Politics
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I went off on another trail, as is my tendency, and haven't finished this book yet. But at this point, about halfway through, I think it may be the best book I've ever read on the contemporary social-political situation. Maybe that's not saying a lot, since I haven't read many such books. Suffice to say…
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The fatal flaw of liberalism was always its pretense or fantasy that the state could and would remain neutral on most questions of value, especially the big ones. This illusion was only possible because there was a broad consensus on most of the most serious matters in that realm. When, almost immediately after the establishment…
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This is not a review, because I'm only on page 68 of this book. But I can't resist quoting from it. So far it seems to be the most incisive and thorough critique of liberalism I've seen. It's plain that liberalism, the doctrine of maximum freedom for all, is in fact exhibiting a paradoxical drift…
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Richard Dawkins, generally lauded for his attacks on Christianity, discovers that some religions are still protected classes in the eyes of the enlightened world. I guess I find it amusing because it's two factions of the neo-Enlightenment snarling at each other, and especially because of the wildly inapplicable use of the weapon of first and…
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I had a brief debate with a friend on Facebook the other day about the meaning of the term "pro-life." In brief, he objected to its being only a synonym for "anti-abortion," and wanted it to have a broader meaning, taking in all the things one might believe or do to support the intrinsic value…
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And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his…
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For the second time (at least), Justice Kennedy demonstrates that being a fool is no bar to being a Supreme Court Justice.
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When my wife and I got married she owned a copy of Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, not to mention several other feminist works of the time, which in retrospect should perhaps have worried me a little. But in the early '70s most college girls with any sort of intellectual inclination read things like…
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Here's something else I've revisited in the process of selecting Sunday Night Journals for inclusion in a book: a series of posts from 2006-7 called "The Liberal Conservative," in which I lay out at some length my notion of a meaningful conservatism. It covers a lot of the ground we've visited here in recent discussions…
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We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here. –Barack Obama
Light On Dark Water 