The Left Betrayed My Country - Iraq
January 14, 2005
by Naseer Flayih Hasan
"It's worth noting, as well, that the general attitude of peace activists I met was
tension and anger. They were impossible to reason with. This was because, on one hand,
the sometimes considerable risks they took to oppose the war made them unable to accept
the fact that their cause was not as noble as they believed. Then, too, their dogmatic
anti-American attitudes naturally drew them to guides, translators, drivers and Iraqi
acquaintances who were themselves supporters of the regime. These Iraqis, in turn,
affected the peace activists until they came to share almost the same judgments and
opinions as the terrorists and defenders of Saddam."
Leftists sided with Radical Islam.
December 5, 2004
by Robert Fulford
"Horowitz's new book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left
(Regnery), describes the latest blind alley down which the left has stampeded.
Put plainly, American leftists responded to 9/11 by going over to the side of the
enemy, radical Islam. They are captives of what Horowitz calls "neo-communism," a
combination of romantic yearning for the Soviet empire and unreasoning hatred of
capitalism and U.S. power. In practice, this means they sympathize with any force
Washington opposes."
Political Correctness 101
January 15, 2003
by Pete Geddes
"Our enemies are fanatics, beyond reason, logic, or compassion. Their aim is not to
reform America, but to destroy it and the entire Judeo-Christian culture and heritage
of liberty they find so threatening. They epitomize pathology. They can not be
negotiated with, only defeated."
Tsunami must be fault of the US
January 20, 2005
by Gerard Baker
"In the past three days I have been impressed by the originality of the latest
critiques of the evil Americans. The earthquake and tsunami apparently had something
to do with global warming, environmentalists say, caused of course by greedy American
motorists. Then there was the rumour that the US military base at Diego Garcia was
forewarned of the impending disaster and presumably because of some CIA-approved plot
to undermine Islamic movements in Indonesia and Thailand did nothing about it."
12 Reasons to leave the United Nations
June 15, 2003
by William F. Jasper
"1. The UN's basic philosophy is both anti-American and pro-totalitarian."
Are Academic Elites Communists?
by Walter Williams
No. They are anti-anti-communists.
Back to More Business Bashing
December 5, 2005
by Tibor R. Machan
"When so many influential people still believe that business ethics is an oxymoron, it's
no wonder that journalists and even those in the business community begin to let the
notion go unchallenged."
Cinema and the Capitalist Hero
by Edward W. Younkins
"Films have depicted business people as over-materialistic, greedy, miserly,
villainous, corrupt, unethical, hypocritical, insecure, insensitive, anti-culture,
exploitative, smaller than life, repressed, and subservient to the establishment.
Fortunately, some films, more than I have recounted here, have emphasized their
heroic traits and accomplishments."
Eco-Fascism
by Russell Madden
"The violations of private property rights that have flowed from the environmental
movement and its adherence to the erroneous theory of "intrinsic value" have already
caused intense hardships for many people. Individuals have been prevented from
developing their land as they best see fit because of claims by environmentalists
that such usage would threaten an endangered species, a coastline, a wetland, or the
general "character" of some landscape. The contention is that efforts to enjoy the
benefits of these properties would destroy the value which that land or animal or
plant supposedly possesses by its mere existence regardless of its relationship to
specific human beings."
Hitler's Ghost Haunts German Parents
August 12, 2005
by Alexandra Colen
"Of all religious groups Baptists were among the most fiercely persecuted in the Soviet
Union. They were not just Christians but they also distrusted the state, preaching an
institutional secession from state-run institutions. Many Baptists belonged to the
German-speaking minority in Southern Russia and Kazakhstan. In the late 1980s and early
1990s, they emigrated to Germany, the land where their forefathers had originally come
from. Today, these Baptist immigrants from Russia, as well as the Low-German Mennonites,
are being prosecuted in Germany because they are unhappy with what their children are
learning in the German public schools, which they consider too secular. Children are not
allowed to opt out of classes or school activities and homeschooling is illegal in
Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938."
Hollywood's Views of Capitalism
by Raymond J. Keating
"The two views of government presented in Wall Street and Tucker are
instructive as well. In Wall Street, stock market regulators act as saviors,
cleaning up what unbridled capitalism has wrought. In Tucker, the Securities
and Exchange Commission does the bidding of powerful politicians and special interests
in crushing the entrepreneur."
May the Force Not Be With You
by Sheldon Richman
In Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace "The conflict that is the focus of
the movie has to do with trade, and the traders are the bad guys. The opening scroll
tells the audience that the Galactic Republic has imposed a tax on trade routes to the
outer star systems, but “the greedy Trade Federation” is disputing the tax."
On Usury Laws
by William Cullen Bryant
"The fact that the usury laws, arbitrary, unjust, and oppressive as they are, and
unsupported by a single substantial reason, should have been suffered to exist to the
present time can only be accounted for on the ground of the general and singular
ignorance which has prevailed as to the true nature and character of money. If men would
but learn to look upon the medium of exchange, not as a mere sign of value, but as value
itself, as a commodity governed by precisely the same laws which affect other kinds of
property, the absurdity and tyranny of legislative interference to regulate the extent
of profit which, under any circumstances, may be charged for it would at once become
apparent."
Progressives Protest Progress
July 30, 2003
by Pete Geddes
"I share my friends’ concern for human rights, environmental quality, and improving
social well being, particularly for the poor. Their anger at the short-term disruptions
of capitalism is real. But the alternatives are oppressive policies that retard progress
and destroy liberty."
Rockwell's Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"Today we face an ideology every bit as pitiless and messianic as Marxism. And like
socialism a hundred years ago, it holds the moral high ground. Not as the brotherhood
of man, since we live in post-Christian times, but as the brotherhood of bugs. Like
socialism, environmentalism combines an atheistic religion with virulent statism."
Roger and Me and Free Enterprise
by James L. Doti
"Roger and Me documents the impact of General Motors’ decision to relocate
automobile production facilities from Flint, Michigan, to lower-cost operations in
Mexico. The film’s message is that relocating assembly plants outside the U.S. had a
devastating socio-economic impact on the people of Flint. The film’s villain is the
free market system that allows G.M.’s supposedly callous CEO, Roger Smith, to undertake
reprehensible acts while holding himself and his company above accepted norms of decent
behavior."
The Secret Hate in Hate Crimes
February 2001
by Lowell Ponte
"Economic hatred during the past century has left a trail of death and horror as terrible
as hatred based on race, religion, and other differences now included in hate crime laws.
Why, then, have the authors of such laws carefully avoided inclusion of economic and class
hatred from their lists of prohibited hatreds? Why have college speech codes not punished
dehumanizing expressions of hatred such as “Eat the Rich” or “Down with the Bourgeoisie”
or “Let’s expropriate the selfish, idle rich” as they do racial epithets?
One answer is that outlawing class hatred would banish Marxist rhetoric and teaching from
campuses. Campuses where such speech codes are strictest are often ones where Marxist
views are most prevalent—and where “diversity” means having faculty that includes a black
Marxist, a lesbian Marxist, a Latino Marxist, and a transgender Marxist, but no professor
with free-market views. A leftist activist in my community advocated removing all books
that “promote violence” from our public library, but she ceased her campaign when I
applauded her in the local newspaper and called for removal of all books that promote
Marxism, a philosophy responsible for 100 million deaths during the twentieth century."
