Author: Thomas Fleming

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Fleming / Free Content

4 Sep, 2017

The Nature of the Beast: Simple Simon’s Political Lexicon, “Conservatism” Part III

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Most political/ideological movements are defined more by what the movement opposes than by what it supports.  Jacobins were a bit fuzzy about their Golden Age vision of a restored Roman Republic, but they were pretty clear about whom they wanted to kill.    (By the way, one easy way of distinguishing a wholesome religion or religious movement from a mere sect is that sectarians tend to define and name themselves according to their leaders and spend an enormous amount of time destroying what previous generations have created.  Iconoclasts and progressives  act more or less like ISIS and the Communist Party.) Conservatives...

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Fleming / On the House

31 Aug, 2017

What is Truth? Part II of Simple Simon’s Definition of Conservatism (Free to Subscribers)

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What is truth, asked jesting Thomas, who stayed for an answer. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is possible to tease out some fundamental principles that undergird all or most conservative movements and sentiments.  Let us further suppose that the most basic principles are not specifically American, Anglo-American, or even Christian-European but could be revealed not only in Sophocles, Aristotle, and Cicero but, perhaps, even in Confucius and/or Lao Tsu.  Once the more general principles were established, we could then see how they develop more particular attributes and requirements as part of Christendom and even Anglo-American...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

28 Aug, 2017

Cultural Genocide: I swear I’m not making this stuff up!

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Jim Easton asked me yesterday when the UN is going to be summoned to punish Americans engaging in cultural genocide by vandalizing and tearing down historical monuments and engaging in an endless damnatio memoriae.  Every week, it seems, we witness a new reductio ad absurdum.  The recent winners are the not the  Jews of the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center who went to tear down the statue of the “anti-Semitic” Peter Stuyvesant in New York,  and recommends “replacing all traces of his name with that of Asher  Levy, one of the first Jewish settlers in New Amsterdam.”  No, as hilarious as their proposal is,...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

24 Aug, 2017

Simple Simon’s Political Lexicon: Conservative, Part I

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As preface to discussing Conservative, I begin with a few more words on Liberal (which I have inserted into the previous article.) The term “Liberal” is simple in conception but obscured by confusion and deliberate misrepresentation.  After all, it comes from liber, the Latin word for “free” and was used to translate the Greek eleutheros, which had secondary senses that range from humane to noble to generous.  We still speak of “the liberal arts” and of people who are liberal in making gifts or doing favors.  It is quite proper to speak of non-political liberalism as a peculiarly western form...

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Uncategorized

23 Aug, 2017

Chesterton Conclusion–Go Back to Being Roman

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But Rome endures in more places than the seven hills on the Tiber.  The civilization of Europe and its colonies is only an extension of the Roman world, from which we have never been really cut off. Where world- historians such as Spengler have seen ages and cycles severed from each other by cataclysmic events, Chesterton sees continuity. We do not understand, to be sure, the few monuments left by our distant neolithic ancestors; but the Greek gods have never died in that fashion; and the Roman empire has never died at all. Of the most modem industrial cities in...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

23 Aug, 2017

The Counter-Revolution–Back to Square One (Conclusion)

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Then what are we to do with the Great Books of the revolutionary tradition?  They are to a great extent a poisoned chalice which is fatal to those who drink from it.  There is a sense in which the system of American education is taking care of at least some of the problem.  Apart from Great Books colleges and Western Civ courses, no one actually reads Montaigne or Voltaire.  They are simply dead white males that only a conservative fuddy-duddy would read. But suppose we confine the question only to people we care about, our children and students.  Do we...

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Autodidact / Free Content

22 Aug, 2017

Ask the Autodidact:  “How Bad are the Harry Potter Books?”

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After having read or listened to so many of the books on your Auto-Didact list, my daughter Annie has grown to trust my literary judgment.  If Dad says a book is worth reading, it is.  If Dad says it isn’t, it isn’t. Well, my daughter is of an age where all her peers have read or are reading the Harry Potter books.  I’ve told her the Harry Potter books aren’t worth her time.  While that answer is good enough for Annie, many of her friends and classmates press Annie to explain why her dad––who is also the pastor of the...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

19 Aug, 2017

The War of Gods and Demons: Chesterton, Part II

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Chesterton was certainly not alone in treating the Romans fairly, but he is among the few who saw the conflict in the proper civilizational terms, as a conflict between decent paganism that prepared the world for the Incarnation and the filthy sort of paganism that instead of adoring the Christ child would have joined Herod in seeking to kill him.  Chesterton begins his essay “The War of  Gods and Demons,” a chapter in The Everlasting Man, with a deep reflection on the failure of so much academic history on Rome: Merely political histories of Rome may be right enough in...

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Feature / Fleming

19 Aug, 2017

I HATE TRUMP, 2:  08-19-17, 9:00 AM CDT

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I have always hated Trump, even when he was a star on reality TV.  Even before.  To me, The Art of the Deal is really The Art of the Steal.   That is what all businessmen are, fundamentally, especially big businessmen:  thieves.  One of my professors (Harvard Law, 1987!) told the class that someone—I guess it was JFK—once said that property is theft.  He was so right!  I absolutely hate the rich.  A little guy like me, worth only a couple hundred million, can’t get justice in this country.  Look at poor Bernie Sanders’ wife, the way she is being...

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Feature / Fleming

18 Aug, 2017

I HATE TRUMP: 08-18-17, 9:00 AM CDT

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This is a President?  Instead of issuing  high-minded moral diatribes against racism, when some minor incident develops in  Kankakee or Charlottesville, this big-haired moron wastes his time on forcing North Korea to back down.  Then, as was noted on NPR so correctly, even his religious advisors–men who are supposed to be of high moral character–refuse to resign in protest. What planet do these so-called Christians live on? Why doesn’t this moron admit the truth?  The South is evil, except for the African Americans and Mexicans who live there.  American Slavery was the worst moral evil in the history of the human race, worse...