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Billy Beck, whose essential thinking on the War on Terror I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to distil from his writing, asked some good questions back in June. However interesting his questions are, he’s yet to seriously consider the crucial one: does liberty have a dog in this fight? Or: how can Western Civilization […]
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The blog is a strange creature, from where I sit. Not this blog, but rather the web log as a form of written communication. The modally average blog burns a lot of bits commenting on the “issues of the day” and commenting on others’ commentary on the same. I sometimes think I should do that, […]
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I’m beginning to like this Russell Madden fellow. Seems I’m not the only one who can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a brown shirt. (Link via Strike the Root.)
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I just popped over to Strike the Root and found this old-friendly quotation: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had […]
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If Arthur Silber isn’t careful, we’ll have another market anarchist on our hands. [4/10/07 — Long-overdue update: Silber did indeed turn anarchic, though it looks like John T. Kennedy of No Treason called it well before I did.]
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Contrary to the respectable opinion-in-practice, the way to get the most out of intellectual exchange may well be to presume your interlocutor is a duplicitous imbecile, but that his argument is vastly more subtle and penetrating than at least first impressions suggest.
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Billy Beck has written an outstanding post on a topic that I’ve shied away from, simply because its implications are so large, and I hardly feel up to the task of folding them all out and making beautiful origami from them. Anyhow, Billy points out that values are radically individual in their genesis, and that, […]
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I watched The Pianist last night, and it put me in a particular misanthropic mood I recognize. I last experienced it years ago as I read through the comments book at the end of my last visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The comments in the book, reading between the lines, added up […]
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Diabolical, diabolical democracy: it forces you to care what other people think, then to worry about what they might be persuaded to think, and, finally, to hope in desperation that they can think at all. Example: Were it not that I lived in a democratic order, One Million Moms scared of guns would concern me […]
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If the average man is made in God’s image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The […]