L’Affaire Assange
This isn’t about national security. It’s about politics – dirty politics of the dirtiest kind.
Yearly Archive: 2019
Roger Scruton: Purged
I see Prof. Sir Roger Scruton has been sacked by the Conservative government for saying George Soros is bad, Islamophobia is an imaginary problem, the sky is blue, water freezes at O centigrade, and a host of other offense notions. I never met Scruton, though I used to have some dealings with the Salisbury Review. I read some of his essays and his book on Sexual Desire, which had some good things in it but comes out of a philosophical tradition that has done far more harm than good. In this sense he is a real conservative, clinging to rationalism...
Heresies in the Mirror: Globalism and Nationalism, Part II: One World, One Government, One Ruling Class
Christians ought to be deeply suspicious of both nationalism and globalism, which developed in the course of the 18th century and which were both advocated by the bloody-handed leaders of the French Revolution who killed each other over whether the Revolution represented the revival of the French nation or the dawning of the brotherhood of man. In the end, the nationalists won, and while Napoleon pretended to be liberating the captive nations of the Holy Roman Empire, he was really only replacing Austria with France, Hapsburgs with Bonapartes. Stalin and Trotsky played out the same homicidal farce in their struggle...
Wednesday’s Child:Looking the Part
Last week, geneticists from the University of Wisconsin announced the results of their research, ongoing since 1957, into the perceptions of “facial beauty.” The conclusion, as is the usual case with most studies of this kind, will surprise nobody, as what these scientists have determined is that “there is not a master gene that determines a person’s attractiveness, and instead it is most likely associated with a large number of genetic components with weak effects.” The news, vapid as it was, caught my attention on Sunday afternoon, after I’d been to church, the day being the Feast of the Annunciation...
Heresies in the Mirror: Globalism and Nationalism: Prologue
Globalism is one of many nightmares spawned by the French Revolution, which also generated equally pernicious counter-movements. If some Jacobins opposed war, others embraced it; if considerations of race and ethnicity were condemned by some as retrograde, they were also celebrated by others as as the ultimate reality, and, if the ultimate Jacobin dream is of a universal paradise without distinctions, the lesser alternative has been embraced by a long line of hard-headed pragmatists like Napoleon and Lincoln, Stalin and Hitler.
College: Affirmative Action Economics
At Mount Holyoke, the affirmative action committee sent to all departments an article by one of their professors of philosophy, arguing that preference on grounds of race and sex was proper, whereas no sound case in logic could be made for preference on grounds of ability.
Podcast: The Right to be Rude
Thomas Fleming explains the purpose of “From Under the Rubble” and applies it to the twin errors of political correctness and the so-called right to self-expression in school.
Pete Buttigieg–Man of Faith
Here’s a pretty-how-de-do! Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend and leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, wonders if someone like Donald Trump–so wealthy, so unashamed of his wealth–could possibly be Christian. He has also attacked Mike Pence for his concentration on sexual issues. Like many people who read the headlines, I wondered what religion could inform the mind of a man who attacks one politician for being rich and another for being moralistic, when he pretends to have married another man. (I forget which he pretends to be the wife and which the husband.) He can’t be a...
St. Thomas Economicus
Many libertarians and classical liberals regard St. Thomas Aquinas as one of the enemies of liberty, of economic liberty in particular. According to these critics (and to some self-described Thomists, Thomas is supposed to have devised an abstract and systematic theory of an ideal state, which would have the power to regulate the marketplace by establishing a quasi-Marxian “just price” for all goods and by prohibiting all interest on investments. This opinion of Thomas’s economic views is substantially wrong, both in the details and in its overall point of view. Although Thomas was far from being a classical liberal, his...
Wednesday’s Child:At the Circus
I’ve spent the whole of last week at the circus. No, I don’t mean Westminster or Capitol Hill, I mean literally, with a bunch of clowns. Generally speaking, they don’t make clowns these days like they used to. A few of them have actually gone into politics. In Italy, what is now the largest political party was founded by one, and I note that another one, in Ukraine, is slated to be the next president. They call themselves comics to lend themselves respectability, but what they really are is tragic clowns. They play on the popular perception, famously a dramatic...
