It is not obvious that true privacy in our day will endure the ministrations of its narrow partisans. There is a bizarre sort of double effect on the idea of privacy right now: a simultaneous exaggeration and diminution. Its deterioration as a firm principle of life proceeds at once with the hoarsest and most desperate [...]
Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
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The horror. The horror.
December 29th, 2010 
admin “When I turned around, there wasn’t a lot of blood in the toilet–just one roughly lemon-sized clot, and next to it, something that was most definitely not clot-colored. I leaned over and squinted at it, and holy sh-t, there was a freaking embryo in my toilet! They had told me that I probably wouldn’t be [...]
Africa submissive.
December 29th, 2010 admin I am privileged to have visited Africa three times: twice in late 2003, when on a mission for the HHS Secretary, and once on a junket with Ashley Judd in 2005. The latter was everything a junket should be: pointless, wasteful, and gratifying for the ego of the attendant celebrity. The former two were genuine [...]
Barbarians in the gates.
December 29th, 2010 admin We care about Europe for the same reason we care for the suicidal: because a chosen fate is not inherently a just one, and we are called to act when an unjust end threatens. We care about Europe because filial piety is still a virtue: we are, in the end, a European nation as surely [...]
Moral Quandaries
December 29th, 2010 admin Josh Trevino relates a story that is becoming more familiar as the days go by…. A true and current tale: A person of my acquaintance, wishing to have a child with his wife, was discussing his lack of success with another friend, a female who with her own husband has lovely and vigorous sons. This [...]
Reasoning Oneself Into Dhimmitude
December 29th, 2010 admin The spectacle – at once bizarre and bewildering to Western eyes, yet oddly calculable, as though its occurrence were a matter of adding two quantities – of the cartoon jihad has disclosed to the perceptive observer the profound spiritual abjection of much of the West before Islam, a sort of mock kenosis in which many [...]
The new cross burners.
December 29th, 2010 admin Make no mistake: Islam has no monopoly on blasphemous sensitivities. And it was inevitable that some of the aggrieved Muslims in the Danish cartoon case would seek vengeance in kind — by assaulting the revered symbols of other faiths. Lo, thus here and here, we see the emergent phenomenon of Muslims wielding crosses with, shall [...]
Compromising Positions
December 29th, 2010 admin I made the mistake the other night of laying aside some good reading material to go channel surfing and ended up on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. I don’t know if I was spinning in circles by the time it was over, but I was certainly disoriented. One segment’s content reminded me of an earlier post [...]
How Times Change
December 29th, 2010 admin Today, playing hide and seek with depression, I found myself listening to what might be the greatest music ever composed by an American: Samuel Barber’s Knoxville, Summer of 1915. Big mistake. It reminded me of the very things I was trying to forget. You see, in 1958, the Pulitzer Prize for literature was awarded (posthumously) [...]
Politics and the Myth of a Pre-Social Human Nature
December 29th, 2010 admin The present moment is one beset by seemingly interminable and intractable (as indeed they must be, given the presuppositions of the warring parties) disputes concerning the relevance of human nature to political, even geopolitical, questions. That may seem, to some, a prima facie absurd and portentious declaration, but there it is. Its truth is manifest [...]
