Category: What is Progressivism?

Cancel Culture, Top to Bottom

Xi Jinping, at the G20 summit — why a communist murderer is even allowed to attend an international economic conference in the first place is one of those questions that can only be answered by adopting a resigned “Such are the times we live in” frame of mind — expresses anger that his private chastisement of Justin Trudeau, whose country’s political system China...

Multiculturalism Equals Anticulturalism

Multiculturalism, a Newspeak fantasy initiated, predictably enough, in Canada, is a social theory that pretends to promote and defend all cultures, while in fact — and in true intention — diluting and neutering all cultures. It accomplishes this subterfuge by subordinating all cultures to the demands of a democratic egalitarian relativism which becomes, in effect, the new global super-culture, or, more accurately, anti-culture....

John Cleese Gets Cancelled

John Cleese, the most famous member of the Monty Python troupe, has chosen to spend his final years in the posture of one of his most famous characters, the Black Knight in The Holy Grail, continuing to taunt and threaten his foe in spite of having been reduced to nothing but a head and torso, all his limbs having been lopped off. In...

Giving Offense Today

The Polish Ministry of Education has removed a passage from a new school textbook related to sexuality in modern times, due to public criticism of its offensiveness. Here (and I apologize in advance for assaulting your innocence with such smut) is the offending passage: Increasingly sophisticated methods of separating sex from love and fertility lead to the treatment of sex as entertainment and...

Updates on the State of Public Discourse

This morning I noticed two news items that tell a very consistent story, a story that would seem ominous, were we not all resigned by now to the irreversible trajectory of our civilizational decline. Since, on the other hand, we all know (I presume) that we are currently and inevitably cascading into the darkest night — though not necessarily the longest one —...

Culture and Nature

No one who sincerely espoused an attitude worthy of the name “multiculturalism” would ever imagine that multiple cultures — let alone all cultures — could or should coexist under an umbrella of mutual love and acceptance; for this would be to denigrate the very notion of culture. As though the various ways of human living, developed over centuries of survival, poetry, and faith,...

On Privacy and Modernity

The desire to be heard vs. the desire to be understood.— Heraclitus spoke for all time: “One is worth ten thousand to me if he be the best.” “‘Like a dog,’ he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.” Kafka thereby describes the condition of every one of us in the very late modern world, hounded, herded, and...

Thought Police Update

Len Goodman, a BBC personality of some sort, joked during a discussion of various foods related to the Queen’s jubilee that he had once been hesitant to try curry, which his grandmother used to refer to as “foreign muck,” although he has since become an enthusiastic curry eater. In response to this utterly innocuous comment — the sort of comment that could only be...

Abortion Rights and Self-Determination: The Great Progressive Fear

Someone has leaked a draft of a U. S. Supreme Court decision, written by Samuel Alito, indicating that the court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, the notorious 1973 case that was decided in favor of making abortion a federally guaranteed right. Contrary to the political hay being made of this by the left in general, and the Democratic Party in...

Peace-through-principle vs. Peace-at-any-cost

I do not always agree with Garry Kasparov on general matters of ordinary politics, but on Putin and the current stage of Putin’s war of conquest against the West, I know of no other popular voice today who speaks with such clarity and uncompromised principle. Of the many appeasing & contrary to history and reality pieces I have read during Putin’s war of...