The War Against Life
February 2, 2003
by Butler Shaffer
"Contrary to those who look upon government schools as failures, I have long regarded
them as shining accomplishments for state purposes: to produce herd-oriented men and
women incapable of making independent judgments, and who are thus prepared to submit
to external authorities for direction in their lives."
What Does the War on Wal-Mart Mean?
Spring 2004
by Steven Malanga
"Because Wal-Mart represents the leading edge of this American business revolution, the
Left’s crusade against it is more than just a battle against a single company. It is
instead a clash of worldviews, as unions and their allies, representing a narrow band of
special interests masquerading as a populist movement, try to convince the public that
super-efficient discounters like Wal-Mart lower workers’ standard of living even as they
actually raise living standards by offering goods to so many at such low prices."
Why Do They Hate Him?
by Stephen W. Carson
"Tolkien stands in stark contrast to the socialist-leaning, Modernist, elitist literati
that hate him so much. As Mingardi and Stagnaro have demonstrated, Tolkien understood
that socialism was unworkable and made little distinction between "left" and "right"
socialism."
Benetton’s Evil Ads II: Sears Strikes Back
Spring 2000
by Dennis Saffran and Joe Diamond
"Give Sears credit for bucking the PC orthodoxy prevalent in corporate America these
days. It terminated an exclusive contract to sell a special line of Benetton clothes
after the uproar over the Italian company's repulsive "We, On Death Row" ads that
romanticize convicted killers."
Barbarians on the March
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The Times of London reported on September 29 that British town planners have
decided that what jewel-box Georgian and Regency towns such as Bath and Cheltenham
need—architecturally speaking—is the shock of the new. The planners actually demand
that, in exchange for their permission to build, new constructions should "stand out
like a sore thumb" instead of "blending into the vernacular" of the serenely classical
terraces."
Do Sties Make Pigs?
Summer 1995
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The City Council—the people's elected representatives it transpired, had done far more
damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering's air force.
Indeed, they had managed to turn it into a terrible visual ordeal for anyone with the
most minimal visual sensibility.
First among the reasons for this large-scale architectural vandalism was the prolonged
revulsion against all things Victorian. In Britain this was particularly pronounced after
the war because for the first time it was unmistakably clear just how far the country had
declined from its Victorian apogee of world power and influence: a decline made somewhat
easier to bear, psychologically speaking, by the consistent, unabashed denigration not
only of the Victorians themselves but of all their ideas and works as well."
The Dung Hits the Fan
by Stefan Kanfer
"Mayor Rudolph Giuliani expressed outrage over such objets d'art as the corpses
of dissected animals suspended in formaldehyde, an indulgent portrait of a child murderer,
and, perhaps most significantly, a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant
dung and cutouts from pornographic magazines. Noting that the Brooklyn Museum receives an
annual $7 million stipend from the New York City budget and leases its building from the
city, the mayor announced: 'You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating
somebody else's religion. And therefore we will do everything that we can to remove
funding for the Brooklyn Museum until the director comes to his senses and realizes that
if you are a government-subsidized enterprise, then you can't do things that desecrate
the most personal and deeply held views of people in society.'"
It Hurts, Therefore I Am
Autumn 1995
by Theodore Dalrymple
"I first formulated my viral theory of criminality when I noticed that at least nine out
of ten white English prisoners are tattooed, more than three or four times the proportion
in the general population. The statistical association of crime with tattooing is
stronger, I feel certain, than between crime and any other single factor, with the
possible exception of smoking. Virtually all English criminals are smokers, a fact that
sociologists have also unaccountably overlooked."
Multiculti Museums—Or Else
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The British government announced in May that it plans to monitor the ethnic composition
of visitors to the nation's publicly subsidized museums. Those museums that fail to draw
what the government considers a sufficient number of ethnic minorities will lose their
subsidies."
Tradition and the Modern City
Autumn 1995
by Robert Adam
"Post-war buildings and planning are the product of the failed modernist ideal that
transformed most aspects of twentieth-century life, from politics to painting, and that
gave rise to our urban social ills and to urban ugliness. In architecture,
modernism—the cult of abstract rationality and change for its own sake—has given us
sterility and inhumanity instead of its promised progress and liberation. Utopian
ambitions and professional arrogance have left our cities with decay and dereliction,
the perfect breeding ground for the alienation and brutality that have undermined
community life."
Victimhood Equals Heroism
by Theodore Dalrymple
"With admirable courage, Lapper has overcome her disability to become an artist—with,
alas, all the tedious conformism of her professional tribe: it goes almost without saying
that she is a single mother sporting ironmongery in her nose. Her own art, according to
a eulogistic website, “questions notions of physical normality in a society that
considers her deformed because she was born without arms.” The eulogizer, however, does
not spot the contradiction or irony here: that Lapper has shrewdly (and, in the
circumstances, understandably) commodified her armlessness, turning it to an advantage.
If people truly considered her condition either normal or beautiful, it would be
disastrous for her career."
No Beheadings, Please, We’re British.
Appeasing Muslim extremists means surrendering Western liberties.
February 6, 2006
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The weekend edition of Le Monde carried on its front page a startling photograph
of a masked protester in London, holding up a placard demanding the death of those who
insult Islam. Policemen flanked him on either side, as if protecting him from the vicious
assaults of cartoonists.
Nothing could have captured better the cowardly and pusillanimous response of the British
government to the crisis deliberately stirred up in many Muslim countries four months
after the publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad (only one
of which was remotely funny)."
Superheroes and the Fight for Liberty
May 2001
by Raymond J. Keating
"In recent assessments, conservatives seem split on the direction of comic books. In a
1994 National Review article, for example, Anthony Lejeune praised old-time comics,
pointing out: “Political themes, as distinct from simple Americanism, were generally
eschewed as being likely to divide than to attract readers.” But he saw a drastic change
in longer, grander comics known as “graphic novels”: “What almost all of them have in
common is that their vision is dark—like the new Batman—rather than bright, ugly rather
than beautiful, bitter rather than optimistic, cruel rather than genial.”
In contrast, in the Weekly Standard (1998), Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote that some
people creating comics “are trying to explore the big questions. And they’re doing it in
books openly hostile to the moral relativism of modern liberalism.” He concluded that
'conservative moralists could do a lot worse than to follow the latest round of
superheroes flying above the streets of Metropolis and Gotham.'”
Viva Voltaire: In the cartoon controversy, it’s the French who’ve been courageous, the
Americans and British spineless.
February 10, 2006
by Theodore Dalrymple
"This time, the French have put the British and Americans to shame. From the outset of
the crisis over the Danish caricatures, they have vigorously defended the right of
free expression, unlike the British and Americans, whose pretence that they
“understand” Muslim outrage has fooled no one and given the fanatics the (correct)
impression of weakness and lack of conviction—and thus encouraged them."
A Beautiful Movie, Lousy Economics
by Sanford Ikeda
"Perhaps someday Hollywood will release a major film about an economist who really
did change the course of history for the better (which rules out Keynes), and who
also suffered, struggled, and triumphed. As I imagine it, an early scene would be
set, circa 1920, in a lively little coffeehouse in Vienna."
Conservatives in Hollywood?!
