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Daily Blogs for 5/2007
by Christopher Chantrill
What is "Price Gouging?" | 05/31/07
You’d expect ...
Why We Don't Take Comedy Seriously | 05/30/07
Back in the good old days of Greek drama, the arts were properly balanced between ...
Iran Tottering on the Edge | 05/30/07
How bad are things in Iran? It’s hard to know. Our international media are ...
We Are All in It Together, Clinton Says: | 05/29/07
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says that the Bush “ownership society” is ...
GOP Tide in Full Ebb | 05/29/07
Don’t look now, writes ...
Marriage in America: It's a Class Thing | 05/28/07
As the June wedding season swings ...
Down the Memory Hole | 05/28/07
Last fall ...
Peggy Noonan Against Senate Bill | 05/25/07
It’s one thing for your normal right-wing knuckle-dragging yahoos like you and me to ...
Evangelicals Enter Establishment | 05/25/07
Lberal religion reporter ...
Immigration Numbers | 05/24/07
Supply-sider ...
"Hook-up" Culture: Girls Still Confused | 05/23/07
You can see what a job that feminists have done on our young college women. When ...
The Unenforced Immigration Laws | 05/23/07
No doubt, as our political leaders insist, there is a major immigration problem that ...
Committing Politics in Britain | 05/22/07
Here in the United States our leaders are busy rushing a immigration amnesty bill to ...
The Immigration Bill and the Big Picture | 05/21/07
It is, as writes, an outrage when the governing classes try to rush a ...
How Much Does the Elite Know? | 05/21/07
The great presumption of the twentieth century was that an educated elite capable of ...
Who Needs School Anyway? | 05/18/07
Pity poor Marilee Jones, formerly Dean of Admissions at Massachusetts Institute of ...
Dems Can't Break the Habit | 05/18/07
Despite their promise of moderation and transparency last November the Democrats can’t ...
Iraq: After the Americans Leave | 05/17/07
Conservatives think that when the United States leaves Iraq that all hell will break ...
Who Defeated the Soviet Union? | 05/17/07
In hindsight, everyone knew that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse. ...
Jerry Falwell and Enthusiastic Christianity | 05/16/07
What are we to say about Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Christian pastor who ...
Entrepreneurs and Media Dinosaurs | 05/15/07
Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is proabably as good and energetic an interviewer as you’ll ...
Riling Up the Republican Base | 05/15/07
The art of politics is to divide up the electorate neatly into 51-49, with 51 percent ...
Let's Throw Good Money After Bad | 05/14/07
Yes. Give us a billion here and a billion there and we could really solve the ...
Traditional values down, but not out | 05/14/07
Some political actors believe that the Democratic capture of Congress in 2006 ...
Global Guerrillas for Breakfast | 05/11/07
Alerted by the trend-spotting Instapundit to ...
Married Mothers Day | 05/11/07
Why is it that liberals have made a world with their welfare state in which single ...
A Decade of Blair | 05/10/07
First the good news. The ten years of Tony Blair have been the most successful ...
Iran and the Chimera of "Self-Sufficiency" | 05/09/07
Ever since the dawn of the modern age movements have erupted again and again calling ...
For Dionne It's All About Compulsion | 05/08/07
Things don’t look too good out there for people like us, writes ...
Democrats Still Opposed to Missile Defense | 05/08/07
For forty years after World War II the defenses of the United States were aligned to ...
Netroots: On Chait in TNR | 05/07/07
Here is how the netroots experience their birth in the aftermath of the contested 2000 ...
Center-right Sarkozy Wins In France | 05/07/07
Because the left has liked to represent Nicolas Sarkozy, the next president of France ...
Don't Frighten the Horses | 05/05/07
Analyzing the British local elections of last ...
Tories Advance in Brit Local Elections | 05/04/07
Britain’s Conservative Party oustripped forecasts of 600-700 by gaining over 875 seats ...
After the Debate: Romney | 05/04/07
You could say that the reason I’m a Romney guy is because of the ...
The Heart of the Education Problem | 05/03/07
In Britland they have recently discovered that social mobility is going down not ...
"Make No Mistake" | 05/02/07
After President Bush vetoed the Democrats’ emergency war funding bill everyone got ...
GM to Advertise on Limbaugh Show | 05/02/07
This year on August 1 talk radio will be 19 years old. It started with Rush ...
Romney: You Make the Call | 05/01/07
The AP recently reported that Mitt Romney didn’t think it was that important to go ...
"Eurostar Generation" Threatens Euro Social Model | 05/01/07
They call them the “Eurostar Generation.” They are the young French ...
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
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