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 […]
Here’s a good recent item by “Z-Man” on the effects of cultural and sexual rootlessness. Excerpt: Maybe a better way of thinking about the sexual aspect of our cultural crisis is that both men and women are haunted by different specters. For instance, our women are growing increasingly deranged, not because men are wimps, but […]
If you are as fatigued as I am by that false and flyblown “nation of immigrants” propagandum, you will read with appreciation this item, by Pedro Gonzalez, at American Greatness.
Yesterday, on the nation’s 242nd birthday, I asked if we could set strife aside for a day, and just be grateful to live in such a remarkable nation. It occurred to me immediately after writing that line, though, that simple gratitude for the nation we have is itself a deeply conservative disposition. Joseph Sobran described […]
Here’s a brief, two-part discussion between John Batchelor and historian Michael Vlahos (of Johns Hopkins) on signs of civil war. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Some previous entries in this ongoing conversation are here, here, and here.
Bill Vallicella weighs in on the natural-rights question we’ve been discussing, here. We read: The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don’t have rights to life, liberty, and property […]
Two posts ago we read Michael Anton’s emailed reply to a collection of questions I’d posted in Part 1 of this series. I mailed back a response, and received another reply in return. (There the correspondence stands, for the moment, as I’ve been traveling and working the past couple of days. I’d also like to […]
Our commenter Jacques has replied, in an email to me, to Michael Anton’s response (published in our previous post). I am posting it below. Michael Anton (on the question of “natural rulers”): “One can raise all sorts of objections to this. For instance, if Trump is such a natural ruler, why did he lose the […]
My last two posts (here and here) were in response to an extensive review, by Michael Anton, of Thomas West’s new book on the American Founding, and to a comment by our reader Jacques. In Saturday’s post I laid out some questions that I thought the review, and Jacques’ comment, had raised. I did not […]
In my previous post I linked to a review, by Michael Anton, of a new book on the American Founding by Thomas G. West of Hillsdale College. I have a keen interest in the Founding, and in particular I am, like nearly everyone in the “neoreactionary” community, dogged by the question of just where things […]
I’ve just read a remarkable review, by Michael Anton, of a new book by Thomas G. West, who is a professor at Hillsdale College. (You may know Michael Anton as ‘Publius Decius Mus’, the author of the celebrated essay “The Flight 93 Election” that argued for the necessity of electing Donald Trump in 2016.) Professor […]
As we all know, the accelerating edge of cultural evolution is steered and sharpened at our nation’s institutes of higher learning. Long gone is the cultural Pleistocene of my youth, when one could simply live and think according to the principles, customs, precepts, guidelines, mores, and traditions our parents learned as children, and passed along […]
Well! It being The Current Year, the beauty pageant “Miss America”, an iconic American institution, has announced that it will no longer be judging contestants on their appearance, and is getting rid of the swimsuit competition. (As “Iowahawk” quipped online: “well, I guess they can move it to radio now.” We read: The organization is […]
Long ago, in a previous age of the world, I found myself in the recording studio with a guitar player, a member of an immensely popular costumed rock band, who was working on a self-financed solo album project. Solo projects by famous band members being, in general, notoriously unsuccessful, I asked him one evening if […]
There is something unspeakably sad about watching a great nation in terminal cultural collapse — especially when it is the nation that gave birth not only to the place one calls home, but also to one’s own parents. The U.K., having over the course of half a century slowly plucked out its own bones, now […]
You may recall a fellow by the name of Chris Langan (I wrote about him here, back in 2009). He has one of the highest IQs ever measured, but after a hard early life has lived quietly, without attracting much attention. Yesterday I stumbled on a link to a page on the Q&A website Quora, […]
A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump can’t block Twitter users from following him. Here’s a key excerpt from the ruling, by Judge Naomi Buchwald of New York’s Southern District: We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account — the “interactive space’ where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President’s […]
The brilliant but relentlessly optimistic Steven Pinker offered today a link to a brief article about a new cross-cultural study of human morals. The article, which you can read here, lists seven moral rules that seem to be universal to all cultures. They are: 1) Love your family. 2) Help your group. 3) Return favors. […]
It was only yesterday that I mentioned Jonah Goldberg’s latest book, Suicide of the West, and mentioned in passing Paul Gottfried’s critique of Mr. Goldberg’s earlier money-maker, Liberal Fascism. Well, just today Professor Gottfried has published a review of Goldberg’s book over at VDare — and as you might imagine, it is not favorable. Read […]
From Spandrell: here, here, and here are three posts outlining an idea — “Bioleninism” — that seeks to explain the steady movement leftward of political systems, and the shift, beginning in the 1960s or so, from economic to cultural Marxism as the vehicle for that movement. The model seems coherent and plausible. It also has […]
I’m driving all day, but for now here’s a brief item on the political consequences of shifting American demographics. Rising diversity at national scale increases tribalism, destroys cohesion, diminishes liberty, and fosters divisive competition that throughout history always tends toward fission and violence. What fools we are.
Next stop on the road to Utopia: if the NAACP has its way, you will have your thoughts examined on suspicion of “implicit bias”. (This is because you might, in the tenebrous recesses of your reptilian brain, harbor the monstrous notion that some things are generally different from others, in ways that occasionally matter.) “The […]
My friend Bill Vallicella, having read our recent post and comment-thread on Rod Dreher’s essay on Marx (see Bill’s recent post on the same article, here), noted my formulation of the consistent principle of our opponents in the current culture war: Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always. (The […]
The term of the moment is “incel”, which is short for “involuntarily celibate”. It rose to virality after a young man associating himself with the “incel” movement ran down a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto last month. The young-adult liberal website Vox explains the term here. There is now a bit of a reaction underway […]
There’s been an interesting discussion over at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website about the Constitution’s prohibition, in Article VI, of a “religious test” for public office. The discussion, with an anonymous Canadian philosopher (although, as was said once of Newton, “we recognize the lion by his claw”), spans several posts. In the first post in […]
April 26, 2018 – 12:37 pm
You’ve probably heard about the Alfie Evans affair in England, in which Her Majesty’s Government, having decided that a young boy in a persistent coma ought to be dead, has been trying to kill him, and has prevented his parents from taking him elsewhere for treatment. It’s a disgusting and horrifying story, and should remind […]
April 26, 2018 – 12:05 pm
Over the transom today: It’s “ethically inappropriate’ for government and medical organizations to describe breastfeeding as “natural’ because the term enforces rigid notions about gender roles, claims a new study in Pediatrics. “Coupling nature with motherhood”¦ can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that […]
April 11, 2018 – 11:16 am
From Twitter today: Your great-grandmother: 12 kids Your grandmother: 6 kids Your mother: 2 kids You: pic.twitter.com/foxFyXJ17P — Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) April 11, 2018 Cosmologists wonder about a thing called the “Great Filter“. It may be as simple as this.
The scales have fallen from Rod Dreher’s eyes. Commenting on Harvard’s decision to suspend and defund a campus religious organization, he says that his belief in “compatibilism” — the idea that it is possible for orthodox religion to coexist peaceably with the modern liberal state — is over. Regarding the new liberal order, he notes […]
Last Saturday’s post was about the scuffle between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over the role of genetics in the varying distribution of cognitive, behavioral, and personality traits in distinct human populations (and over Mr. Harris’s association with Charles Murray, whom people like Klein accuse of peddling racism and “pseudoscience”). I linked to Andrew Sullivan, […]