The question posed by Liel Leibovitz: “Why have so many Jewish leaders put their weight behind an activist whose separatist rhetoric is cloaked in the flaccid language of human rights?” On a closely related note, see Gary Weiss’ earlier “The Politics of Anti-anti-Semitism“. I also refer my Right Honorable friends to the phenomenon termed as Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome.…
Review of Lawrence Powell’s masterful history of New Orleans in Cosmos + Taxis. The palpable sense of cultural vibrancy and of place, so essential to New Orleans’ identity, makes absolute nonsense of the currently fashionable phrase “cultural appropriation”, a conceptually illiterate term of abuse, a newfangled fundamentalism, espoused by the authoritarian “regressive” left. cosmos &…
Died on this day in 1994. A sure-fire way to wind up your colleagues on “plantation regressive” is to leave this book in plain sight or, for that matter, any Stove book would do the trick. If you like a cracking no-holds-barred philosophical polemic then Stove is the man for you (Stove might well have been the most…
Joseph Epstein, still as sharp as a whistle, in The Weekly Standard. JE’s coinage “virtucrat” (“any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous in the bargain”) is the precursor to the term “virtue-signaling”, the condition befalling many academics, politicians and in all probability many…
Peter Boghossian and James A. Lindsay perpetrate a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies. Alan SokalgenderJames LindsayMichael ShermerPeter Bogdanovichpost modernismregressive leftrelativismsocial constructivismSokal Hoax
Well put by George Will in The Washington Post (I’ve said as much in a forthcoming review article (extracts #1 and #2) and earlier (extract #3)) — see also Daryl Hall’s thoughts on the matter. The logic of this reactionary fundamentalism would mean that the biggest and most effective cultural magpie of them all — David Bowie…
Austrian EconomicsauthoritarianismBehavioral economicsclassical liberalismconstructivismdistributed cognitiondistributed knowledgerationalismregressive leftsituated cognitionspontaneous orders
This really was a thoroughly crap film back in the day and though it hasn’t improved with age, I guess it was onto something (well at least the novel on which it was based). Here is Joe Dante making a case for the film to be reassessed, at least on the grounds of its prescience. Here too is…
Israelregressive left
John Gray in the New Statesman. Islamist movements fill this gap by combining hatred of the West with Leninist methods of remodelling society by force – a mix that some on the left evidently find appealing. authoritarianismjohn grayKoestlerregressive lefttotalitarianism
manwithoutqualities 