Autumn 2005
by Brian C. Anderson
"When Hollywood does put its liberal worldview aside to make movies that embody
traditional values, it often scores big with the public."
Forrest Gump: A Subversive Movie
by Aeon J. Skoble
"If intelligence and analytic ability are not portrayed in the most popular film of
the year as important components of the good life, an intellectually lazy generation
will tacitly take this as support for their disengaged condition. The majority of teens
cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a world map, or the Civil War by half-century. The
fastest growing trend in criminal defense is diminished responsibility. Books are out,
MTV is in. Critical reasoning is on the decline not only as a skill but as a desideratum.
And now comes Forrest Gump to reinforce the idea that we are not responsible for our
destinies, that intelligence is not important, that independent thought will be
punished. That's dangerous."
A Great Conservative Filmmaker
Winter 2004
by Julia Magnet
"What Stillman notices in Barcelona is that irresponsible politics and
irresponsible sexual behavior spring from the same ideology. The moral relativism that
informs post–sexual revolution mores also undergirds European anti-Americanism. To a
relativist, there is no difference between Soviet Russia and NATO; the Americans are no
better than the fascists—what they all really want is power, which, like judgment, is
one of the only postmodern vices."
Hollywood and Isolationism
April 25, 2003
by R. Cort Kirkwood
"Hollywood not only zealously propagandized for the Great Crusade of its own accord, but
also gleefully manufactured government propaganda. In 1941, Hollywood went to war with
America, and it has stayed on the front ever since. John Wayne, the best friend
conservatives ever had in Hollywood, greased more "Krauts" and "Nips" than the 101st
Airborne and Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers combined.
But two of Hollywood’s finest pro-war cinematic achievements never showed Americans
smiting the Axis in battle. The heroes fired their salvos not at the enemy abroad, but
at the enemy at home: the isolationists, also known as America Firsters after the
America First Committee, which disbanded four days after Pearl Harbor was left a
smoldering ruin."
Hollywood and the Culture of War
January 28, 2003
by Rod Oglesby
"Children of the Baby Boom such as Ron Kovic grew up on a steady diet of these war
glorification films, and this primed them to be gun and bomb fodder in Vietnam.
Unfortunately for Mr. Kovic and many men like him, by the time they learned the ugly
real truth about war it was too late. In retrospect, blind support for war was an
objective Hollywood's producers and directors accomplished with great success. It's
too bad many of them weren't sent to the front lines instead."
Hollywood's Views of Capitalism
by Raymond J. Keating
"The two views of government presented in Wall Street and Tucker are
instructive as well. In Wall Street, stock market regulators act as saviors,
cleaning up what unbridled capitalism has wrought. In Tucker, the Securities
and Exchange Commission does the bidding of powerful politicians and special interests
in crushing the entrepreneur."
In Defense of “Borat”
November 15, 2006
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
"Borat is simply anarchic—there is no institution, idea, cultural value or government
he does not find worthy of being picked apart through humor."
Laughing With/At Michael Moore
August 8, 2003
by James Ostrowski
"In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore tries and fails to explain why America is
so violent. I give Bowling for Columbine one thumb down and the other thumb up.
(Can I do that?)"
May the Force Not Be With You
by Sheldon Richman
In Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace the conflict that is the focus of
the movie has to do with trade, and the traders are the bad guys. The opening scroll
tells the audience that the Galactic Republic has imposed a tax on trade routes to the
outer star systems, but “the greedy Trade Federation” is disputing the tax."
Movie-Goers Can Think for Themselves
by Tibor R. Machan
"Some charge that these films are being used by Hollywood producers to peddle brand-name
products. (In Bull Durham it was beer and other products, none of which I
remembered after I saw the movie or even noticed as I watched it.)"
Roger and Me and Free Enterprise
by James L. Doti
"Roger and Me documents the impact of General Motors’ decision to relocate
automobile production facilities from Flint, Michigan, to lower-cost operations in
Mexico. The film’s message is that relocating assembly plants outside the U.S. had a
devastating socio-economic impact on the people of Flint. The film’s villain is the
free market system that allows G.M.’s supposedly callous CEO, Roger Smith, to undertake
reprehensible acts while holding himself and his company above accepted norms of decent
behavior."
The Sin of Sin City
by Andrew Klavan
"I can’t emphasize this enough: I like sex and violence in stories. But meaning has
a moral weight. Here, as with the degraded photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and the
hateful lyrics of Eminem, we’re being asked to applaud a show of undeniable artistic
talent without passing judgment on the vision it conveys. It’s kind of like asking us
to appreciate the excellent marksmanship of the boys at Columbine High."
Sixtiesville
Winter 1999
by Kay S. Hymowitz
"Hollywood has always been a steadfast partisan in the culture wars, but recently
there have been signs of wavering. The highly acclaimed and potential Oscar
nominee Pleasantville captures the feel of this transitional moment."
Those Awards
by Murray N. Rothbard
"The Oscars have increasingly taken on the dimensions of a racket. Since the eligible
movies are those that emerge at any point during the calendar year, and since the
producers fully understand the minuscule attention span of the typical Academy dimwit,
all the Big Pictures, calculated to appeal to said dimwit, are held back until December
30 or 31. As a result, the experts were confidently predicting awards in late December
to movies that no one had yet seen. The major studios have always had special previews
for Academy members (i.e., Oscar voters) for the pictures they are hyping for the awards;
now, that has been supplemented by videocassettes expressed to the homes of each voter."
Westerns and Property Rights
March 2004
by Andrew P. Morriss
What Sicko Left Out
by Humberto Fontova
"As eagerly expected by Michael Moore's Cuban case officers, Sicko's screening
was the signal for their other propaganda assets to chime in: "Communist Cuba's universal
free health system has achieved low child mortality and high longevity rates on a par
with rich nations since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution," wrote Anthony Boadle from
Havana's Reuters Bureau last week.
An infant mortality rate that plummeted from 13th lowest in the world (lower than in
Germany, France, Japan, Israel among many other first world nations) during the
unspeakable Batista era to 40th today, that finds most of the nations behind it in 1958
now ahead of it – this rate qualifies as an "achievement" in the lexicon of news agencies
that have earned a Havana bureau."
The Dystopian Imagination
Autumn 2001
by Theodore Dalrymple
"It is hardly surprising that a century of utopian dreams and coercive social
engineering to achieve them should have been a century rich in imaginative dystopias.
Indeed, from The Time Machine to Blade Runner, the dystopia became a
distinct literary and cinematic genre, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and
George Orwell's 1984 became so much a part of Western man's mental furniture that
even unliterary people invoke them to criticize the present."
The Grapes of Opportunity
March 1990
by Hannah Lapp
"Just the term “migrant labor” conjures repulsive images in the minds of many people
who have heard of or seen only such examples portrayed in John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath. The term is often associated with poverty, shame,
desperation, and helplessness. What’s frequently overlooked by those enjoying material
ease is the fact that happiness isn’t measured only by standard of living, and that
poverty isn’t necessarily unfortunate in the minds of those involved."
The Last Wild Children of Capitalism
by William B. Irvine
American futures markets have long played the role of villain in popular economic
thinking. In his 1903 novel The Pit, for example, Frank Norris offers his readers
the following description of the Chicago Board of Trade:
Within there, a great whirlpool, a pit of roaring waters spun and thundered, sucking in the life tides of the city, sucking them in as into the mouth of some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some colossal sewer; then vomiting them forth again, spewing them up and out, only to catch them in the return eddy and suck them in afresh.
