We live by our opinions. While other people’s opinions are called illusions, if they pose no threat to our interests, and prejudices if they do, we call our own opinions “truth” or fundamental principles, if we are fools; if we are more cautious we prefer to speak of theories and hypotheses
Many years ago, to test the gullibility of colleagues and readers, I started the rumor that I was being considered as a possible Presidential candidate. No one I know could be that gullible? Think again, one prominent libertarian-leaning conservative called to find out if it was true. Obviously, he was sounding me out for a cabinet appointment. A few years later, I printed a piece, which I explicitly attributed to a dream, in which I was being dragged to the Hague to be put on trial for complicity in Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal policies in Kosovo. Again, who would believe it?...
If Donald Trump is doomed to endure a second ordeal of impeachment proceedings, what are we to expect?
It’s time to move on to another book discussion. Here are some possibilities.
Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes.
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, which deals with household and family management.
Several of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idyls….
Mexico and the United States are both known as violent countries, but there are important differences in the style—and the incidence–of criminal violence. Both are complex countries with varying ethnic and regional traditions.
For over 20 years, whenever the US Congress is debating a stricter immigration law, hundreds of thousands Mexican-Americans take to the streets. The demonstrators, often waving Mexican flags, demand rights for the illegals and accuse conservative Republicans of racism. The substance of much of their complaint is that Mexicans, illegal as well as legal, have made an indispensable contribution to the American economy, and yet they are treated with disrespect and hostility.
This review of David Donald’s Lincoln ( New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1996) was commissioned and published by the Spectator (London), for which I wrote with some frequency, once upon a time before the world ceased pretending to exist.
Science is not the problem but the blind faith in science that is the religion of Secularism.
I do not believe that I am the only American who has been put off by hysterical rants about the end of the American way of life. Almost everything I have come across, from articles in so-called conservative publications to blogposts to conversations with friends strikes me as based on very limited understanding, not just of history but of the basic meaning of words.
“How about a Bible story, kiddies?”
The children were overjoyed to escape from their monotonous captivity, and their mother was too beaten down to impose her will. Down from the loft they plummeted, stumbling on the steps of the ladder, like three half-grown squirrels on the first day of spring. Evelina started to send them back up but stopped
