American Left
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Young Conservative Intellectuals
From David Brooks in the Atlantic reporting on the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month in Orlando. You know, the one where Hawley gave his American masculinity speech: Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have
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The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II
And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means
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The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I
I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live–as much
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The Healthcare Technocracy & the Pandemic
So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence—what the patient says—only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence—what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology
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Biden’s Visit to Capitol Hill
Mr. Phillips, a well-liked moderate who captured a Republican district in 2018, expressed hope earlier in the week that Mr. Biden could serve as a bridge between the party’s factions. But he acknowledged on Friday that those chances had “been sadly diminished” in light of what he called the president’s “nothing-burger” of a visit to
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Left Authoritarians?
This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters the argument I made in Naive Idealists posted on 9/6. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, work with the energies of one-sided Doves, aka Naive Idealists. You don't have to be a Dove like Robespierre or John Brown to be
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Naive Idealism
During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever
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Some Random Thoughts on Afghanistan
Despite whatever level of culpability Biden has for not planning the logistics of the evacuation effectively, it's also become abundantly clear that those Afghanis who supported the twenty-year American boondoggle in Afghanistan as translators, etc. should be very happy that Biden was in office rather than Trump. This withdrawal was going to be a mess