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Daily Blogs for 7/2007
by Christopher Chantrill
The Surge is Working, But... | 07/31/07
It’s pretty clear that the “surge” in Iraq is making progress. And as ...
Debating YouTube | 07/30/07
Should Republican presidential candidates descend to the level of YouTube? ...
Alarm bells on China | 07/30/07
Classical liberals thought that they had won the argument over free trade back in the ...
"Can I Help You?" | 07/27/07
It’s a Gilded Age, writes ...
Mean-spirited Universities Sit on Cash | 07/27/07
Our Democratic friends in the House of Representatives recently passed an education ...
The Cruelty of the Welfare State | 07/26/07
Everyone knows that the welfare state is the most wonderful thing in human ...
Grabbing The High Ground | 07/25/07
Back in the old days before the French Revolution the world was a conservative place. ...
British Conservatives in a Pickle | 07/25/07
In Britain they are trying to dry out after 50 year floods. But in the ...
The Secret Life of Cars | 07/24/07
You may not have wondered how a car makes you feel, but BMW has. That’s what ...
Democrats' New War on Poverty(1) | 07/24/07
Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards both want to declare ...
The "New Victorians:" a Trend or a "Trend?" | 07/23/07
It would all seem pretty sensible if it weren’t that the trendy New York Observer’s ...
Dean Barnett's 9/11 Generation | 07/23/07
We know all about the Boomer generation, says 40-ish ...
What Do Women Want? | 07/20/07
The feminists don’t want to hear it, according ...
When the US Leaves Iraq | 07/20/07
Call me a conspiracist, but I believe that US political class has already decided to ...
Eating beef 'is less green than driving' | 07/19/07
They’re coming to take you away, those lefty global warming types, those ...
Dem House Solves College Costs With Subsidies and Regulation | 07/19/07
With college costs soaring way above the rate of inflation and many graduates finding ...
Who Is Norman Borlaug? | 07/18/07
Everybody knows Paris Hilton. But who the heck is Dr. Norman Borlaug? ...
The Not-so All-Night Debate on Iraq | 07/18/07
The United States Senate is the world’s greatest deliberative body, and last night ...
In the Belly of the Beast | 07/17/07
The reason we need the welfare state, liberals tell us, is because we need a safety ...
It's a Regional War, Stupid | 07/17/07
From the very beginning of the war on terror, it was obvious that the war was not just ...
Germany and France on Collision Course | 07/16/07
The euro has climbed to stratospheric levels in recent months, approaching $1.40 to ...
L.A. Diocese Pays for Abuse | 07/16/07
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay out over $600 million ...
Religion is Safe With Democrats Says TIME | 07/13/07
For years Democrats have warned that religion and politics don’t mix. You’d ...
Working Moms Want to Cut Back on Work | 07/12/07
Woman, we know, is the “victim of the species.” That’s what Simone de Beauvoir, ...
Hewitt Talks to Republican Jews | 07/12/07
Conservative talk-show host talked to the Republican Jewish Coalition recently, ...
Global Warming and Solar Heating | 07/11/07
Who do you believe? Today there were two articles on the relation between solar ...
The End of the Newspaper Columnist | 07/10/07
About twelve years ago, according to ...
British Conservatives Issue Plan To Fight Social Breakdown | 07/10/07
It’s called Breakthrough Britain and ...
Keeper of the Tower Lives in France | 07/09/07
Is this what Britain has come to? The chap who keeps an eye on the crown jewels ...
Now The Lawyers are Upset | 07/09/07
The Brits are just waking up to the idea that lawyers are miserable. Apparently ...
The Underclass As Residue of Social Mobility | 07/06/07
Most of us like to write about the underclass as a failure of the welfare state. ...
The Real David Halberstam(1) | 07/06/07
For what seems like forever we have been taught to celebrate David Halberstam as ...
Is Government Force? Michael Moore Says No | 07/05/07
We all know, or at least we’d better know by now, that Michael Moore thinks that ...
Don't The Pols Get It? | 07/05/07
Now that the Democrats are back in control of Congress we are hearing calls for ...
Arnold Kling on Trust in Society | 07/04/07
The big problem of the human race is the problem of extending trust beyond blood ...
BBC Scare Quotes for Climate 'Scepticism' | 07/04/07
It’s truly amazing, when you think about it, that after all the scare stories and ...
The Broken Society in Germany | 07/03/07
Yes, yes. For decades we have been worrying about little girls in ...
A Father Speaks | 07/02/07
In these diverse postmodern days what should a father do? The father of teenaged ...
Steyn on Immigration and the "Pork-filled Rooms" | 07/02/07
How does he do it? We are talking ...
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
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
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”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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
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