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 […]
December 12, 2018 – 3:33 pm
Here’s an illustrative point from Theodore Dalrymple: Curiously, liberals who have long denied that punishment deters crime””or indeed serves any purpose, except to take vengeance on the weak and vulnerable, driven to crime by their wretched circumstances””are generally avid for strong penalties for hate crime. The way to make people like one another is to […]
December 11, 2018 – 10:06 am
As a staunch subsidiarianist, I’ve been pointing out for a while now the perils of centralization and interdependency in global and regional affairs. Just over two years ago I wrote: It is well-known in the engineering disciplines that too-tight “coupling” is at the root of many, if not most, failures of complex systems. Far more […]
November 21, 2018 – 10:01 pm
A couple of weeks ago the voters of New York’s 14th Congressional district, in a spasm of petulant unwisdom, elected to the House of Representatives one Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a garrulous, bug-eyed Jacobin ignoramus not even out of her twenties. Today I learned that the United Nations has appointed Millie Bobbie Brown, a television actress only […]
November 17, 2018 – 1:22 pm
A while back, as further evidence that grievance is fractal, I offered a little post about “TERF War“: the bitter Top-Victim rivalry between radical feminists and men identifying as women. The battle rages on, with a defeat for the biological females in the latest skirmish: apparently a midwestern university has now banned The Vagina Monologues. […]
November 16, 2018 – 10:43 pm
Over at The Orthoshpere, J.M. Smith, who has just turned sixty-one, has posted a piercing essay on the stages of life: not just the lives of men, but of civilizations. They have a great deal in common. We read: It is not only the lives of men that can be seen as passing through a […]
November 16, 2018 – 5:01 pm
The persecution of heretics that has become the chief feature of our age continues: the latest occupant of the ducking-stool is no less than the great cultural and intellectual eminence Sir Roger Scruton. Learn more here.
November 15, 2018 – 10:36 pm
I’ve written before about the ongoing series of conversations between radio host John Batchelor and war historian Michael Vlahos about America’s present-day run-up to a third civil war. Mr. Batchelor is convalescing at the moment (get well soon, sir!), and has been running archived material for the last couple of weeks. Professor Vlahos, though, has […]
November 1, 2018 – 11:12 pm
The next skirmish in the war for religious rights and freedom of association might be the case of the Hope Center, of Anchorage Alaska, a Christian charitable organization that provides succor for the poor and downtrodden. Among the services it provides is a women’s shelter. The shelter’s clients are typically victims of domestic and sexual […]
October 28, 2018 – 12:02 am
Tonight I have for you a recent half-hour talk by Anthony Daniels (A.K.A. Theodore Dalrymple), on the corrosive combined effects of today’s expansive view of rights and the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism. I’ve transcribed some excerpts. Dr. Daniels mentions that he had asked a young patient, who had announced with the glow of religious inspiration […]
October 27, 2018 – 4:03 pm
It’s hard to know what to say in the wake of the sickening horror in Pittsburgh today. Evil is real, and it is always at large in the world. Eleven years ago, in the wake of the Virgina Tech massacre, I wrote this: When this sort of thing happens, the natural reaction here in the […]
October 22, 2018 – 10:11 pm
Back in May I offered a post linking to Spandrell’s essays on what he calls “Bioleninism”: the enormous political power that becomes available to elites who are able to create durable coalitions of naturally low-status members of society. If you haven’t read these yet, you really must do so; it’s all going to be on […]
October 17, 2018 – 9:53 pm
If you’ve been trapped in rubble for the past couple of weeks, and have only just got back online, you might be puzzled to see ‘NPC’ everywhere you look. It stands for ‘non-player character”, and it’s a meme that has spread with amazing rapidity. It also seems to be particularly irritating to our new digital […]
October 9, 2018 – 10:45 am
On Saturday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Alexis Grenell, a Democrat strategist. Had it run even a few years ago, the language it contains would have been shocking; now the piece is only another example of how far that paper (and with it, American culture) has declined. The essay, written under […]
September 19, 2018 – 4:24 pm
About a year ago, I wrote this: Our attention, which is more precious than gold, and the one thing we must master if we are to have any hope at all of inner development, is increasingly spent in a virtual world created, manipulated, and harvested by a few increasingly powerful companies. (Note that we “pay’ […]
August 5, 2018 – 12:36 pm
In a recent post our friend Bill Vallicella sticks to his guns regarding what he considers the “mistake” of looking at the missionary leftism of the modern West as a religion. He prefers to use the alienans expression “ersatz religion” to describe it, while I’ve said all along that it really is a religion — […]
Once again we call your attention to the ongoing conversation between John Batchelor and historian Michael Vlahos on the darkening clouds of civil war. You can find all of these podcast episodes here.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]