Money and Politics in the Land of Oz
by Quentin P. Taylor
"L. Frank Baum claimed to have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz “solely to
pleasure the children” of his day, but scholars have found enough parallels between
Dorothy’s yellow-brick odyssey and the politics of 1890s Populism to suggest otherwise.
Did Baum intend to pen a subtle political satire on monetary reform or merely an
entertaining fantasy?"
Our Future
by Murray N. Rothbard
"George Orwell's collectivist Utopia has plugged all the loopholes. There is no hope at
all for the individual or for humanity, and so the effect on the reader is devastating."
Starship Troopers
April 9, 2003
by Karen Kwiatkowski
"For the rest of us citizens, denizens, residents and lovers of liberty, Heinlein’s
fascistic fantasy can help explain the present, and possibly the future."
We Can Do Better than Government Inspection of Meat
by E. C. Pasour, Jr.
"Sinclair wrote The Jungle to ignite a socialist movement on behalf of America’s
workers. He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed or verified the horrendous
conditions he ascribed to Chicago packing houses. Instead, he relied heavily on both
his own imagination and hearsay. Indeed, a congressional investigation at the time
found little substance in Sinclair’s allegations."
Ebenezer Scrooge: In His Own Defense
by Ted Roberts
"The Dickens with Dickens."
In Defense of Scrooge
December 24, 2002
by Michael Levin
"No doubt Cratchit needs - i.e., wants - more, to support his family and care for
Tiny Tim. But Scrooge did not force Cratchit to father children he is having
difficulty supporting. If Cratchit had children while suspecting he would be unable
to afford them, he, not Scrooge, is responsible for their plight. And if Cratchit
didn't know how expensive they would be, why must Scrooge assume the burden of
Cratchit's misjudgment?"
Puffing Puff Daddy
Summer 2001
by Theodore Dalrymple
"Genuflection to popular culture’s worst products is today a sign both of
enlightenment and of a properly generous democratic sentiment."
Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: A Libertarian View
by Andrew Ian Dodge
"The religious and the straight-laced in the world have always looked upon rock & roll
as a shining example of libertinism. I would posit that, on the contrary, rock & roll,
more specifically, hard rock and heavy metal, are libertarianism in action."
The Economic Fantasy of Star Trek
by P. Gardner Goldsmith
"If one looks closely at Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry's United-Nations-based
concept of the "Federation" and the military life of his space travelers, one
concludes that he adhered strongly to the fanciful ideas of utopian socialism."
Lessons From Star Trek or What is Good for Business?
by Dmitry Chernikov
"It seems beyond doubt that the economic system of the Trek Federation is
socialism of some variant, which, oddly enough, has resulted not in social suicide
but in unprecedented, if not clearly shown to the viewers, prosperity."
On Sesame Street, It's All Show
Autmun 1995
by Kay S. Hymowitz
"While it teaches the alphabet and supposedly prepares children for school, it actually
instructs them in the conventions of an anti-intellectual pop culture and thus makes
common cause with the vast contemporary forces arrayed against literacy. While it
asserts its purity from commercial taint, it wields the most sophisticated marketing
strategies to sell its products to keep the show in business. Like the television
commercial on which it is modeled, Sesame Street is a triumph of appearance over
substance."
PBS Continues Probe into Biased Film
December 7, 2005
by Wendy McElroy
"The documentary ["Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories."], which addressed domestic
violence and children, is accused of being anti-father, factually inaccurate and
politically motivated."
The Orwellian Ideology of 24
January 29, 2007
by Matt McCaffrey
"As enjoyable as 24 is on the surface, a more than cursory glance makes it
obvious that the show is attempting to justify and even celebrate an ever-expanding
Orwellian state. It almost makes me want to root for the bad guys."
Sex, Sadness, and the City
Autumn 1999
by Wendy Shalit
"Despite the hype, Sex and the City is not about girls who just want to have fun,
flaunting their sexual appetites. While promoters offer the show as one more brave step
in the sexual liberation of women, leading to ever greater fulfillment, in fact it is a
lament for all the things of inestimable value that the sexual revolution has wrecked,
in this city and beyond. If Candace Bushnell were a practicing Catholic, she couldn't
have produced a more effective proselytizing tool for continence and modesty."
Should Star Trek Be Regulated as a Monopoly?
by Gary North
"Star Trek has become a conservationist firm, not a monopoly. I am not pleased
with this development, since I am a greedy, profligate, free-riding consumer who wants
lots more rides on The Enterprise for the price of cheap videotapes."
Softening Us Up for Torture, 24 Hours at a Time
by Dave Trotter
"They contrive a perfectly worst-case scenario to demonstrate Bush administration
logic: namely, that because it’s theoretically possible that a single man, woman, or
child, if tortured, could reveal information about a terrorist plot which could
potentially save innocent lives, then any amount of coercion is therefore justified
to compel that individual to surrender whatever useful information that he might be
hoarding."
The Starship Private Enterprise
by Timothy Sandefur
"Star Trek’s vision of futuristic bureaucracy is certainly unrealistic, as
Star Trek’s own success testifies: the franchise has succeeded through
decentralized marketing, not central planning. So can space exploration."
Thoughts on Creativity While Watching The Twilight Zone
by Thomas A. Giovanetti
"But no matter how advanced technology becomes, it is doubtful that machines will ever
possess creativity. The idea of a computer performing a task with creativity or
inspiration seems best left to the imagination of science fiction writers."
We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore
Autumn 2003
by Brian C. Anderson
"The “fair and balanced” approach that Fox trumpets in its slogan is part of this
iconoclastic tone, too. Sure, the anchor is almost always a conservative, but it’s
clear he is striving to tell the truth, and there’s always a liberal on hand, too.
By contrast, political consultant and Fox contributor Dick Morris notes, “The other
networks offer just one point of view, which they claim is objective.” Not only does
the Fox approach make clear that there is always more than one point of view, but it
also puts the network’s liberal guests in the position of having to defend their
views—something that almost never happens on other networks."
Why Jon Stewart Is All the Rage
Spring 2005
by Harry Stein
"It is safe to say that the vast majority of Stewart’s young fans have no more a coherent
political philosophy than they do a sense of history. What they do tend to have, in the
contemporary vernacular, is attitude: a set of poses, ranging from an easy
familiarity with drug culture to a bemused contempt for religion, that define one as hip.
Jon Stewart confirms that view of themselves in every broadcast."
The Cultural Undertow of Muslim Economic Rage
December 12, 2001
by Timur Kuran
"Islamists believe that to be a good Muslim is to lead an "Islamic way of life." In
principle, every facet of one's existence must be governed by Islamic rules and
regulations — marriage, family, dress, politics, economics, and much more. In every
domain of life, they believe, a clear demarcation exists between "Islamic" and un-Islamic
behaviors. Never mind that in all but a few ritualistic matters the Islamists themselves
disagree on what Islam prescribes."
