Category: Culture Matters
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Democrat-Run Cities: The Case for Letting them Burn to the Ground
Marc Thiessen presents, without endorsing, the case for allowing the social experiment in lawlessness to proceed: Trump declared that enough is enough and that he and Attorney General William P. Barr will soon unveil a plan to “to straighten things out.” But maybe he shouldn’t. The genius of our federal system is that states and localities serve…
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The Bookman and the Rifleman
You know things are getting bad when a bookman must also be a rifleman if he intends to keep his private library safe from the depredations of leftist thugs who are out to 'de-colonize' it. You cannot reach these evil-doers with arguments, for it is not the plane of reason that they inhabit; there are,…
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Can the Humanities be Saved?
Excerpts from, and commentary on, John Gray, Why the Humanities Can't be Saved. HT: Karl White. It is hard to see why any sensible person would enroll in a humanities degree at the present time. A common argument used to be that the humanities taught students how to think. [. . .] This is not…
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Is Speech Violence? Culture War 1.0 and Culture War 2.0
Peter Boghossian: The rules of engagement relate to how we deal with our disagreements. In Culture War 1.0, if an evolutionary biologist gave a public lecture about the age of the Earth based on geological dating techniques, creationist detractors would issue a response, insist that such dating techniques are biased, challenge him to a debate,…
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Double Cultural Appropriation!
Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over…
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Epitaph for a Dying Culture
The 'genius' of Donald Trump, if you want to call it that, is that he is able successfully to bait Democrats into showing the most deeply-dyed and color-fast of their true colors, colors that are not typically on display but hidden beneath layers of mendacity and obfuscation. They now stand exposed as the destructive hard-leftists…
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Can We Keep Silent in a World Gone Mad?
An address by Andrew Klavan at Hillsdale College. Long, but good. So good.
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What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation?
Is acting white cultural appropriation? No doubt, but what's wrong with that? What's wrong with cultural appropriation? I culturally appropriate every day from the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews. Why shouldn't blacks borrow from and make use of the products of white culture? I also appropriate culturally from the Jews who play the blues, who…
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‘Expressive Individualism’ is Becoming a Buzz Word
Or rather a buzz phrase. What does it mean, and where is it from? Where [Alasdair] MacIntyre used the term emotivism to name our moral predicament, in their classic 1985 study of American society, Habits of the Heart, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-writers identified two powerful strands of American thought that in some…
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It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic
John Fante, Full of Life, HarperCollins 2002, pp. 86-87. Originally published in 1952. I liked an atheistic wife. Her position made matters easy for me. It simplified a planned family. We had no scruples about contraceptives. Ours had been a civil marriage. We were not chained by religious tenets. Divorce was there, any time we…
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This Platonizing Owl Feels a Little Guilty . . .
. . . at deriving so much intellectual stimulation from the events of the day. It is fascinating to watch the country fall apart. What is a calamity for the citizen, however, is grist for the philosopher's mill. Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous…
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Trump Against the Multiculturalists
Excerpts (bolding and some subtitles added) from an outstanding essay by Thomas D. Klingenstein, Our House Divided: Multiculturalism vs. America: What is Multiculturalism? Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with…
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Weimar Villanova
Dreher reports. I am finding it harder and harder these days to resist Kulturpessimismus. As for Notre Dame de Paris, it would be irresponsible to speculate as to its cause. Let the facts emerge. Whatever the cause, there is something deeply symbolic about its destruction: the de-Christianization of Europe. A Fox News commentator this morning…
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Banning Guns and Banning Muslims
Conservatives are not opposed to gun control, but they strenuously oppose gun confiscation and proposals to ban civilian ownership of semi-automatic weapons. These include semi-auto handguns of .22 caliber, semi-auto rifles such as the AR-15, and semi-auto shotguns. Most of these same conservatives, however, support a reduction of, or moratorium on, Muslim immigration, either across…