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.
Last week, as young Vasily and I walked the Via Maqueda, the gentle reader may recall the sharp turn we made on reaching the railway station. This brought us to the Chinese quarter, and to urban blight of a different kind.
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A ten minute podcast: Biden’s bungling on Taiwan illustrates one of the worst flaws in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
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.
Is abortion a key to U.S. military might? According to U.S. Navy veteran Allison Gill in the WaPo, “Overturning Roe would be disastrous for the U.S. military.” She starts with a horrible story, “When I was 21, I was drugged and raped violently while serving in the military, a crime that resulted in pregnancy.” She then got an abortion. Of course, more should be done to prevent such assaults. She then jumps to this conclusion, “Should Roe be overturned and access to abortion restricted for female service members across the United States, military readiness would be directly affected.” I’m not...
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.
