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 […]
October 22, 2019 – 8:24 pm
A few weeks ago, as I recovered from a bad cold, I posted a review, by Michael Anton, of the book Bronze Age Mindset, by an unknown author writing as “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). At the time I said: The book is essentially a Nietzschean manifesto — though it describes itself not as a work […]
October 18, 2019 – 8:42 pm
Back in August, the New Yorker ran an interview with Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The interview was, of course, adversarial: Professor Wax, a woman of exceptional intelligence and courage, is an outspoken conservative and defender of traditional Western values and ideas. In this interview […]
October 1, 2019 – 5:07 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s the latest insanity from the Ministry of Truth: woke math. It’s easy to see why mathematical literacy has to go: numbers don’t lie.
September 26, 2019 – 1:52 pm
Mencius Moldbug: [W]hen we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said “how ya doin,” invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this […]
September 25, 2019 – 9:57 pm
This seems timely: here are the two latest installments of John Batchelor’s ongoing conversation with historian Michael Vlahos about the darkening clouds of civil war. In these two segments (twenty minutes in all), the two discuss messianic and millenarian revolutionary movements, past and present. Things do seem to have ratcheted up a bit, even […]
September 3, 2019 – 7:07 pm
Engineering firms have a difficult problem to solve: the laws of the actually existing world upon which their products operate are unsentimental and unforgiving. The judges of an engineer’s work are not feelings or opinions, but the simple and ruthlessly objective criteria of success or failure, and the stakes are high. If a bridge is […]
August 31, 2019 – 3:44 pm
We hear all the time — it’s a favorite trope of our current crop of Democratic candidates — that the United States has a shamefully high percentage of people living in poverty. Not so fast, say the authors of a new study. Where these accusations go wrong is that they measure only paychecks, and not […]
August 21, 2019 – 8:19 pm
A young man by the name of Joshua Lawson, who is a graduate student at Hillsdale College, has written a vigorous response to the New York Times’s Orwellian project of “reframing” all of American history as a Marxist narrative of racial oppression. The essay is published at The Federalist. Mr. Lawson provides moral and historical […]
August 19, 2019 – 1:34 pm
If any of you had any lingering illusions about the New York Times being any sort of impartial “news” agency, you can put them to rest. In an all-hands staff meeting last week, executive editor Dean Baquet announced in explicit terms that, the paper’s propaganda war against Donald Trump having suffered a defeat in the […]
August 15, 2019 – 8:27 pm
Michael Anton has published an outstanding essay at Claremont’s American Mind — his best, I think, since his influential “Flight 93 Election” piece back in 2016. The essay begins with a discussion of the mainstream-media narrative surrounding mass shootings, and of the collaboration of the pseudoconservative pundits he calls the “Vichycons” in support of that […]
I’ve paid little attention to the news over the past few days, but two related stories have percolated through. The first is the decision by the city of Charlottesville, VA, to put an end to its annual celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. Older readers, who received their education prior to the Ministry of Truth having […]
This morning’s assortment of email alerts included a fine short essay by Anthony Esolen, writing at American Greatness on the subject of “toxic masculinity”. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a longish excerpt: We’ve all been hearing plenty about “toxic masculinity’ these days, and never from people who trouble to tell us what […]
From Richard Fernandez: what happened in Portland this weekend — an unholy merger of self-imagined virtue with willingness to inflict terror — is nothing new. (Just ask Robespierre.)
The New York Times has published an article, with lovely graphics, explaining that the GOP is now an extreme right-wing party, while the Democrats — whose presidential candidates were on stage tonight calling for, among other things, abolishing private healthcare, stripping and redistributing legally earned wealth that they believe to be “in the wrong hands”, […]
Yesterday’s post, in which I attempted a taxonomy of civil war, brought out a long and sorrowful reply from a reader by the name of Casey. I began to respond in the comment-thread, but the concern Casey expressed seems to me so prevalent in traditionalist and conservative circles lately that I thought that I should […]
In David Armistead’s fascinating and insightful book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, the author distinguishes three kinds of civil war: “successionist”, “supersessionist”, and “secessionist”. Successionist civil wars are those that are fought over which individual shall sit atop a nation’s institutional hierarchy. The king dies. Who will succeed him? In this sort of war […]
My friend Bill Vallicella has posted another interesting item on the idea of America as a “proposition nation”. Bill, who is quite rightly trying to find a middle way between open-borders multiculturalism and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, begins by citing with approval a quote from Patrick Buchanan: But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, […]
Do you still read the papers? Do you send a letter to the editor now and then, or leave a comment at the online version? Enjoy it while it lasts, warns John Derbyshire. Here.
