Politics
-
Some direct quotes from that James Hitchcock piece in Touchstone that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago: …liberalism is now not merely a political philosophy compatible with many kinds of religion but has itself become a religion. …it is expedient for liberals that their movement not be seen as a religion, since it thereby…
-
I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and I find that every time I start collecting my thoughts I discover that events have taken another step. It's dawning on more and more Christians that the movement for homosexual marriage and for approval of homosexuality in general means that the liberal culture is…
-
On the way home from work I listened to the BBC/PRI radio show The World. A BBC foreign affairs writer was interviewed about the Woolwich murders. The interview lasted for somewhere around ten minutes, and the words "Islam" and "Muslim" were never once mentioned. I deplore anti-Islamic hysteria and fear-mongering. But there's nothing to be said…
-
It's almost irrelevant whether we call progressivism a religion or a substitute for religion. Either way, in the really committed progressive, it functions as a religion, providing a coherent world-view and a guide to right thought and right conduct. Here's a young mother on MSNBC gently guiding her daughter in the way she should go:…
-
One of Chesterton's more well-known aphorisms holds that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. It is in that spirit that I generally approach a book review. I really don't enjoy doing them, because I feel obliged to do it in such a way as to give the prospective a reader…
-
You remember her, right? The author of Against Autonomy: Justifiying Coercive Paternalism? Here she is again, making her case in the New York Times apropos the almost-universally-scoffed-at ban on 64-ounce “sodas” (sorry, the term is still a little foreign to me). I continue to be astounded by her serene confidence that social science and government–armed…
-
Probably. Quin Hillyer thinks the tide may be turning against Obama in a big way. I sorta doubt it. But there's one item in that piece that really caught my eye: the quote from an unidentified "Democratic insider" saying that "It’ll take the American people five years to realize what Obama’s really about and what…
-
Heh. No White House tours for us, no golf for you, Mr. President. I don't suppose the congressman's amendment would actually have any effect, but it's an appropriate response to a strikingly petty gesture. The sequestration-wolf-crying doesn't seem to have worked for Obama, with even some media liberals saying he overdid it and could have avoided…
-
The phrase, as you probably know, is the sentence Voltaire passed on the Catholic Church: crush the infamous thing. The Atlantic has been redesigned again, made thinner and flashier, with shorter pieces reduced even further. At the top of one of the pages devoted to these, there's a box labelled "A Very Short Book Excerpt." The…
-
This is a follow-up to the discussion that followed on this post, and to a lesser extent on this one, about the definition of neo-conservatism and of conservatism in general. In a comment on the first one, Grumpy suggested that everyone read George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. As it happens, I…
Light On Dark Water 