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Not Your Grandfather's Conservatism

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civilization Archive

Friday

20

March 2015

1

COMMENTS

The Flight From Truth

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cain flees God blake

Why do we care about the truth? It seems a strange question to ask because very few people question that truth is a good thing. It’s difficult to imagine anyone not being concerned with truth. When truth becomes regarded as irrelevant or even dangerous, the social order begins a path toward destruction. Ideologies are set against human nature. The promised Utopia is always just one more purge away. This means that it’s better for a society to face the truth even when the truth hurts, because you’re better off in the long run. But the fact is that there have been […]

Monday

9

March 2015

5

COMMENTS

Comfort Kills

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Kabul under Taliban attack

When I push the “On” button on my smartphone, the image that appears is one of a seaside Mediterranean cathedral. It is made of white stone. “It looks so pretty.” What the Americaness doesn’t notice is that behind the ghostly numbers telling the time, the cathedral is riddled with shrapnel. I know well enough, since I took the picture myself and poked the gashes and snarls of metal embedded in the doorway. Artillery shells exploded here within recent memory. Here, where German tourists now waddle around in flip-flops and souvenir t-shirts. Here, within fifty paces of the kind of beach described as […]

Monday

2

February 2015

28

COMMENTS

The Clash of Civilizations in 2015: The West, Russia and Islam

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clashofcivilizations

In 1992, the late conservative political scientist Samuel P. Huntington delivered a lecture on the developing ‘clash of civilizations,’ his vision of a post-Cold War world order characterized by large-scale cultural conflict in place of the previous global ideological conflicts between the various political “-isms” produced by Western modernity — capitalism, communism and fascism. Developing his thoughts into a book in 1996, Huntington provided the following breakdown of world civilizations: Huntington himself offered some explanations for why civilizations clash in the typically modern, Harvard style of over-explaining fairly banal concepts, i.e. civilization is profoundly felt, profound differences cause conflict, etc. — […]

Monday

26

January 2015

39

COMMENTS

Women’s Liberation is Women’s Prostitution

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Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Destruction_1836

What follows is an illuminating anecdote involving a professor, a young female student, and myself. The professor was an excitable and amiable middle-aged man, fairly chubby by North American standards. His swarthy complexion, gleaming bald head and bushy mustache betrayed his foreign ancestry — an Egyptian Coptic Christian from Cairo, long since emigrated to the New World, and long since employed at his hallowed American university, though he had never quite managed to master that standard, saccharine accent of the American Midwest. His Arab speech was deep and gravelly, yet still uniquely colorful. He could not utter a sentence so much as perform it, effortlessly […]