2,253 words
Nothing destroys a good idea so efficiently as success—not so much the success of the idea itself as much as the success of those, politicians mostly, who claim to be implementing it. This is why in Russia advocating privatization is more likely to get you punched in the face than listened to, (more…)
1,232 words
Atrocities against innocent people are used to terrify and intimidate. So often it works to turn victims into paralyzed, mute victims rooted to the ground in fear. The phenomena that we have been witnessing even in the short term has been eye-opening. (more…)
Andrea Dworkin
1,744 words
Andrea Dworkin
Methodological problems with the Koss study were soon uncovered and publicized, but to little effect. For one thing, it was not the “victims” themselves who described their experiences as rape or attempted rape (hence the title of Warshaw’s book: I Never Called It Rape). (more…)
2,044 words
Here comes the sun. Oh, wait…
One has to feel a grudging admiration for the dedication shown by the British government to making the lives of the people it was elected to serve as onerous as possible. Each day, the question on the nation’s lips is, “What are they going to spoil today?” (more…)
4,790 words
Henry Blue Kline, et al.
I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
Harper Torchbook, 1962
One of the major themes of federal politics throughout the first seven decades (1789-1859) of the American Republic was the struggle to maintain the balance of power between the Northern and Southern states. (more…)
1,804 words
The 1980s, the decade of my early manhood, was an era of transition. Seeds planted in the 1970s that would burst forth into hideous flower in the 1990s were quietly germinating. The rumor that there was more sex than before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s persisted—as it does even today among the less well-informed of the older generation—but the initial excitement had clearly died down. (more…)
Artemisia Gentileschi, Allegory of Rhetoric, 1650
Artemisia Gentileschi, Allegory of Rhetoric, 1650
1,989 words
(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, Part 8 here, Part 9 here, Part 10 here, Part 11 here, Part 12 here, Part 13 here, Part 14 here, Part 15 here, Part 16 here, Part 17 here.)
Securing Ourselves Against Injustice (508c–513c)
Recall that one of Callicles’ main arguments for prizing the techne of rhetoric is that it is a source of power for securing oneself against injustice. (more…)
5,285 words
Alexander Vindman
The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine
PublicAffairs, 2025
The greatest tragedy of the twenty-first century so far is the Ukraine War which started in 2022. (more…)
2,468 words
The inability to develop a diagnostic test of scientific rigor is a consequence of the inability to isolate or purify the virus. Instead, what was done by HIV pioneers was the stimulation of cell culture samples with hormones, mitogens and oxidase in order to get the abnormal proteins said to be HIV specific. (more…)
1,882 words
Here may indeed be torment, but not death.
Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio
Perhaps that’s what hell is. The entire rest of eternity spent in Bruges.
Ray, In Bruges
(more…)
3,942 words
Like Poetry, History Rhymes
One of the more startling aspects of this past election cycle has been the way in which it repeated the dominant themes and challenges from 2016. Trump as a beleaguered challenger; a demographic crisis continually spiralling out of control; America and its working people betrayed by an unaccountable and decadent elite; a world on the brink of war; and so on. (more…)
1,476 words
Late one Saturday morning in 1990 under the skeleton-bleaching California sun, I motored through a crumbled, hilly, ashen section of East LA looking to see if any of the Hicks Boys Stoners were around to sell me some weed. (more…)