The Empty Fanatic
Winter 2006
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The TV commentary made no connection between Muriel Degauque’s promiscuity and drug
abuse on the one hand and her subsequent conversion to a murderously puritanical form
of Islam on the other (she wore the most extreme of veils). It requires little
imagination to make such a connection, however, for one possible interpretation of her
former life was that she sought to fill an inner void, a lack of purpose or interest,
with mere sensation. Once the self-defeating nature of this effort was obvious to
her—and nothing suggests that she lacked intelligence, despite her mediocre academic
background—she became vulnerable to a “complete” answer to life’s problems. Her death
demonstrated, both to herself and to others, how deeply (or at least desperately) she
believed in it."
A Fifth Column in the Prisons?
Let’s keep firebrand Muslim clerics away from prisoners.
Spring 1996
by Paul Howard
"U.S. counterterrorism officials have known for several years that al-Qaida views
the U.S. prison population as a fertile source for recruiting homegrown terrorists—the
kind that slip through security measures designed to catch foreign jihadi. Would-be
“dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, for instance, was a former Chicago gangbanger who converted
to radical Islam in prison and traveled to Afghanistan for jihad training. Many observers
believe Islam to be the fastest-growing religion behind bars, particularly among black
convicts; Muslim prison gangs are proliferating. On some estimates, as much as 20 percent
of the New York state prison population may be Muslim."
France vs. France
Winter 2006
by Stefan Kanfer
"Hélas, high-sounding phrases will not help France recover from the problem it
faces in integrating its millions of young, welfare-dependent, and increasingly alienated
Muslims. France’s unemployment rate stands at about 10 percent, roughly twice the U.S.
rate. The economy grows slowly—under 2 percent. Few new jobs are available for the angry
and unskilled (except, of course, in the arts of destruction). Absent economic reform,
the private sector is unlikely to create any jobs this year or next year or the ones
after that."
If the Problem Is Muslim Terror, Then What?
Autumn 2005
by Victor Davis Hanson
"It is a tremendous historical irony that America’s liberal Left, embracing moral
equivalence in this fashion, has all but refused to denounce the illiberal ideology of
our enemies—an ideology that supports polygamy, gender apartheid, religious intolerance,
hatred of homosexuals, and patriarchy. Sometimes, the terrorists even win outright
praise: perhaps the most popular filmmaker of election year 2004 was Michael Moore, who
celebrated the suicide bombers and terrorists of Iraq as “minutemen” akin to our own
Founding Fathers."
Islam is a Riot
November 17, 2005
by Burt Prelutsky
"Frankly, what I most fear is that in a world in which multiculturalists, including
even President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, feel obliged to bow and scrape to
Muslims, in a world so overflowing with infantile feel-good rhetoric about the joys
of Islam, that it will eventually and inevitably give rise to fascism."
Jihad's Fifth Column in the West
April 23, 2003
by Serge Trifkovic
"What is happening today is nothing like the wave of immigration to America
that took place in the 1880s and 1890s. That was not clandestine, and it
was not based on the presumed right of the newcomers to bully the citizens
of the United States into submitting to their religion and killing them if
they proved reluctant to do so."
London Muslims “Celebrate” 9/11
Autumn 2002
by Farrukh Dhondy
"The assembly adjourned twice for prayers, and the crowds flowed out into the courtyard,
led by the muezzin. The star of the meeting was Omar Bakri, a cleric of Syrian origin
who heads the sinister cult Al Mahajiroun, which draws its recruits mainly from the
colleges and universities of Britain. Al Mahajiroun seeks to make Britain an Islamic
state. Bakri told his rapt audience that they must learn the “lessons” of September
11—the murderous lessons, presumably."
Our Islamic Fifth Column
Autumn 2001
by Farrukh Dhondy
"In 1989 came the most significant divide in the multicultural history of Britain: the
Rushdie affair, which uncovered a multicultural fifth column, whose literary criticism
entailed book burning and death threats. The British Muslim community echoed the call of
the Ayatollah Khomeini to hunt down and kill the writer. There were denunciations of
Rushdie in every mosque by mullahs and crowds who had only handled a copy of the book
to burn it. Not one mullah—not one—raised a voice in support of the principle of freedom
of creativity; no mullah ventured the opinion that the fatwa was wrong or against Islamic
teaching. Though the supposedly liberal Muslim commentators whom the British press
retains were not in favor of the death sentence, none would extend himself to a defense
of the book. In Bradford, an ugly book-burning rally was led by one Kalim Siddiqui, who
was forced to admit to an investigating press that he and his operation were financed by
the government of Iran."
The Philosopher of Islamic Terror
April 11, 2003
by Paul Berman
"It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too,
speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that
someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb.
But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild
fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and
to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political
leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of
multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This
is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep
things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things.
Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to
dispatch armies, for better and for worse."
Something Rotten in Denmark?
April 29, 2003
by Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard
"For years, Danes lauded multiculturalism and insisted they had no problem with the
Muslim customs - until one day they found that they did."
The Suicide Bombers Among Us
Autumn 2005
by Theodore Dalrymple
"Surveys suggest that between 6 and 13 percent of British Muslims—that is, between
98,000 and 208,000 people—are sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists and their efforts.
Theoretical sympathy expressed in a survey is not the same thing as active support or
a wish to emulate the “martyrs” in person, of course. But it is nevertheless a sufficient
proportion and absolute number of sympathizers to make suspicion and hostility toward
Muslims by the rest of society not entirely irrational, though such suspicion and
hostility could easily increase support for extremism. This is the tightrope that the
British state and population will now have to walk for the foreseeable future; and the
sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced, in a single day, by
the nightmare of permanent conflict."
The Terrorist Next Door
September 1, 2003
by Daniel Pipes
"In short, while Hawash confessed to his crime, his supporters refused to admit their
mistakes.
There are two lessons here. First, profiling can work. Alert neighbors reporting on
apparently militant Islamic activities brought Hawash to law enforcement's attention.
Second, sympathizers of terrorist suspects are entitled to express surprise and tell
heart-warming stories about them. But shrill charges of racism and appalling comparisons
to Nazi Germany impede the U.S. government's efforts to protect Americans."
The Terror of Islam
by Antony Flew
The 'West', Islam and Islamism: Is ideological Islam compatible with liberal democracy?
June 2003
by Caroline Cox and John Marks
"We write as non-Muslims who sincerely seek to promote peace and mutual respect
between people of different faiths and cultures."
The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies
Summer 2005
by Kay S. Hymowitz
"All told, the nation is at a cultural inflection point that portends change. Though
they always caution that “marriage is not a panacea,” social scientists almost
uniformly accept the research that confirms the benefits for children growing up with
their own married parents."
China’s Missing Women
September 1, 2004
by Wendy McElroy
"With a new appreciation of their importance to society, the role of women in China
seems poised for redefinition. The Chinese government can best help that process by
getting out of the way."
Elder Abuse Demands Family Solutions
February 18, 2003
by Wendy McElroy
"Elder abuse cannot be absolutely eliminated. Any politician who says differently is
either mistaken or lying, and you should check whether his hand is in your pocket. But
elder abuse can be greatly reduced by supporting the non-government institutions upon
which society used to depend. Less law. More family."
Family does best when governments don't try to nationalise child-rearing
This is a press release for Family Policy, Family Changes by Patricia Morgan,
which compares the state of the family in secular Sweden, Catholic Italy, and Britain.
"One of the most striking points of comparison is the extent to which the state
interferes in family life, especially the rearing of children, in each of the countries."
