You know your reading is taking off when the books you’ve knocked off your list start connecting in your head like puzzle pieces on the dining room table. This happens to yours truly all the time nowadays, and it particularly occurred with two works I read in 2018, Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of A Family and Culture In Crisis by J.D. Vance.
Continue readingA Remarkable Exercise In Inanity. Review of Arthur C. Brooks’ “Love Your Enemies”
It has been my conviction for a while now that social media and the daily phony outrages they help spur are rewiring our brains as we speak and make us more stupid. (Ever been on Twitter? Yeah.) Moreover, reading the drivel passing for political insight on our feeds makes us desperate to avoid the latest spat involving President Trump when we talk to these Facebook philosophers at an uncle’s birthday party. Better to change the topic to, say, the Patriots’ ‘Deflate Gate’. It’s bound to get some voices raised, but at the end of the day that feels better than having to battle accusations of secretly cherishing Nazi sympathies.
Continue readingOn Motivation, Intrinsical and Extrinsical (Review of Daniel Pink’s “Drive”)
One of the great feats of being a small business owner — besides being part of the backbone of America’s economy — is that one gets to spend evenings reading books and magazines about organizational management and other business topics in a continuous effort to improve one’s own skills.
Or so the theory goes. Yours truly, in fact, prefers to read about philosophy and history and would consider Plato to be the best organizational guru there ever was. Preferred self-help works include Dante’s Divine Comedy and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. But occasionally, nudged by the missus, I’ll open up one of the works on her growing list of recommendations and start reading.
Continue readingTop-Heavy Liberalism (Book Review)
During a good chunk of the mid-twentieth century the great conservative giants of that era argued over the question of what conservatism is. For Russell Kirk it transcended particular cultures and was, in the words of Bradley Birzer, “a natural longing to preserve the best of human thought as divined by, through, and across the slow process of the experience of humanity, tied to an omnipotent source of creation.” To Robert Nisbet, in contrast, conservatism was a modern phenomenon formed in reaction to the French Revolution and essentially launched single-handedly by Edmund Burke.
Brett Kavanaugh, Identity Politics, and the Descent Into Ochlocracy
If a sigh of relief can be heard whooshing through these United States after the Kavanaugh debacle has come to an end, it’s surely to be followed shortly by a scratching of heads over the question of how it got this far. There is no doubt that the battle over Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court has left wounds that extend far beyond its losers, such as Dianne Feinstein, that loathsome Michael Avenatti, and the Democrats in general. Amidst the rubble, a larger meaning of what took place can be found by the discerning eye.
The Peculiar Cassandra: Review of Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission”
The string of terrorist attacks in European cities in recent years has produced, in addition to a significant number of casualties, no shortage of prophets counseling us on where the present crisis of Islamic immigration into the Old Continent will end. Those predicting that it is but a passing moment which will dissolve into a peaceful and harmonious future face off against doomsayers, yours truly included, who fear that many European countries are at risk of becoming Balkanized and collapsing into political turmoil or even civil war.
Spiking the Punch For the Dark Road Ahead
The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation debacle is yet another solid reminder that we live in spectacularly depressing times. Two separate allegations having failed, for once, to crack the collective spines of the Republicans on Capitol Hill and derail Kavanaugh’s nomination to the nation’s highest court, Michael Avenatti, that self-aggrandizing ambulance chaser, has just become the latest to add to this bonfire of the vanities.
More Dry Than Critical: “Liberty or Death”
“They said to her in a harsh voice: ‘Cry out: Long live the nation!’ – ‘No! no!’ she said. They made her climb onto a heap of corpses. … Then a killer seized her, tore off her dress and opened her belly. She fell, and was finished off by the others.” So ended the life of the Princess de Lamballe, a close confidante of Marie Antoinette, in 1792.
This harrowing episode is one of many documented in Peter McPhee’s 2016 book about the French Revolution, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution. This thorough and well-researched work takes off in pre-revolutionary France, which the author explains “was a land of mass poverty in which most people were vulnerable to harvest failure” and “in which the weight of authority guaranteed relative obedience and stability.” This state of obedience gradually disintegrated throughout the eighteenth century, as food-rioting and “complaints about the presumptions of the privileged” increased. A patchwork of overlapping authorities of monarchy, aristocracy and Church in those days, France was economically backward compared to England, where the Industrial Revolution was well underway by 1789. France’s peasants and artisans had ample reason for discontent with their rulers.
What Went Wrong?
When Bernard Lewis wrote his excellent book with this title, he had the Muslim world in mind, but not too long from now somebody will almost certainly be producing the long-expected sequel with the West as its subject. The recent kerfuffle over Jeff Sessions praising the “Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement” prompted this sad thought in me, in particular after reading this commentary by Mark Steyn. “We live in wretchedly moronic times,” Steyn writes, “in which even senators, lieutenant governors and other panjandrums who bestride the land know nothing of anything that happened before last Tuesday.”
Continue readingNo, White Terrorism Is Not a Greater Threat Than Islamic Terrorism
The fumes hadn’t cleared from the Manchester bomb site before the Left moved on to a threat apparently much graver than that posed by Jihadis. You see, in the same week Salman Ramadan Abedi blew himself to pieces, taking 22 others with him, a couple of deranged white guys back home in the U.S. between them stabbed three innocent people to death. Leave it to the far Left to politicize incidents like these: “White Terrorists Killed More Americans This Week Than Refugees Have in 40 Years.” And: “The Numbers Don’t Lie: White Far-Right Terrorists Pose a Clear Danger to Us All.” Out: Islamic terrorism. In: White terrorism.
Europe As the New Israel
I’ve got to thank the Islamic crazies for one thing: This time I woke up with the news, whereas last time around I went to bed with it, so at least I’m spared the morning hangover from too many glasses of scotch today. But that’s the only silver lining I can think of at the moment.
So Now What?
As the French were licking their wounds, the question in the title above was posed to me on social media by a dear friend of old, who expressed his fear that the French might invoke NATO’s Article 5 and that, consequently, he might himself be drafted into the Dutch military, like the good old days before the 1990s.
The Free Dutchman 