Month: April 2025

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…)

1,744 words

Andrea Dworkin

Part 1

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…)

1,623 parole

Ma torniamo alla nostra storia. Qualche giorno dopo, il nostro ragazzo sta conversando con un amico e gli dice: “Sai, mi è successa la cosa più incredibile che ho avuto lo scorso fine settimana”. Sorpresa e sconcerto sono ancora percepibili nella sua voce. (more…)

2,001 parole

Il filosofo britannico CEM Joad (1891-1953) una volta spiegò la decadenza sociale come “un segno della tendenza dell’uomo a fraintendere la propria posizione nell’universo, ad avere una visione del proprio status e delle proprie prospettive più elevata di quanto i fatti giustifichino e a dirigere le proprie società e a pianificare il proprio futuro sulla base di questa interpretazione errata”. Le età decadenti iniziano quando:

L’uomo che ha goduto di un lungo periodo di successo crede che nulla gli sia impossibile. È lui, secondo lui, l’arbitro del suo destino e della sua fortuna; il futuro è suo, da creare. “Gli uomini”, come disse Alberti, il fiorentino rinascimentale, “possono fare tutto se vogliono”.

(more…)

3,244 words

Part 1, Part 2

Leading the stimulant wing of the narcotic spectrum was the crack cocaine scourge that filled jails and hospital wards. Complimenting this was the slightly more respectable abuse of prescription drugs – rampant among tranquilizer and sedative takers. (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

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…)