Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
If you had told my father in 1965 that someday within his lifetime pornographers would be lionized as champions of the 1st amendment while the Knights of Columbus would be vilified by a United States senator (and now VP candidate) as a dangerous right-wing front group for hate-filled bigots, he would have thought you were … Read more
If it’s all about self-empowerment and doing our own thing, and not about self-sacrifice and doing what we should, we will always have a system in which the strongest, using the tools of technology, will impose themselves upon those who are weaker than they are. If it’s not about love but about power, we should … Read more
It’s an article of faith among many conservatives, and some liberals, that we’re being swept by a Maoist cultural revolution destined to transform American society into a woke collective. Yet before surrendering basics like equality of opportunity, social order, and free speech to leftist authoritarians, we should consider whether they’re the ones who will wind … Read more
Psychopaths are a dangerous lot. They lie as easily as they breathe and when they’re not busy gaslighting people they’re hunting for bits of sensitive information to exploit later on. Clinical therapists recommend that the best way to deal with psychopaths is to avoid them. Yet most people are loath to abandon the little monster … Read more
We live in strange times in which we have become obsessed with race to such a degree that skin colour has become the determinant of all moral rectitude. If we were “fortunate” enough to be born with white skin, we are guilty of “privilege” which is systemically racist; if we were “unfortunate” enough to be … Read more
Critical race theory looks like it’s all about race. But race is merely the tool used to stir up emotional responses that play into the hands of agitators who simply want to control minds. Agitators for critical race theory have fanned out of academia into mind-hacking workaday Americans, trying to convince them the nation is … Read more
The past several days have seen exactly the attacks I predicted on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s family. Upon learning that she and her husband adopted two children from Haiti, I knew those attacks were inevitable. They have nevertheless come as a surprise to people outside the adoption sphere, so it is worth taking a moment … Read more
The organization Black Lives Matter has removed from its website a page that included language condemning America’s “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” The page, titled “What We Believe,” included various public policy positions unrelated to police brutality and police reform. The Washington Examiner discovered on Monday the page had been removed. . . . The Wayback … Read more
Joe Biden has said that he will only appoint “living” constitutionalists to the courts. Unless they find unstated rights in the Constitution, he won’t name them: “I would look to judges, potential nominees, they would have to acknowledge the fact that there are unenumerated rights that are nonetheless constitutional rights; they’re not mentioned by name … Read more
“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.” H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy Related PostsStanford Students Demand Journalist Remove Their Names from Stories … After … Read more
Yesterday, we closed on the sale of our place in Chicago. In August, we bought a place in Nevada. We will be moving out of Illinois to Nevada in 26 days. I was born, raised, and worked in Chicago. I won’t die there. For the last five years, my wife and I have left Chicago … Read more
Those who invoke it refuse to acknowledge any common human ground, a challenge to Christianity itself. . . . As our society fractures into hostile factions without any apparent glue to hold them together, it is an appropriate time to consider our culture’s embrace of “diversity.” Diversity is now the raison d’être of contemporary life, … Read more
Wherever you come down with respect to the debates over re-opening, mask-wearing, and whatever else, all reasonable citizens ought to feel a bit distressed by our collective failure to effectively navigate COVID-19 by saving as many lives and livelihoods as possible. The reasons we have failed to do so are many, but one certainly stands … Read more
Here is a concise explanation of why object to Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and so on. Following Lindsay and Pluckrose, I will use the shorthand “Theory” to describe these ideas or mindsets. 1. Humans have two bases for hierarchies: prestige and dominance. In a prestige hierarchy, such as the international rankings of chess players or … Read more
Note that one term, meant as a criticism, that George Will uses to describe this CDC action is “muscular.” So in this light consider that a Washington Post report today describes – apparently approvingly – the plan that President Biden will implement to fight covid as “far more muscular” than actions taken under the Trump … Read more
It is one thing to peacefully march against injustice, and quite another to burn down what others built up. . . . When my oldest daughter was very young, she asked why we have to pay for things. “Why can’t everything be free?” I explained that if everything were free, no one would work or … Read more
FIRE’s latest video sneaks some psychological science into a cartoon, so that everyone can understand a fable that’s badly needed in these days when our own emperors are so naked. My 9 and 11 year olds liked and mostly got it – it’s a good one to share with your kids and grandkids. The … Read more
Were the lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes. Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I noted in May, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 75,000 and 116,000 people in the … Read more
In 1977, the French essayist, Jean-François Revel, published a tract with the title The Totalitarian Temptation. In it, he condemned the western intelligentsia’s faiblesse, which was at the same time dishonest, posturing, stupid, and evil, for Stalinist-style dictatorships. One might have thought—I certainly thought—that with the downfall of the Soviet Union, the totalitarian temptation had … Read more
Venezuela’s last oil-drilling rig has shut down. Venezuela still has plenty of oil — about one-fifth of the world’s known petroleum reserves are under the jackbooted feet of Hugo Chávez’s heirs. Nothing happened to the oil, and, in spite of the recent coronavirus-related turbulence in the energy business, nothing really happened to the oil market, … Read more
Inexplicably, the woke have beatified their victims. George Floyd has been made a saint, even though he wasn’t exactly a saint when he as alive. Did getting killed make him a better person or just a dead person? Did this guy whose existence registered on no one’s radar before he had the grave misfortune to … Read more
It was in Minneapolis that George Floyd died in police custody, sparking protests and a renewed emphasis on criminal-justice reform nationwide. It was in Minneapolis that protests first descended into riots, with other cities soon following suit. Yet while most of the country will eventually move on from this turmoil, Minneapolis will be among the … Read more
The motive principle animating the riots under way in Kenosha, Portland, etc., is less a conspiracy than it is an emergent religious phenomenon. The model for understanding what is happening in our burning cities is not the Mafia — it’s the Moonies. That radical movements and revolutions take on a religious character is an insight … Read more
Abortion is a serious and sorrowful thing, but the new film ‘Unpregnant’ tries to make it a laughing matter and normalize the loss of life and hope. . . . Even those who support abortion have generally not treated it as a laughing matter. Most people have had the moral decency to recognize the seriousness … Read more
Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had ordered an “eviction moratorium” until after the election. The Surgeon General now prohibits landlords from recouping unpaid rent, because it is “necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases to prevent the spread of an illness.” Or, in … Read more