Ten Years After September 11, 2001

Ten years ago today, our country and my family received a terrible blow.  We were attacked.  Our countrymen were murdered.  We were shaken. 9/11 is an important historical event that has defined much of the last ten years, but it was also a family tragedy for me, as my Uncle Donnie Regan gave his life [...]

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The Rigged Moral Calculus of the Western Liberal

Lawrence Auster explains clearly the confustion that results from left-liberal multiculturalism and its combination of insane moralism intramurally among other westerners, while abandoning basic moral standards in dealing with “other” people: [T]he liberal order articulates the world through a “script” in which there are three characters: the white liberal, who embodies the non-discriminatory virtue of the [...]

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Distractions

Vanishing American had a good point about how we are collectively led away from clear thinking on what the problems of the age are: I’m reminded once again of C.S. Lewis’ observation about how each age warns against the very things which are no threat to the prevailing culture: in a libertine culture, people warn [...]

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PC: The New Religion

Jim Kalb is probably one of the greatest observers of all that is wrong about liberalism.  His latest piece on PC notes how it ultimately destroys culture and human life by taking away our ability to live in a truly human way, specifically by destroying our scale of values which involves ranking choices, “styles” of [...]

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Our Fragile PC Universe

The sometimes mocked, but often underestimated, milieu of political correctness in our world is just applied liberalism.  And liberalism is a myth about how the world works.  The individual reigns supreme.  Generalizations are bad.  The West is suspect, particularly because it suggests equality may not be a fact about the universe.  So any facts, opinions, [...]

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A Free Country?

One thing we sometimes forget is that the most important means of social control in communist regimes was the power over your job; if you offended the communist leadership, you could be fired.  It turns out the NJ Transit Authority employee who burned a Koran near the WTC site was fired.  The stated reason, “violating his [...]

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A Real Education Lesson

A rather forthright young lady at Harvard Law mistakenly thought the school was serious about its motto: Veritas.  She calmly and dispassionately explained her views on racial differences, genetics, and various related social problems.  She used no epithets or coarse language.  A member of the Black Law Students Association, and similar associations at other elite [...]

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David Brooks, Conservative

Today in the New York Times: When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. I, by contrast, read Burke my freshman year, fell in love, and wrote my bachelor’s thesis on his philosophy.  One peculiar thing about the neoconservatives is [...]

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Freedom and Culture

One of Bush’s more asinine theories of foreign policy, a theory at the heart of much of neoconservatism, is the idea that everyone everywhere wants American-style freedoms and American-style democracy.  As he said in his 2007 speech on the surge: The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. [...]

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Neoconservatism: A Type of Jewish Thought?

David Bernstein asks this question at the Volokh website.  He raises a number of good points, including probably insoluble ones about whether we can generalize about the ethnic character of any ideology held only by certain members of a group.  After all, most American Jews are not neoconservatives, either explicitly or otherwise.  But his and others’ [...]

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