In Monday’s post about Angela Saini’s race-denialist polemic, I should have added a few words about the deep moral and philosophical errors that lead so many people to fear, and to seek to suppress, the stubborn realities of human biodiversity. (“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”) For Americans […]
I haven’t paid much attention to baseball this year (although if you do, I’ll make a shameless plug for my son Nick’s outstanding baseball-analysis website, Pitcher List). But I have just noticed that what used to be called the “disabled list” is now the “injured list”. Why? It’s because the word “disabled” might offend someone. […]
Here’s an item for you: an advocacy group called “Super Happy Fun America” says it has been granted a permit for a Straight Pride Parade to be held in Boston this August. Their motto: “It’s great to be straight!” (Also, apparently, “Please don’t hate me — I was born this way.”) They even have a […]
The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment is insufficient to sustain our civilization against moral, spiritual and philosophical exhaustion — and so he calls us back to the faith that built […]
Yesterday our friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, commented on a 2018 column by Mackubin Thomas Owens about kinds of nationalism. Mr. Owens says that American nationalism is good and necessary because it is of the right sort: an allegiance only to a set of philosophical principles. Bill singled out this passage: Much of today’s […]
Is it possible to balance order and entropy in complex societies while maintaining vitality and avoiding sclerosis and stasis? If we look at societies as living systems, they must maintain a dynamic, not static, equilibrium: to sustain life, energy must flow through them without disturbing the complex balance of internal parts and subsystems. They must […]
I note two related items in the media today: one is this story, about introducing a new “adversity score” to the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the other is this essay, by Heather Mac Donald, about the poor performance of “diversity hires” in elite law-firms. The link between them, is, of course, an unfortunate truth, previously […]
April 30, 2019 – 10:13 pm
One thing that you may have noticed is that where science conflicts with hegemonic ideology, science takes a beating. (You shouldn’t have much difficulty thinking of both historical and contemporary examples, from Galileo to E.O. Wilson, and I’m sure Judith Curry would agree.) Nowhere is this more apparent in our own time than in the […]
April 25, 2019 – 10:49 pm
Here’s the story of the day: BOSTON ”“ A Massachusetts judge was indicted Thursday on charges that she helped a man who was living in the U.S. illegally sneak out a back door of the courthouse to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent. Newton District Court Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph and former court officer […]
Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher comments on a blog-post by one Sofia Leung, who is “The Teaching And Learning Program Manager at MIT Libraries”. Ms. Jeung writes: If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) […]
April 16, 2019 – 12:46 pm
We all saw the horrifying news of the fire at Notre Dame yesterday. It was unspeakably sad. It was also, as others have also noted, perhaps the most powerful metaphor imaginable for the death of Christian Europe. (Can you think of a more iconic symbol of high Western civilization anywhere on the Continent? I can’t.) […]
April 10, 2019 – 12:31 pm
Here. (See also this, from, of all places, Vox).
The House held a hearing on “white nationalism” today. One of the speakers was the conservative black woman Candace Owens, who gave a rousing opening statement. You can watch it here. The focus on “white nationalism” by the Left has been a clever and effective tactic, one that exploits the essence of the conservative disposition. […]
March 19, 2019 – 11:46 pm
Having read Rachel Fulton Brown’s commentary on the New Zealand massacre, you should now go and read Peter Brimelow’s. His point is a simple one: when nations are deliberately destroyed, and all peaceful means of preventing the calamity are suppressed, what remains will be evil reactions by violent men.
