Art For What’s Sake? Part One
An untechnical conversation on the meaning of art, set in a Middle American saloon with pop music blasting over the speakers.
Category: Feature
Restricting Self-Defense, III: Our Barbarian Roots
There was no justice for a murder victim without a family to demand vengeance. Before we rush to condemn the Germans as savages, we should recall that even at Athens during its Golden Age, it was the family’s responsibility to bring charges against someone who had murdered one of its members.
Restricting Self-Defense, Part II
Every animal seems to “know” the two commandments of nature: Survive and propagate, and each creature seeks to preserve its own identity and to transmit it genetic heritage through time.
Ask The Autodidact:
The civil right to choose the sort of education your children receive remains of paramount importance….
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Merriest Christmas: 1991 and the End of the Soviet Union
Just like that, it was over. On Christmas Day 1991 at 7:32 pm Moscow time, the hammer-and-sickle red flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin.
Self Defense–Some Conclusions
For several hundred years, ordinary people have been taught to regard such practical necessities as surviving and defending themselves as rights that derive from nature. Theories of natural rights are, alas, a poisoned chalice, since every assertion of right can be met with a counter-assertion
Jerks 01.C: Immoderation in All Things
The ancient pagan ideal was not Christian humility, which pagans found puzzling if not degrading, but the proper self-respect that encourages to do the right thing and not make fools of ourselves.
America: The Decrepit Empire
America is like an old business family in which the patriarch has gone senile, and the heirs are just plain stupid, competent only at blowing the inheritance. The enterprise is collapsing inexorably.
Poems for December 6
Claudel, one of the great Christian poets of the last century, was subject to the crudest vilification from the communist and surrealist enemies of all things European, Christian, and civilized, in other words, the literary intellectual class that has destroyed literature and learning.