Family Values? Let's Stop Playing Politics!
by Ben Mettes
"In the end, politicians are politicians and they will place the
political process above more autonomy for families."
Fear and Loathing at the Day-Care Center
Summer 2001
by Kay S. Hymowitz
"Not so long ago, the sight of 30 cribs, even supposing them tucked in with 300-count
sheets, evoked gloomy associations of hospitals and orphanages. But for the past three
decades, day-care centers have become the cheerful setting of a new life script for
American women. Shortly after women have their babies, the script goes, they head
brightly back to work. Just as brightly, their babies head off to quality day-care
centers, where professionally trained caregivers nurture them. The result is fulfillment
for everybody: women find new satisfactions in work while achieving economic
equality; young children thrive even more than they would under the care of their
non-credentialed mothers. As the having-it-all script gained a following, though,
certain chinks appeared: for one thing, a lot of women eagerly following its scenario
reported suffering from feelings that seemed like . . . guilt."
The Gay Adoption Conundrum
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
"I argue for the validity of the political intuition of both the
left (that gay couples shouldn't be prohibited by law from adopting)
and the right (legalization raises the specter of children placed
by courts in ethically dysfunctional environments and otherwise
used as political footballs). I conclude that the social, cultural,
and religious conflicts associated with gay marriage and adoption
are best resolved through laissez-faire."
How to Separate School and State: A Primer
by Douglas Dewey
"Only if we can restore the fundamental sovereignty of families in the education of
their children can we begin once again to speak of “the family” as having political
and moral standing in public life. If families remain weak and servile, no other
liberties will long endure. With families restored to full dignity and vitality,
all else can be restored."
Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work by Jennifer
Roback Morse
reviewed by Ryan H. Sager
"Despite a somewhat garbled discussion at the end of the book of whether the decision
to love is reasonable-a section that attempts to answer such intractable questions
as "what is love?" (perhaps best left to non-economists)-Morse makes a compelling case
for libertarians and others to pay more respect to the role of the family. While many
commentators have certainly made the case for strong families, Morse's economic approach
is a novel and thought-provoking addition to a long-running debate."
Mises on the Family
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"Why did Mises address family and marriage in an economics book refuting socialism? He
understood-unlike many economists today-that the opponents of the free society have a
broad agenda that usually begins with an attack on this most crucial bourgeois
institution."
The New Blacklist
by Stefan Kanfer
"Opponents of Dr. Laura’s defense of traditional morality conjure up an ugly specter."
PBS Continues Probe into Biased Film
December 7, 2005
by Wendy McElroy
"The documentary ["Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories."], which addressed domestic
violence and children, is accused of being anti-father, factually inaccurate and
politically motivated."
SUVs and the Clash of Cultures
February 04, 2004
by John A. Baden, Ph.D.
"Given recent controversies over SUVs and condemnations of their drivers, the pro-SUV
atmosphere in Moab was really quite remarkable. I am intrigued by the hostility shown
SUVs, especially given their popularity in our region. Having been an anthropologist,
I detect cultural conflict.
It’s akin to a statement often heard in November of 1980, attributed to an editor at
The New Yorker: “I don’t understand how Reagan could have won, nobody I know
voted for him!”
Exactly! Of course she didn’t understand. She lived in a hermetically sealed social
universe. Her tribe’s opinions were limited to those sanctified by Harper’s and
The New York Review of Books."
Violations of Marriage; Adultery, Fornication, Cohabitation, Bigamy, and Polygamy
by Peter McWilliams
The history and effects of laws regarding cohabitation.
Defining Deviancy Away
Spring 1997
by Richard E. Morgan
"As George Orwell would have said, only an intellectual could believe such bilge; ordinary
people—and not just the religiously devout—will reject it out of hand. They will, that is,
if they get the chance. For so great has the influence of the American intellectual class
become, so great are its institutional advantages—especially in the courts and in a few
large cities—that the socio-legal revolution against marriage is advancing in ways that
largely evade the requirement of majority consent."
For Better or Worse: Gay marriage is better.
by Thomas W. Hazlett
"The institution of marriage is a public good. As H.L. Mencken pointed out,
monogamy kills passion--which is dangerously antisocial--and so preserves civil society.
But boring, established, long-term relationships would serve the tranquilizing social
function for homosexuals as much as for anyone else. Why can't the religious right see that
some of the most harmful excesses of the "gay lifestyle"--you know, the "disgusting"
practices that I read about in graphic detail whenever my name is rented to a Falwellian
fund-raiser--may flow from the lack of such calming institutions?"
The Gay Adoption Conundrum
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
"I argue for the validity of the political intuition of both the
left (that gay couples shouldn't be prohibited by law from adopting)
and the right (legalization raises the specter of children placed
by courts in ethically dysfunctional environments and otherwise
used as political footballs). I conclude that the social, cultural,
and religious conflicts associated with gay marriage and adoption
are best resolved through laissez-faire."
Gay and Lesbian Rights: Property Is Better Than Politics
by Brian Micklethwait
Homosexuality
by Peter McWilliams
The history and effects of laws regarding homosexuality.
The Scout Wars
Summer 2001
by Stefan Kanfer
"The New York Times even described the Scouts ‘as something akin to a
hate group’—the same Scouts who do irreplaceable work in the inner cities helping
poor, and mostly minority, kids put order and ideals into their lives."
Why the Scouts Ban Homosexuals
Winter 2002
by Stefan Kanfer
"Homosexual activists have been at daggers drawn with the Boy Scouts of America since
1998, when the Scouts decided to fire any troop leader who announced his homosexuality,
and the Supreme Court’s backing of Scout policy in 2000 only intensified the conflict.
In the homosexual activists’ view, the Scouts are bigots, exhibiting bias against a
victimized minority. The Scouts respond that their purpose is to serve boys, not
scoutmasters—and that purpose requires them to protect young boys from any pederasts
who predictably might be drawn to them."
Diversity’s Limits
Autumn 1997
by Wendy Shalit
"'The university would be in chaos,' warned Ivan Marcus, a Yale history professor, "if
it bent over backward to accommodate everyone's sensitivities." The New Yorker's
David Denby quite agrees: colleges cannot "continue to humor every group's
sensitivities." Are they referring, perhaps, to the antics of Yale's
Bisexual/Gay/Lesbian/Trans-gender Cooperative? Making a case for defunding its
African-American cultural studies house or its Latina/Latino cultural center? No, this
September's crackdown on diversity came on the heads of five Orthodox Jewish students
who had asked to be excused from Yale's requirement that they live in coed dorms—which
they said offended their religious beliefs. As everyone by now knows, the administration
denied the request. Diversity, it seems, ends where traditional morality begins."
Mistaken Identity
Autumn 1997
by Heather Mac Donald
"In between scattered non sequiturs and platitudes, one theme clearly emerges: the
overriding, all-consuming importance of identity politics. Incredible to say, the head
of the world's most prominent private foundation believes that one of the paramount
"challenges of the 21st century" will be that of "strengthening . . . identity"—even
though ethnic tribes and urban gangs are massacring one another over a surplus of
the stuff."
Multiculti Museums—Or Else
by Theodore Dalrymple
"The British government announced in May that it plans to monitor the ethnic composition
of visitors to the nation's publicly subsidized museums. Those museums that fail to draw
what the government considers a sufficient number of ethnic minorities will lose their
subsidies."
