Category: Fleming

4

WFB, JR: De Sociis Mortuis, nihil nisi bonum

A FB friend of mind sent me a link to an exchange he had with a movement conservative type on the subject of William Buckley. I was never close to WFB and, while I wrote for NR on several occasions, I was never an admirer of the shallowness and partisan bullying of much of what was written there, though I did respect many NR’s editors and writers, e.g., James Burnham, Ralph Toledano, Ernest Van den Haag, Thomas Molnar, Jeffrey Hart, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Mel Bradford, and Clyde Wilson, most of whom I published as NR began to be less receptive to their points of view.

2

“I Got Rights,” Conclusion

Most talk of morality and law is now reduced to a question of rights.  Leftists talk about rights to privacy, gender equality, and minority rights, and—more recently—of the right not to be offended by other people’s prejudices, while Libertarians talk about the right of labor and goods to pass unhindered over borders—to say nothing of rights to life and property and the right to say or publish or film anything you like, no matter whom it offends or what moral harm it causes.  

16

“I Got Rights,” Part III (of IV)

Educated Americans believe, for the most part, that revenge–even when it can be excused or mitigated–is always wrong.  In legal terms, right—by which I mean the principle of rightness in good behavior—almost always involves the assertion and protection of rights, which are something like the 10 Commandments or Plato’s Ideas or the Natural Law of the Stoics:

5

I Got Rights, Part II

Then what does an American citizen do when he discovers that his civil rights are not protected by governments who prefer to protect the universal human rights of illegal alines and criminals?  Consider the situation in which the hero of a country song (Hank Williams, Jr.’s, “I Got Rights”) finds himself.

1

The Titanic and the Banality of Evil

Barack Obama has managed to sneak back into the news.  The occasion was an interview with Christiane Amampour in which he compared the modest media response to the death of 700 illegal immigrants, whose boat sank before they could enter Greece, with the hysteria over the fate of 7 rich tourists who tried to visit the Titanic.