Latest musings, analyses, and general madness
Pope Francis, a Marxist through and through who happens to be the head of a faith that includes an uncompromising opposition to Marxism as part of its official doctrine, has decided, in his (God-willing) final months, to go all in on three key points of emphasis: the rejection of all things American, the condemnation of the Church’s “masculine” history, and endlessly repeated demands...
You should believe most of what you say, but you need not say most of what you believe.
There is no rationale for deferring speech until you are absolutely certain of the truth of what you will say. Or rather, the only rationale for adopting such a policy is…
Let us list, with comments, a few terms that one cannot avoid hearing or reading persistently these days, at least to the extent that one’s mind has the misfortune of being within range of the popular media (in all its manifestations) and the headline-shouting world it both embodies and engenders. The far right. This expression has no determined meaning in modern discourse, beyond...
Ireland, whose most influential modern artist described its capital, a century ago, as “that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” and which seems to have been a country on the edge (or further) of collapsing into some strange combination of drunken suicide and murderous self-indulgence for centuries, finds whatever life force it has left (not at all paradoxically, but rather characteristically)...
Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim-immigration activist, who, like all activists, is easily susceptible to the foolish weakness of reducing all reality to his favorite cause, has led his Freedom Party to victory in the Dutch election, and will be the country’s next prime minister. That might be favorable news if you were viewing the situation entirely through the lens of concern over Western civilizational...
Can someone tell me why a Hollywood biopic (an “epic,” as they say) about Napoleon would be relevant to a culture in which ninety-seven percent of the population would not know what country Napoleon was from, when he lived, what he is famous for, and what significance his life and actions had for future generations of thinkers and statesmen? Or why a man...
Cool (adj.): appealing to others’ fashionable tastes or preferences in such a way as to allow those others to feel that in liking you (the cool one), they are expressing their own independent and original minds.
In short, coolness is, to both the cool one and his admirers, merely a collectively aggrandizing euphemism…
There is no living politician I know of whom I would trust unmonitored with my wallet or my cell phone. Why in the world would I trust one with my liberty or my need to know the truth about anything? Steps are being taken, in every advanced country on Earth, towards establishing the latest manifestation of the totalitarian dream, a cashless society, which...
A lot of people on the progressive side of modern reality (the dim side), whether of the socialist left or the populist right, have gotten swept up in the rhetoric of “genocide” to describe the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza in the weeks since October 7th. It is sensational language, and by definition incriminating in the most extreme way. It therefore...
Those inclined to employ the popular platitude among American conservatives to the effect that their country was founded on something they call “Judeo-Christian values,” as though Judaism and Christianity were essentially the same thing, or at any rate had very little discernible space between them, must be finding their world — which is now defined almost entirely by their “alternative” media — quite...