In a move that’s sure to disappoint my legions of adoring fans, I’m switching gears in this Thursday’s post. Shaking things up. Instead of producing my customary, erudite commentary on something I know a little bit about, such as education or weightlifting or the deep antipathy that our social superiors feel towards red-staters, I’m going to produce erudite commentary on something I know even less about: law enforcement in America. The goal of this switch isn’t just to take myself out of my conceptual comfort zone. It’s also to raise some questions that I think are pertinent, especially in light […]

The libertarian movement, as a whole, tends to adopt critical postures with respect to many government policies which are misguided. The proposal to reform the banking system tends to be one of abolition: “End the Fed.” The focus is on removing the institution, rather than on what comes afterward. While there may be some intellectual discussion of how to replace it, as a practical matter, the focus is on the removal. Similarly, when critics of the Drug War want action, they propose to eliminate the policy and replace it with nothing. In the world of ideas, this tends to make […]

Like I mentioned in last week’s post, just because two people are using the same words doesn’t mean they’re talking about the same thing. That particular discussion revolved around competing notions of what it means to be an underdog, but you can see this phenomenon all over the place. You could turn on the TV this very evening and see it. The average talking head on MSNBC and the average FOX personality, for instance, would both pay lip service to the notion of “patriotism” (the former with a little less enthusiasm than the latter, granted), but in reality they couldn’t […]

Last year I found myself browsing abebooks in the days before Christmas and came across a text now largely forgotten: ‘Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline’. It was by the late jurist Robert Bork – still probably best known for his failed nomination to the Supreme Court. Bork’s mission in this book is to explain how a degrading popular culture came about, which he lays firmly at the door of Modern Liberalism in all its egalitarian showiness and vapidity. His criticisms are biting to say the least. Here everyone, and everything, gets it in the neck. For this […]

Since the popular web emerged and connection speeds became fast enough to share digital photos to millions of people at a time, the virtual pillory has been a reliable source of comedy and moral self-aggrandizement. The way that it works it to take a photo of a degraded person, mock them, and then collect chuckles from anonymous people spread all over the world. This is a little bit similar to internet pornography, enabled by the same technology, but for shaming. Unlike the real pillory, which actually served a purpose to limit bad behavior within a real community composed of people who […]

Off the back of Reed Perry’s article ‘declension of the rich‘, I had that old Reactionary adage running through my head, “technological advances mask societal decay”. What does this actually mean? To expand, this adage is to say that people will be unawares of deep structural problems in their society, even as said problems metastasize to a choking largess, because they will be according undue praise to technological advancement as a measure of civilizational success. In other words, similar to how it is prophesied in the Hindu Doctrine of the Ages that the measure of men will become their wealth, the […]

In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans. G.K. Chesterton This is not meant to be a triumphalist piece, rather an analysis of the link between Progressivism and Protestantism. Whilst many people on the right are concerned (nay obsessed) about the Jews, it is my opinion that this is a distraction. A far more serious matter in my opinion, is the relationship between Protestantism and Progressivism. One of the best short essays written last year in the sphere was, […]

The latest thing the hipster Millennial commentariat wants you, their adoring public, to stop doing is “punching down.” They want you to know it ranks just below violating a safe space but above microaggressions on the graduated scale of Not OK. Totally problematic. And what exactly is “punching down”? Well, punching down is where a big guy picks on a little guy (or girl). It’s where someone from a position of power or privilege makes and argument or a statement or even a joke that comes at the expense of someone from a lower social stratum, where the well-situated mocks […]

The simple answer to this is that progressives took over the universities, and gradually made it so that those universities were the only institutions legally empowered to test on merit. This has made it so that parents eager to improve the standing of their children (and by extension, themselves and their families) will send their children to the most prestigious leftist seminary that they can afford. In this way, progressives stack the decks of management at larger corporations and the government, both of which tend to prize credentials far more. It’s hard to be fired for hiring the Harvard MBA, but […]