Born on this date. It’s worth giving a listen to this curated bunch of podcasts presented under the auspices of the BBC’s “Composer of the Week” series. As the one and only Bernard Williams wrote: “You can have a well-formed, deep relation to Western music while passing Wagner’s works by, finding them boring or not…
Check out his prescient warning published in Commentary. bernard lewisislamLiberalismregressive left
Davide Orsi et al. discuss Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations 25 years on. (Complete book open access) cultureDavide Orsi.islamMichael OakeshottPolitical philosophyregressive leftSamuel P. HuntingtonThomas Hobbes
Raymond Aron’s classic freely available here. One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy; even Sartre noticed that Marxists are lazy. Indeed, they enjoyed having one key to open all doors, one universally applicable explanation for everything, an instrument…
Striking paragraph in Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1757). aestheticsAtheismDavid HumeislamLiberalismregressive leftReligionOfPeaceScottish Enlightenment
“Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small” — attributed to Henry Kissinger. Eric Bennett’s scathing assessment of activism masquerading as inquiry. “The IYI [intellectual yet idiot] pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game. The…
The regressive Left’s identitarian-intersectionalism fetish (sadly with many IYI Jews in their ranks) are the Trojan Horse of Jew hatred. Their shallow and incoherent identitarian politics presents a threefold danger: (1) white supremacist groups have now been relicensed to play that game. And yet, the regressives find their primary purpose as Nazi hunters, the uptick of…
Here’s an open access book by the most excellent and always provocative Susan Haack. Charles Sanders PeirceconstructivismFriedrich HayeknaturalismPhilosophyquineregressive leftscienceScientismsusan haack
Looking forward to Ben’s forthcoming book. Ben, much like Frank Furedi, refreshingly offers sane commentary and insightful analysis from a Left perspective. Ben would be a terrific addition to the Spiked and Quillette rosters. ben cobleyFrank Furedifree speechidentity politicslabour partyPolitical philosophyregressive left
Stephen Hicks’ masterful critical survey of the disparate strands and ever-shifting cynical alliances, and as a consequence, dissonant morphology, offers a very accessible first orientation to understanding the shitstorm that we are currently in the midst of: “Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant…
manwithoutqualities 