enough to affect the very currents […]
December 7, 2013 – 11:05 pm
Back in July, I wrote the following: To the conservative, traditions arise naturally from the workings of human nature, as part of the ontogeny and organic development of societies. They are not the result of scientific planning or sociological theorizing — and like biological species themselves, they only come into view in retrospect. They are, […]
November 29, 2013 – 11:34 pm
Another of our steeples drench’d, I’m afraid. More here. We are dying, dying…
November 27, 2013 – 12:19 pm
From the blogger known as ‘educationrealist’, here’s a penetrating look at Common Core, and some of the reasons why it is such a bad idea. One of the reasons it’s a bad idea: it fails to acknowledge an essential and utterly self-evident truth, namely that the ability to learn and master complex topics is not […]
November 22, 2013 – 10:20 pm
Our e-pal ‘hbd* chick’ (a scholar of human reproductive patterns and variation whose outstanding blog should be on your regular reading list, if it isn’t already) posted an excellent item yesterday on the increasing difficulties confronting adherents of the ideological cult of Diversity in the face of damning and discrediting evidence. (At this point the […]
November 20, 2013 – 11:32 pm
It seems to me that race is more in the news today than ever — and I’m old enough to remember the 1960s. For something that, according to all goodthinkful people, doesn’t even exist, it sure does get a lot of attention. Or not, depending on the context. For example, the media seem just now […]
November 18, 2013 – 10:21 pm
I pass this along without comment: an actual television show, from Japan.
November 7, 2013 – 10:49 pm
Here’s a 3D-printed 1911. In metal.
October 23, 2013 – 10:43 am
It is generally the case that bien-pensant women (and not just the women!) in advanced Western societies are eager to crush all vestiges of “gender” differences. They imagine a world in which half of all soldiers, network admins, metallurgists, auto mechanics, and oil-rig workers are female, and half of all librarians, nurses, pre-school teachers, cosmetologists, […]
October 11, 2013 – 11:41 pm
With a hat tip to our friend Mangan: sitting will kill you.
October 10, 2013 – 9:55 pm
On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move like maggots in a tin. — Theodore Dalrymple, visiting a club. From Life at the Bottom, Kindle location 1408.
October 8, 2013 – 3:29 pm
In a new worldwide evaluation of various cognitive skills, Americans have made a poor showing. Americans performed below the international average on math, reading and problem-solving on the exam, known as the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. U.S. math skills lagged far behind top performers, including Japan and Finland. The Organisation for […]
October 4, 2013 – 2:20 pm
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own […]
September 28, 2013 – 2:59 pm
Here is the opening of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, pp 25-26, 1986. (My emphasis.) For “openness”, you may substitute “non-discrimination”. There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put […]
September 21, 2013 – 9:48 am
Here’s the comedian Louis C.K., with some remarkably insightful remarks on the popularity of smart-phones and the human condition. Blaise Pascal said: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room’. We would rather see, or do, almost anything rather than be forced to look […]
September 19, 2013 – 1:40 pm
Cleverly displayed, using animated maps. Here.
September 16, 2013 – 4:20 pm
Jonah Goldberg has posted a tart essay on the Left’s conceit that it is they, not conservatives, who stand on the side of personal liberty. We read: Alleged proof for this amusing myth (or pernicious lie; take your pick) comes in the form of liberal support for gay marriage and abortion rights, and opposition to […]
September 13, 2013 – 4:24 pm
A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, economic, cultural, mathematical, and biological realities of the actual world. The California […]
September 2, 2013 – 12:09 pm
Mark Steyn: The problem with the American way of war is that, technologically, it can’t lose, but, in every other sense, it can’t win. Here.
August 29, 2013 – 1:44 pm
Writing at Taki’s, John Derbyshire marks the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s greatest oration by contrasting a world of genuine obstacles with a modern-day retreat into magical thinking. Here.
August 8, 2013 – 12:22 pm
Sometimes, scientific research leads to conclusions that are starkly at odds with ordinary experience, with common sense, and with the received wisdom of the ages. Not so here, however: a new study from the UK finds a correlation between ethnic diversity (“lower own-group density”) and psychosis. From the abstract: Results For every ten percentage point […]
August 7, 2013 – 10:51 pm
Steven Pinker has just published an article that seemed to be getting a lot of attention earlier today. His essay is a rejoinder to the claim, made by many in the humanities, that scientifically minded secular types are besotted by “scientism”, which is nothing more than a new form of faith masquerading as pure rationality. […]
Note: I’ve taken down this post for now, in order to rewrite it. Feel free to email me about it: malcolm [at] malcolmpollack.com.
