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A fast fact or two from the May Harper’s:
Percentage of Pakistanis and Indonesians who say that attacks on civilians are sometimes justified to defend Islam: 3
Percentage of Americans who say that attacks on civilians are sometimes justified: 24
No doubt a great deal depends on how the survey question is worded. Even so, the latter number [...]
Filed under: Social criticism, War, magazines
That’s the unfortunate lesson of the whole Imus flap. Of course his remarks were uncivil — that’s the whole point of talk radio, which is about the lowest form of discourse imaginable. If you had to fire any radio blowhard to said something offensive (politically incorrect or not), there would be no talk radio. Imus [...]
Filed under: Social criticism
George Kennan: A Study of Character, by John Lukacs.
The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States, by Gerald Horne. (Read a review, or see here for Justin Raimondo’s account of Dennis.)
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre N. McCloskey.
I should have [...]
At long last, I’ve been able to get my hands on a copy of Russell Kirk’s Prospects for Conservatives (also known, in various editions, as A Program for Conservatives). The book is out of print and I never got around to ordering a used copy, but a colleague had one on hand — and now [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism
Rudy Giuliani sez:
“Ultimately, it’s a constitutional right, and therefore if it’s a constitutional right, ultimately, even if you do it on a state by state basis, you have to make sure people are protected.”
Of course, somehow I don’t think Giuliani believes that the constitutional right to keep and bear arms means that states or [...]
Filed under: Politics
From a year or so back, but I missed it the first time: the text, courtesy of the Guardian, of Peregrine Worsthorne’s talk on liberalism at the Athenaeum club. A snippet:
Today, however, liberalism is the only ism in a position not only to dream of world hegemony but to try to make that dream come [...]
Sound advice from Clive James, who reveals a new reason to like Pablo Neruda:
Pablo Neruda was instrumental in smoothing the assassin’s path [to planting an ice ax in Trotsky's melon] but never wrote a poem on the subject: something to remember when reading the thousands of ecstatic love poems he did write. They are full [...]
