A collection of 550 posts
In the early days of World War Two, George Orwell published a marvelous essay entitled “England Your England.” With the Luftwaffe in the skies above London laying waste to the city, Orwell observed a peculiarly contemptible trait of the English intelligentsia. In a word, this portion of the national elite
Both the right to freedom of expression and the institution of trial by jury came under intense scrutiny just three weeks after Raab’s article, when a Bristol jury acquitted four young people of criminal damage, even though they had all admitted tearing down a city centre statue.
The growing use of armed drones in Ethiopia and other backwater conflicts is linked to the recent war in Afghanistan.
According to the mainstream narrative about race, “white supremacy” is an all-controlling social force responsible for bad outcomes such as racial disparities. According to an alternative narrative popular on the far-Right, Jewish influence is a similarly powerful force, which explains outcomes disliked by those on the Right, such as multiculturalism
Rand’s style often caused her to be misunderstood and dismissed as some kind of Nietzschean.
A review of World in Danger: Germany and Europe in an Uncertain Time by Wolfgang Ischinger, Brookings, 280 pages (November, 2020) Every winter in Bavaria, the great and the good from Europe and the United States gather to take stock of the threats facing the world. The Munich Security Conference
I anticipated a more thoughtful exploration of Christopher Hitchens’s political history and relevance than what Ben Burgis provided.
Putin believes that the current crisis puts principled opposition to authoritarian empire-building at odds with the imperatives of faith and history, as well as the pragmatic imperative of keeping Germans supplied with energy.
We need to break the spell of illiberal ideology, and come back to our collective senses—to stop self-censoring in fear of the mob and excusing nonsense in the name of political allyship, and to start defending the values of pluralism, humanism, and democracy.
Wooldridge argues that meritocracy can only survive if it is infused with an ethos that prioritizes virtue, applying talent to ends that ennoble rather than enrich.
Yugoslavia is dead, and it isn’t coming back.
For the “new intellectual,” ultimately, the way forward has to be paved with nuance and understanding.
Hell hath no fury like a trolled daughter’s father: When multiple media houses and friends of friends from far overseas approach me and my family over a devastating, soul-destroying, career-ending lie, then the time of any person to act has arrived. It’s time to protect your daughter and
Late in his life, John Adams sent a letter to his great political rival Thomas Jefferson in which he wrote, “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” Adams must have understood Jefferson by the end, because on the 50th anniversary of the
The danger—or opportunity, depending on your view—is that two radical candidates like Mélenchon and Zemmour win the first round.