March 19, 2019 – 11:34 pm
I’ve just read an item at American Greatness about the Christchurch massacre. The article is by Rachel Fulton Brown, a professor of medieval history who keeps an excellent blog called Fencing Bear At Prayer. I am an admirer of Ms Brown’s — there are many reasons for me to be — and her essay rightly […]
March 17, 2019 – 11:22 pm
A couple of months ago I posted an item about Germany’s ostentatious effort to rely on solar and wind power: a flamboyant exercise in virtue-signalling that has become a spectacular, and costly, failure. (I should add that I also consider those giant windmills we now see everywhere — someone has aptly called them “eco-crucifixes” — […]
The world is aghast today at the news of a massacre in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter was a white Australian; the victims were Muslims. As I write the death-toll stands at forty-nine. This is a horror, a sickening atrocity. It is important to try to understand what happened here, especially as […]
March 14, 2019 – 10:01 pm
The immensely profitable and influential hate-propaganda racket known as the Southern Policy Law Center is in the news today for firing its 82-year-old founder, Morris Dees, for unspecified “personnel violations”. I’m glad to hear it, of course: the SPLC is a “social-justice” flim-flam in the business of organized slander against everyone to its right, and […]
March 12, 2019 – 12:10 am
So good to see someone refusing to grovel for once. Give ’em hell, Tucker.
Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those […]
February 22, 2019 – 12:10 am
Justin Smollett was arrested today. His story of having been attacked by Trumpist rednecks because he is black and gay was indeed a hoax, as I think most of us pretty much knew from the beginning. The story now is that he perpetrated this flim-flam because he was dissatisfied with what he was being paid […]
February 19, 2019 – 7:27 pm
As the Jussie Smollett “hate-crime” flim-flam falls apart, the Daily Caller has put together a list of some of the more sensational faux-racist hoaxes of the Trump era. You can read it here. It was obvious from the beginning that this Smollett business was a sham. First of all, it took place in the middle […]
February 10, 2019 – 1:27 pm
Having pushed their doddering elders down the stairs, and finding among the corpses’ effects the keys to the family car, our newly crowned juvenocracy is wasting no time in taking it for a joyride. The leader pro tempore of this posse of hopped-up teens is a yakkity Chavista bird-brain by the name of Ocasio-Cortez — […]
February 8, 2019 – 9:52 pm
In my previous post I expressed qualified approval for Tuesday’s State of the Union address. Some commenters took me to task for this, because hey, we’re still doomed. They’re right, we probably are. And make no mistake, there’s plenty for a conservative, let alone a reactionary, not to like about Donald Trump, and about the […]
February 3, 2019 – 11:47 pm
There was a horrible story in the local news today: A young woman, pregnant, was stabbed to death in an apartment-building lobby. We read: The killer targeted the 35-year-old woman’s stomach, according to the building super, who said she watched surveillance-video footage that captured the murder. “He’s got a knife! He’s going to kill the […]
January 24, 2019 – 4:00 pm
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has just signed into law a bill called the Reproductive Health Act. (You can read it here.) The principal effects of the bill are a) to remove all mention of abortion from the New York State penal code; b) to permit licensed heath-care practitioners to conduct abortions; and c) to […]
January 18, 2019 – 6:35 pm
Here’s the perfect gift for Mom: a vibrator on a necklace. An ad for the product says “Created by a woman to spark both conversations and feelings of empowerment”, while the online blurb refers to the object’s “forward-looking approach”. How, exactly, are these conversations supposed to go? HE: “Hi, nice to meet you. I see […]
January 13, 2019 – 11:32 pm
Please forgive me for the scanty output here of late — I am deeply distracted with work and family matters, so much so that I have had very little to say. But I will direct you to two sharp posts at The Orthosphere, by J.M. Smith and Thomas Bertonneau, on the nature of the frustrated […]
January 10, 2019 – 11:19 am
Netflix has a new hit movie: Birdbox. The idea is a simple one: there are things in the world that, if clearly seen, are so radically discomfiting that those who see them are driven to suicide. So everyone puts on a blindfold. It’s a smashing success. I wonder why?
December 17, 2018 – 10:25 am
I’ve written for years (as have many others on the dissident Right, most notably and influentially Mencius Moldbug) that modern-day Progressivism is in fact a secularized religion. This diagnosis is plainly evident not only in its form and content, but is also confirmed by its genealogy, which reveals a lineage extending back (at least) to […]