Friday Night Jukebox
I saw School of Seven Bells last night, and they were pretty excellent live. Enjoy:
Monthly Archive: October 2010
The Clinton Aura and the Pending Rise of Democratic Meanness
Whatever one may say about Bill Clinton’s political leanings, let there be no doubt about this: 10 years after leaving office, he’s still the most skilled politician in the land. That may or may...
Chinese Professor
Doug Mataconis passes along this ad from Citizens Against Government Waste: It’s probably a pretty effective ad – James Fallows thinks it’s an instant classic – but I found it also kind of bizarre....
How Privatization Gets (and Deserves) a Bad Name
Gary Farber at Obsidian Wings points out this Matt Taibbi piece in Rolling Stone. Taibbi has always been skeptical of the free market movement, and sometimes his skepticism is even justified: In the summer...
My take on the French retirement protests
can be found here. Comments welcome, particularly from others who have been following the story in the francophone press.
Living with the Dilemma: Religion and Higher Education
Hello there, world: I’m the other new guy. Allow me to introduce myself. I graduated in June from Northwestern University, where I studied English and Classics, and am more or less jealous that Rufus...
One more post about Juan Williams and then I’m done
This controversy has eaten up my whole day, so I won’t spend much more time on it. Glenn Greenwald has some thoughts up at his blog that I very much disagree with even though...
Charles Taylor Thursday #3: How Calvinism eats itself.
Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher and social theorist. His book A Secular Age is an examination of modern secularism and the cultural conditions that gave rise to it. Last week I wrote about...
Randy Barnett on the Commerce Clause and the Individual Mandate
I was going to write a long, long post about the commerce clause and the individual mandate, but this video of Randy Barnett does the job a whole lot better. One thing I hadn’t...
Juan Williams should not have lost his job
So I think NPR was actually wrong to fire Juan Williams. I also think that most of the positive reaction over his dismissal is due to people’s general dislike of Williams and his politics...
Mark Davis, Ronald Reagan, and trick questions
Today, Mark Davis will discover what he would think of Reagan had Reagan been an enemy rather than an ally.
Is the insurance mandate constitutional? Of course – health care reform wouldn’t work without it!
Seriously. Even if you’re not sympathetic to questions about the insurance mandate’s constitutionality, this is just a deeply silly argument.
Quote of the Day
“Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.” – Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots. Guess what, Kelly? They were right!
Reclaiming Freedom From the Right
Since I came out of the gate making such a big deal out of the left’s dearth of articulated first principles, I suppose I should probably suggest one or two. Freedom sounds like a...
A Lonely Consciousness, and False
Rufus writes, commenting on Ned Resnikoff’s generational self-indictment below: What I find more interesting though is that both the left and right are expressing deep misgivings about that atomistic individualism. The right, of course, has...
Let us match wits on a sphere of bloggo
If you wander over to Memeorandum with some regularity, you will likely have noticed a sort of ideological segregation in terms of the manner by which bloggers choose to link to one particular story over...
Sophocles: The Trachiniae, and tragedy under patriarchy
Sophocles’s Women of Trachis presents us with all sorts of problems, which is likely why it’s rarely performed today, even in Ezra Pound’s controversially conversational but still quite good translation. Part of this, I...
A Communist Thesis
I recently watched Goodbye Lenin, which is not very good movie, but I was surprised and pleased by its moderatedly positive portrayal of life in the DDR. Without playing down the unpleasant reality of political...
All’s Fair in Love and Burke
I’ve seen this video linked elsewhere in a condescending let’s-laugh-at-young-conservatives sort of way. And, admittedly, it’s cringeworthy. But damned if it isn’t far more compelling than most discussions of Burke and tradition and how...
Norberg on Vargas Llosa and the Nobel
The Swedish Left is beyond parody. Llosa’s best line: “For reasons that elude me, anyone defending freedom of expression, free elections and political pluralism in Latin America is known as a[n authoritarian] right-winger among...
