Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Political Language

  • Define or Drop

    For leftists, words are weapons. If you are a lefty, and you disagree, then I invite you to define 'fascist,' 'racist,' 'white supremacist,' and the rest of the epithets in your arsenal. Define 'em or drop 'em. Show us that you are people of good will. Suppose I point out the incompatibility of Sharia with…

  • Of ‘Pussy’ and ‘Pusillanimous’ and Politics

    A friend of mine recently maintained with a straight face that 'pusillanimous' derives from 'pussy.'  As an etymological claim that is of course preposterous. But there are two questions here that we ought to distinguish. The first is whether  'pusillanimous' has roughly the same meaning as  'pussy' when the latter is used as it is…

  • ‘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…