August 1, 2013 – 12:39 pm
It seems the moderate center of just about everything is vanishing. A decades-long process of political electrophoresis has pulled us all, it seems, to one pole or the other; the mediating layers of civil association that were the heart of American life in Tocqueville’s day are withering, leaving the atomized and deracinated citizen standing alone […]
We note with continuing satisfaction that Mayor Bloomberg’s big-soda ban has been nullified once again in the courts, this time on appeal. (Our reaction to the original ruling is here.) The issue here is personal responsibility. Implicit in this ban is the idea that it is the proper role of the State to intervene in […]
Mark Steyn on Detroit, which is scrounging around for assets to liquidate: What else is left to sell? Windsor has already offered to buy Detroit’s half of the Detroit/Windsor tunnel, perhaps to wall it up. With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we’re told that “innovation hubs” and “enterprise zones” are the answer. Seriously? In my book […]
From an article on today’s ruling by Ingham County Circuit judge Rosemary Aquilina, who has blocked Detroit’s bankruptcy filing: “It’s cheating, sir, and it’s cheating good people who work,’ the judge told assistant Attorney General Brian Devlin. “It’s also not honoring the (United States) president, who took (Detroit’s auto companies) out of bankruptcy.’ Aquilina said […]
Detroit, once a great American city, is filing for bankruptcy. Draw your own conclusions; I’m not going to spell this one out for you.
With the Zimmerman verdict still reverberating, the blogger known as Ace of Spades has written an excellent contribution to that “national conversation” we’re supposed to be having. Read it here. Also, in case you missed it, here’s George Zimmerman’s brother dismantling Piers Morgan shortly after the verdict.
The Department of Justice, frustrated by the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, is determined to crucify George Zimmerman anyway, whatever it takes. (This is, apparently, necessary in order to fulfill the DOJ’s primary mission: to “alleviate tensions, address community concerns and promote healing’.) Despite the FBI having determined that there was no evidence that […]
Well, as you all know by now, George Zimmerman was cleared of all counts last night in the Trayvon Martin shooting. There’s little to cheer about here, beside the fact that the legal system worked as intended. An unarmed 17-year-old has been shot dead, and another young man will never know a day’s peace as […]
In 1965, near the end of a long lifetime of scholarly study and reflection, the great historians Will and Ariel Durant brought forth a slim volume called The Lessons of History, a companion to their magnum opus, The Story of Civilization. The third chapter, Biology and History, deals with topics now associated with the dissident […]
Our recent post on differing views of the importance of tradition led to a disagreement, in the comment thread, on whether American culture was in decline. No, said our interlocutor “the One Eyed Man”, quite the contrary: While you fret about “our own rapidly vanishing culture,’ the rest of the world frets that their cultures […]
In our recent discussion of the Supreme Court’s DOMA ruling, our reader Peter, “The One Eyed Man”, made the following response to the suggestion that marriage was a tradition so ancient, and so universal, that some care might be warranted in tampering with it: Tradition alone does not justify continuance in perpetuity. Well, I don’t […]
Here’s a weekend roundup of loosely related items. Mark Steyn’s been dipping his quill in aqua regia as usual this week, and from him we have a pair of items. First up is an NRO piece called The Simulacrum of Self-Government, in which Mr. Steyn describes: …just another day in the life of the republic: […]
I seem to be linking to Bill Vallicella a lot lately, but that’s just because he says a lot of sensible things, and says them well. In a fine, short post from a couple of days ago, he asks: Why Not Stick To Philosophy? Why indeed? Having worked hard enough for long enough to have […]
The New York Times‘s omphaloskeptic opinionator Charles Blow has outdone himself in his latest column, in which he presents a gallimaufry of depressing (and unsurprising) statistics about the accelerating disintegration of the American nation and culture, then stands blinking in the rubble, as if to say “what happened”? What has happened, Mr. Blow, is the […]
Here’s a paper worth reading carefully, from Frank Salter and Henry Harpending: J.P. Rushton’s theory of ethnic nepotism In brief, the paper argues that in ethnically diverse settings, the statistical advantage conferred by intra-ethnic altruistic cohesion is sufficient to create significant group-level selection pressure, even when the actual kin relations are fairly weak.
This from Mangan just now, regarding the NSA phone-surveillance revelation: As I’ve said, oh, about a hundred times already, the best way to prevent terrorism is to prevent the terrorists from entering the country. Had the Bombing Borat Brothers not been allowed refugee status, that whole episode would never have happened. Sure, we get a […]
In case you missed it: Verizon forced to hand over telephone data Long ago, Charles Dickens wrote this about the United States: I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at Liberty’s head will be dealt by this nation in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.
This latest current-events biopsy further confirms the diagnosis.
You’ve heard the term lately, no doubt. If you’re wondering what it means, have a look here: Parking Tickets Issued on Wrecks while Stockholm Burns We read: [W]hile the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ’Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,’ Stockholm Chief […]
I think it’s time for a brief review of some simple, obvious facts about human nature and the character of human societies. 1) People generally prefer to live with others like themselves. Even in highly diverse places like great port cities, people generally associate homogeneously in their private lives. 2) In highly homogeneous societies, those […]
Over the transom tonight comes a link to Victor Davis Hanson’s latest: a summary of just how dangerous the bloat and rot and corruption of our Executive Branch has become. We read: Government has become a sort of malignant metastasizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of […]
Yesterday I wrote, with regard to the Richwine affair, that “in their ardor to eliminate, for all time, every form of discrimination ”” which righteous Quest, infinite and unbounded, is the holiest sacrament of our new secular religion ”” it seems that many on the multiculturalist Left are more than willing to bring Truth itself […]
In recent days we’ve linked to an assortment of comments on the public flaying and excommunication of Jason Richwine. (The linked items have all been supportive; had I found anything from the other side that I thought was intellectually respectable enough to offer our readers, I would have done so. If you readers have anything […]