The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Access / All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Fleming

29 Jul, 2023

WFB, JR: De Sociis Mortuis, nihil nisi bonum

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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.

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

26 Jul, 2023

Wednesday’s Child: The Leibniz Barbie

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When the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a pioneer in the field of differential and integral calculus among his other accomplishments, stuck his impressively large nose into metaphysics, we all remember what a ridiculous result this produced.  He assured his contemporaries that the world approaches – tends is the term used by his fellow mathematicians and designated in calculus with a horizontal arrow – perfection, a state that, logically enough, the world’s first optimist named the optimum.

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Fleming

23 Jul, 2023

“I Got Rights,” Conclusion

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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.