The Prep-School PC Plague
Spring 2002
by Heather Mac Donald
"The diversity industry—the profession paid to harangue Americans about racism and
sexism—has burrowed deep into the nation’s elite prep schools. Where private secondary
schools once inculcated American citizenship and patriotism, today they employ diversity
professionals to show students their complicity in an unjust society. Schools that strove
to mold a homogeneous national elite now have enshrined “difference” as their organizing
principle. Aping the fractured curriculum of the university, many prep schools offer
courses in “gay voices,” the “construction of gender,” and 'racial identity.'”
Bring Back Stigma
Autumn 2000
by Roger Scruton
"It is now orthodox to regard social stigma as a form of oppression, to be discarded
on our collective quest for inner freedom. But the political philosophers and novelists
of former times would have been horrified by such a view. In almost all matters that
touched upon the core requirements of social order, they believed that the genial
pressure of manners, morals, and customs—enforced by the various forms of disapproval,
stigma, shame, and reproach—was a more powerful guarantor of civilized and lawful
behavior than the laws themselves. Inner sanctions, they argued, more dependably
maintain society than such external ones as policemen and courts. That is why the
moralists of the eighteenth century, for example, rarely touched upon murder, theft,
rape, or criminal deception; instead, they were passionately interested in the
small-scale mores on which social order depends and which, properly adhered to, make
such crimes unthinkable."
Do You Hate the State?
by Murray N. Rothbard
"So what if they never quite made it all the way to explicit anarchism? Far better one
Albert Nock than a hundred anarcho-capitalists who are all too comfortable with the
existing status quo."
Lost in the Ghetto
Summer 2000
by Theodore Dalrymple
"Life in the British slums demonstrates what happens when the population at large, and
the authorities as well, lose all faith in a hierarchy of values. All kinds of pathology
result: where knowledge is not preferable to ignorance and high culture to low, the
intelligent and the sensitive suffer a complete loss of meaning. The intelligent
self-destruct; the sensitive despair. And where decent sensitivity is not nurtured,
encouraged, supported, or protected, brutality abounds. The absence of standards, as
Ortega y Gasset remarked, is the beginning of barbarism: and modern Britain is well
past the beginning."
Policeman in Wonderland
Spring 2000
by Theodore Dabylrymple
"Working in a hospital in an area where the police take a purely abstract, sociological
view of crime—it is the natural consequence of deprivation and therefore neither
blameworthy nor reducible by means of the application of the law—I quite often catch
glimpses of police reluctance to deal with criminal offenses, even when committed in
the presence of several reliable witnesses. The allowances they make for the offender
(he had a bad upbringing, he once saw a psychiatrist and must therefore be psychologically
disturbed, he is unemployed, he is an addict) reinforce their reluctance to undertake
the paperwork nowadays consequent upon any arrest—paperwork imposed upon them, of course,
by the attempt to answer the continual criticisms of the civil libertarians. The net
effect has been to imprison the poor and old in their houses after dark and sometimes
before it as well."
The Rush from Judgment
Summer 1997
by Theodore Dalrymple
"Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that
nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised
form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds
them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience
unless they are told that they can and should change? . . .
In any case, nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that, in
the words of a bitter Argentinean tango, "todo es igual, nada es mejor": everything is
the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet
emerged from the fertile mind of man."
Towards the Remoralization of Society
by Stephen Davies
Who’s the Deviant?
Summer 2002
Brian C. Anderson
"Beginning in the early seventies, when it first declared that homosexuality was not a
psychiatric illness but perfectly normal and healthy behavior, the American Psychiatric
Association has given its seal of approval to every imaginable form of sexual behavior
once considered aberrant or pathological. Last year, for example, the association
published a study asserting that pedophilia wasn't a mental disorder—unless the pedophile
found himself stressed out by his condition or unable to work or have meaningful
relationships. Accordingly, the study suggested we should no longer label adult sex
with "willing" pre-teen kids as molestation but instead should call it, more normatively,
'adult-child sex.'"
An F for Hip-Hop 101
Summer 1998
by Heather Mac Donald
"students at a Brooklyn public high school are learning how to write graffiti for
academic credit."
How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back
by John H. McWhorter
"Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a
revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn’t be more wrong. By reinforcing
the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish
adversarial stance is the properly “authentic” response to a presumptively racist society,
rap retards black success."
Illiberal Liberalism
Spring 2001
by Brian C. Anderson
"It's hard not to notice that political discussion over the last decade has increasingly
degenerated into name-calling—and that the insults most often come from the
left: "racist," "homophobe," "sexist," "mean-spirited," "insensitive." It has become
a habit of left-liberal political argument to use such invective to dismiss conservative
beliefs as if they don't deserve an argument and to redefine mainstream conservative
arguments as extremism and bigotry. Close-minded and uncivil, this tendency betrays
what's liberal in liberalism."
In Defense of “Borat”
November 15, 2006
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
"Borat is simply anarchic—there is no institution, idea, cultural value or government
he does not find worthy of being picked apart through humor."
Law Isn’t Enough
by Theodore Dalrymple
"I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First,
it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only
the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.
Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to
achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both
intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.
And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone
understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above
all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the
greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make
judgments of morality or value."
Postmodern Mores
Autumn 1998
by E. V. Kontorovich
"Deference has survived feminism, despite all the buffeting it received, and it will
survive AIDS. First, we must refuse to use threats to deference as excuses to stop
making tiny sacrifices. We must keep before us the civic purpose of deference: to remind
us that we have obligations to fellow citizens beyond the strictly legal. We can honor
this idea in ways short of suicide, like calling an ambulance for a stricken man instead
of stepping over him, and comforting the poor creature even as you fear to touch him."
Real Men Have Manners
Winter 2000
by Roger Scruton
"Where today's presumptuousness has destroyed the sense of shame, we cannot shame ill
manners away. But in the young, the sense of shame often vibrates just below the surface.
In the young, shame is not an evil but a necessary preparation for social life—a sign of
the readiness to be corrected. It is therefore a powerful foundation on which to rebuild
the old, life-enhancing courtesies. The fashion among young people for swing dancing, and
the popularity of the recent Jane Austen films, re-creating the ceremonious world where
manners are a mirror of the soul, show that the young are susceptible to, even hungry
for, the enchantment that comes from formality and distance. By precept and example,
therefore, parents and teachers could still do for young people what parents and teachers
traditionally have done—namely, show them the slow track to an intimacy that the fast
track can never reach."
Reassessing Political Correctness
by Anthony Gregory
"Sometimes it's tough to know how to draw the line between polite conversational
etiquette and communicative usage on the one hand, and stifling political correctness
on the other. We can however say it is usually more worth going against the grain to
speak a neglected truth in necessarily forceful language than simply to rebel against PC
orthodoxy for its own sake. A good guideline as to that: if Bill Maher, Jesse Jackson
and establishment Republicans all claim to find it offensive, there is probably some
truth to it."
What’s Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks?
by Theodore Dalrymple
"A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public
excess. There is a Gresham’s law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the
good, unless the good is defended.
