I’m not an unqualified supporter of quantitative modeling in the social sciences, most certainly do I have my doubts about modeling in history. It’s a dangerous business and the results have been spotty at best. Yet, it could work for some sorts of analyses and doing it in a disciplined way would allow rejection or … [Read more…]
A short while back Ralph Nader published an article, Who Owns America?, which begins: There was a time in the Depression of the 1930s when conservative thought sprang from the dire concrete reality of that terrible era, not from abstractions. They did not use the word “conservative” very often, preferring to call themselves “decentralists” or … [Read more…]
The Body of Christ is the entirety of human being, the entirety of a community including both individuals and lesser communities which is Christian civilization, I also claim the Catholic Church to be the central organ of the Body of Christ, not the whole ball of wax. To all appearances, the various Christian churches participate … [Read more…]
Col Pat Lang (ret), a Green Beret and military intelligence officer, has written another of many short and authoritative commentaries on the current messes which are the US civilian government and US military. Of the two, the military seems to be the far lesser mess, even to the point of being reformable so long as … [Read more…]
My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins … [Read more…]
In the back of my mind, I’ve been pondering a strange blind spot in mainstream modern historians and political commentators since reading Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly in May of 2013. It seems to me that she saw clearly the somewhat complex and fluid balance of forces between individuals and families or other tightly knit … [Read more…]
Pepe Escobar is a world-traveling journalist who’s worth more than the entire staff at CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, and most of the others in the American mainstream news-media. He seems to often be in the most dangerous regions of our planet and to have lots of solid information and to be able … [Read more…]
Conspiracies. Don’t underestimate the number and importance of conspiracies in human history, conspiracies political or economic or even cultural but usually criminal and often highly immoral. Don’t overestimate their importance in the general scheme of things but don’t forget their sheer abundance indicates they play a role in God’s story—I’ll pass over a discussion of … [Read more…]
In this essay, I’ll sometimes write about the West as a whole and sometimes try to be more particular, especially in giving examples, by writing from the American viewpoint. In fact, it’s at least arguable that the current moral and social disorders of the West began in the United States. Henry James is said to … [Read more…]
In this short essay, Classical Liberalism versus Anarchism, Mike Rappaport tries to shift the focus in a debate about anarchism vs. classical liberalism. He quotes Robert Higgs, an advocate of anarchism: My difficulty arises not so much from a dissatisfaction with government’s being charged with protecting the citizens from force and fraud, but from a … [Read more…]