As a virtue expressed in Aristotelian terms, it is the mean between the character that invests everything into the distinction between me-and-mine and everything else and the character that rejects all distinction. In Jacobin terms, however, liberty, equality, and fraternity represent either or both of these three baneful extremes.
Why would a dumb kid from Simi Valley, California, want to kill Brett Kavanaugh?
Knowledge is power, so the proverb goes, but it can also be weakness. If human beings knew they were going to die in a few days, some few perhaps might take the opportunity to reflect on their lives and make the most of the time they had; more would give free rein to their wildest appetites; and perhaps the greatest number would fall into acedia and despair.
If a tradition goes back far enough, it is generally because it corresponds, however roughly, to some reality, while by contrast bright ideas spawned by pure reason are all too often no more grounded in reality than phrenology or the literary speculations of Dr. Freud.
Skeptical of propaganda and the sentimentalism of human rights and progress, so-called palaeoconservatives (a term that has lost all utility) might be attacked for their cold-blooded rationality. Instead, they have been more typically criticized for their supposedly romantic attachment to tradition
As human animals with large brain and capacity for conscious thought, we have senses that are attuned to the natural world.
Since the Persian Wars—like the Punic Wars, the Crusades, and the West’s ongoing struggle with Islam—serve to define who we are, it will be useful to reread Herodotus, particularly the books that are directly relevant to the cultural struggle between the West and its enemies.
My subject for this series is the Great Revolution that has obliterated our knowledge of human nature, eliminated the distinctions between man and beast, male and female, adult and child, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly, and re-invented the human race as a hybrid, part invertebrate and part robot.
If the main domestic objective of the government-engineered COVID panic was to alienate Americans from their families, churches, and communities, to make them depend even more completely on the state—an objective the political class has largely obtained….
What’s the big story in America? Young parents going hysterical over a shortage of baby food. And what is the Republican response? Not that American children should grow up before having children of their own, but “We shouldn’t be sending baby food to concentration camps for illegal aliens.