In no country has the process of vulgarization gone further than in Britain: in this, at
least, we lead the world. A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners
is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites and its unbridled and antisocial
attempts to satisfy them. The mass drunkenness seen on weekends in the center of every
British town and city, rendering them unendurable to even minimally civilized people,
goes hand in hand with the appallingly crude, violent, and shallow relations between the
sexes. Britain’s mass bastardy is not a sign of an increase in the authenticity of our
human relations but a natural consequence of the unbridled hedonism that leads in short
order to chaos and misery, especially among the poor."
British Freedom and Muslim Discipline
March 13, 2006
by Theodore Dalrymple
"Discipline without freedom leads to misery, but freedom without discipline leads to
chaos, shallowness, and misery of another kind."
Living and Dying in Socialist Britain
December 2002
by John Clark
"As a physician in a British inner-city hospital and prison, Dr. Dalrymple has observed
as much of the socialist reality as any person can—not just at his workplaces but also
in many homes, streets, public areas, and from interviewing some 10,000 patients over
the years. What is this reality like? When the state provides for everyone’s needs
regardless of effort or conduct on their part, far too many people see no need to learn
about the past, use their time well in the present, or plan for the future. “A system of
welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes anti-social
egotism.” This is what we see—an ignorant, coarse, slovenly, filthy, lawless caste of
socialist “beneficiaries” and others who suffer their abuse and harm."
Portrait of the poor both sharp and bleak
December 16, 2001
by Teresa K. Weaver
"Dalrymple is unrelenting. Poverty isn't caused by economics, he argues, but rather by
a wildly dysfunctional --- and rapidly spreading --- set of values. And a blindly
forgiving welfare state in which being "nonjudgmental" is the highest objective has
helped create a permanent, irredeemable caste of victims, morally adrift and ineducable."
In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage
Interview with writers Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
December 6, 2003
by Jamie Glazov
"The new Russian historians command the language, understand the culture, and have far
more access to documentation that the reigning revisionists of the West. The new
Russian historians also have come to understand that a large segment of the Western
academic world are fools or charlatans when it comes to the history of communism and
go their own way. In time, the weight of their research and writing will overwhelm that
of pro-Communist Western revisionists. The task we face in the West to make
that "in time" as short as possible."
Open Letter to the Rosenberg Son
June 21, 2003
by Ronald Radosh
"But you seem unable to grasp that the case against your parents was part of an effort
to break an important Soviet espionage network, one that your father put together.
Instead you insist on referring to it as a political trial meant to serve as a warning
to the "progressive" Left, to strike fear into their hearts, as you put it in a recent
interview, and to prove that "left-wingers were really agents of a foreign power." As
though this were not indeed the truth, at least in the case of active spies."
The Defense of Our Civilization Against Intellectual Error
June 1992
by Friedrich A. Hayek
"I am indeed profoundly convinced that there is much less difference between us and our
opponents on the ultimate values to be achieved than is commonly believed, and that the
differences between us are chiefly intellectual differences. We at least believe that we
have attained an understanding of the forces which have shaped civilization which our
opponents lack. Yet if we have not yet convinced them, the reason must be that our
arguments are not yet quite good enough, that we have not yet made explicit some of the
foundations on which our conclusions rest. Our chief task therefore must still be to
improve the argument on which our case for a free society rests."
Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism
by George Reisman
"Race is not the determinant of culture. Not only is Western civilization open to the
members of every race, but its present possessors are also potentially capable of
losing it, just as the people of the Western Roman Empire once lost the high degree of
civilization they had achieved. What makes the acceptance of the "Eurocentrism" critique
so significant is that it clearly reveals just how tenuous our ability to maintain
Western civilization has become."
Freedom and the Achievements of Western Civilisation
by David Kemp
The Greens' Biotech Madness
February 12, 2003
by Pete Geddes
"The radical Green anti-biotech movement is best understood as a religious crusade. In
an effort to impose "truth," the Crusaders of the tenth and eleventh centuries killed
many thousands, deliberately annihilating entire populations. We must stop the modern
anti-biotech crusade. For if successful, it is likely to kill more."
Europe is dying: Europeans are worse than cockroaches
November 13, 2003
by Mark Steyn
"Europe is dying. As I’ve pointed out here before, it can’t square rising welfare
costs, a collapsed birthrate and a manpower dependent on the world’s least skilled,
least assimilable immigrants. In 20 years’ time, as those Dutch Muslim teenagers are
entering the voting booths, European countries, unlike parts of Nigeria, will not be
living under Sharia, but they will be reaching their accommodations with their
radicalised Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at
exploiting the ‘tolerance’ of pluralist societies."
To Repair The Culture, Free the Market
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"Anyone who prefers a society of families instead of easy divorce, of children instead
of depopulation, of prudence instead of waste, of high culture instead of underclass
values, of independence instead of group privilege, of saving instead of immediate
gratification, of self-discipline instead of decadence must favor the free market over
the mixed economy."
Self-Reliance vs. Self-Esteem
Michael Knox Beran
"The notion that if you feel good about yourself you will be able to achieve something
worthwhile, though it contains a grain of truth, puts the cart before the horse. The
soundest foundation of self-esteem is genuine achievement, and numerous studies have
shown no measurable benefit from the self-esteem movement in the schools. Even so, under
the banner of self-esteem, schools have dumbed down their curricula, ended
gifted-and-talented programs, stopped tracking kids, emphasized Dewey-style group
projects and groupthink rather than individual achievement, and done away with
valedictorians—because rewarding success might make some kids feel bad."
The Toxicity of Environmentalism
by George Reisman
"Clearly, the most urgent task confronting the Western world, and the new intellectuals
who must lead it, is a philosophical and intellectual cleanup. Without it, Western
civilization simply cannot survive. It will be killed by the poison of environmentalism."
What Ever Happened to Reason?
Spring 1999
by Roger Scruton
"Reason is now on the retreat, both as an ideal and as a reality. In place of it has
come the "view from outside"—which puts our entire tradition of learning in question. The
appeal to reason, we are told, is merely an appeal to Western culture, which has made
reason into its shibboleth and laid claim to an objectivity that no culture could possess.
Moreover, by claiming reason as its foundation, Western culture has concealed its
pernicious ethnocentrism; it has dressed up Western ways of thinking as though they had
universal force. Reason, therefore, is a lie, and by exposing the lie we reveal the
oppression at the heart of Western culture. Behind the attack on reason lurks another
and more virulent hostility: the hostility to the culture and the curriculum that we
have inherited from the Enlightenment."
What We Have to Lose
Autumn 2001
by Theodore Dalrymple
"To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilized men
to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilized men have done worse than
nothing—they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians. They have denied the
distinction between higher and lower, to the invariable advantage of the latter. They have
denied the superiority of man's greatest cultural achievements over the most ephemeral
and vulgar of entertainments; they have denied that the scientific labors of brilliant
men have resulted in an objective understanding of Nature, and, like Pilate, they have
treated the question of truth as a jest; above all, they have denied that it matters how
people conduct themselves in their personal lives, provided only that they consent to
their own depravity. The ultimate object of the deconstructionism that has swept the
academy like an epidemic has been civilization itself, as the narcissists within the
academy try to find a theoretical justification for their own revolt against civilized
restraint. And thus the obvious truth—that it is necessary to repress, either by law or
by custom, the permanent possibility in human nature of brutality and barbarism—never
finds its way into the press or other media of mass communication."
Why I Am Not a Conservative
by F. A. Hayek
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