There’s something sublimely deranged about paying for otherwise unaffordable government outlays with the losses incurred at government-sponsored gambling tables , isn’t there? Long-term planning: now made possible by exacerbating the worst follies of short-term thinking! . . . . Continue Reading »
Blogito, ergo sum . I blog, therefore I am. This epistemological premise would seem to describe more than a few who inhabit the blogosphere these days. One wonders what would happen to the likes of an Andrew Sullivan or a Jonah Goldberg if they awoke one morning to discover that they were unable to . . . . Continue Reading »
The saga continues. Of the latest architect, Santiago Calatrava, Nicolai Ouroussoff complains at The New York Times : Mr. Calatrava remains unable to overcome the project’s fatal flaw: the striking incongruity between the extravagance of the architecture and the limited purpose it serves. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Jackson died this day, one hundred and forty-six years ago. He was thirty-nine years old, a kid for crying out loud, and to have accomplished all that he did! We can only wonder at what he would have done at Gettysburg. Surely he would have insisted that Stuart stay close to the army, that . . . . Continue Reading »
Another excerpt from some recent work: The basic political premise of techno-politics is that the classic question regarding competing claims to rule has been decisively answered: instead of Plato’s philosopher king we get its emasculated modern descendant, the rational bureaucrat. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Long have I railed against the way the phrase ‘sense of’ has crept, like ragweed, into our daily discourse at every level. But this, from Gail Collins in conversation with David Brooks, is particularly egregious and illustrative: And I walked away from the whole drama with a sense that . . . . Continue Reading »
Ross’s latest NYT column makes a point I think I alluded to earlier: just because losing Arlen Specter is bad doesn’t mean having him to begin with was good . And this is not just a charge you can level due to Specter’s stance on policy (on ‘strictly political’ issues . . . . Continue Reading »
Conservatives, postmodern and otherwise, often discuss the difficulties associated with the sometimes promiscuous assignment and declaration of rights in political discourse today. If we look at the American founding narrowly from the perspective of its Lockean influence, it’s easy to see the . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m spending the morning (and now part of the afternoon) on one of those fancy buses that has an internet connection. Since I didn’t have the foresight to download an episode of Battlestar Galactica, I’ve got nothing better to do than read tomorrow’s New York Times, and to . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ve just finished a draft of a dissertation chapter that dredges up one of Richard Rorty’s few, all-too-few references to Philip Rieff. Rorty liked Rieff’s remark that “Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious.” Harold Bloom, no antagonist . . . . Continue Reading »
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