This blog entry is partly intended as a public service to the sane. I’ll first provide links to alternative takes on the So-Called Coronavirus Pandemic and then I’ll simply state some beliefs I already tentatively held about the likely fate of the West, beliefs reinforced by the current happenings in the various public spheres of … [Read more…]
Early in May, I read The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment by Ethan H. Shagan. I thought the analysis was pretty good, but I didn’t like the ‘global’ conclusion: Enlightenment rationality did not devour the world in its ravenous maw, it was only a subset of … [Read more…]
Liberals lie. And I include libertarians among liberals. Perhaps they lie first to themselves, but they lie. All liberals, from Hobbes to Locke to Jefferson to von Mises to Nozick and on to the collectivist enablers or advocates of a `liberal’ and totalitarian order. The biggest part of their lie is the one which claims … [Read more…]
The West has broken down into a gangster-land of sorts, with the realms of centralized governments and money-center banking collapsing into moral chaos. I’ve written often about this. But… If the West is so disordered, morally and politically and so on—`morally’ actually covers all human social possibilities, why don’t the gangsters just take over in … [Read more…]
The problems of the United States, and of some other countries in the West—maybe most, are deeper than are usually acknowledged. I’ll start with this claim: Crimea is more truly part of the Russian realm than California is part of the Anglo-American realm. American leaders are ignorant, functionally stupid, and maybe innately stupid; they are … [Read more…]
I’ll not write too much about this issue I’ve addressed before, but I’ll go further than before on one detail: the United States government is barely such a thing and perhaps it’s leading us into a fragmentation which might lead to multiple governments of some sort or a civil war or some periods of each. … [Read more…]
The Orthodox and Catholic Christian patriarchs of Syria have made a plea to Western countries and their citizens, especially to their fellow Christians in the West. This statement, follows on similar pleas over the years by Christians, including Orthodox and Catholic bishops, from various countries in Southwest Asia, a region which we Westerners, especially Americans, … [Read more…]
Short answer: conspiratorial worldviews and attitudes are necessary to preserve the fiction that the United States has no ruling class. Who were and are the members of this ruling class? They are the ones who went to the well-funded secondary academies of the Northeast, such as Phillips Exeter Academy and all the many with less … [Read more…]
This essay will seem more of a stretch as a case study in the problems of dualism, but there is a method to my stretchy madness. The general point will be: what we see as evil acts by human beings, individual or communal, are the results of behaviors often quite consistent with the bad part … [Read more…]
Introduction On 2017/04/20, Judge Andrew Napolitano published: What if We Don’t Really Govern Ourselves?, a simple and coherent article questioning whether democracy exists in the United States and whether democracy is, in any case, an absolute good or an answer to our various political problems. Napolitano’s essay is in the form of questions which move … [Read more…]