A collection of 209 posts
While Hanson is good in setting out the causes of Trump’s victory, he falls short when it comes to making recommendations for the future.
Faludy’s greatest weapon—what really allows him to swat away the mosquitoes of passing ideologies—is his delight in sensual pleasures.
Brooks blames America’s bitter politics on the “outrage industrial complex”: the media, politicians and commentators who entice voters, attract television viewers, and sell books and event tickets premised on hatred of the other side.
Houellebecq depicts a Europe where French culture is a bad joke.
Orwell warned that liberty of thought—and literature with it—is endangered when writers in free countries adopt a “totalitarian outlook.”
Sowell distinguishes between the unconstrained vision and the constrained vision.
As far as “master concepts” go, this one is hard to beat. One worries, however, that it is a little too neat.
Children get a wider perspective when they’re tugged out of the here and now for a little while each day. In an enchanted hour, we can read them stories of the real and imagined past.
Dictators, of course, are terrible people. They also tend to be terrible writers. Yet many tyrants have entertained the illusion that they were literary super geniuses. Mein Kampf and Quotations from Chairman Mao (aka The Little Red Book) are the best-known works in the dictatorial canon, but they represent only
“Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation, and the other eight are unimportant,” was embraced by us all, regardless of gender.
Relativism, Bloom claimed, “is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.
I refuse to be discouraged by the sort of novel-gone-to-the-dogs pessimism that has been around for generations.
Reading is a gateway to empathy and understanding.
As an answer to the conundrum of consent I don’t think much of it.
Under current social conditions, even the most layered and qualified opinions can be distorted, misrepresented, over-simplified, exaggerated, and generally treated as those of enemies whose voices must be shut down.