Lived with for millennia, first climbed in 1865: the Matterhorn

2,657 words

“I was using the mountain to measure myself. The mountain is the means, the man is the end.” — Walter Bonatti (1930-2011)

People who climb mountains are like people who ride motorbikes or take illegal drugs. They tend to have a lot of friends who die young — or they die young themselves. (more…)

The UK being culturally enriched.

1,316 words

It’s a vital distinction in modern law, but it isn’t defined in any legal textbook or taught in any law school. It doesn’t need to be. If you’re a good person, you’ll understand and apply the distinction without being taught or told.

What is it? It’s the vital distinction between two categories of offense: a very serious category that we can call thought-crime, and a minor category that we can call flesh-crime. Murder, rape, and assault are flesh-crimes. They matter little and don’t threaten our vibrant democracy. Racism, anti-Semitism, and transphobia are thought-crimes. (more…)

2,992 words

Helen Joyce
Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality
London: OneWorld Publications, 2021

Helen Joyce has something that not many other people have: moral courage. As the author of this critique of what I call translunacy, she’s facing a lot of social disapproval and displaying a lot of moral courage. She’s a TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, and she doesn’t believe that men can become women or that men who identify as women should be allowed to enter female-only spaces and compete against female athletes. (more…)

Marina Hydeová, levičácký narcista

1,780 slov

English original here

Zatímco si pohledný řecký mladík Narkissos (Narcissus) zálibně prohlížel svůj vlastní odraz na hladině lesní tůňky, nabízel by skvělý terč pro černošskou „vybíjenou“ (Knock-Out game). Nějaký utlačovaný snědý mladík by k němu snadno mohl připlížit a názorně ukázat sílu spravedlivostí sevřené černé pěsti. (more…)

1,471 words

According to Anatoly Karlin at the Unz Review, the photo below is evidence of how “kneeling before Anglo ambassadors seems to be becoming something of a Ukrainian military tradition”: (more…)

Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1594-96.

1,993 words

Czech version here

As the handsome Greek youth Narcissus gazed into his forest pool, adoring his own reflection, he would have made a perfect target for the Knock-Out Game. An oppressed black could easily have crept up behind him and demonstrated the power of the righteous black fist. (more…)

2,570 words

When the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli received an anonymous solution to a difficult problem he’d set in 1696, he saw at once who had sent it. The solver was Isaac Newton, he said, because he knew ex ungue leonem — “the lion by his claw.” (more…)

3,018 words

The singer Édith Piaf famously, and throatily, regretted nothing about anything. But the poet John Betjeman wished that he’d had more sex. And the economist John Maynard Keynes that he’d drunk more champagne. Me? I regret two things much more important than recreational sex or champagne. (more…)

Front left detail of the Franks Casket, featuring Weyland the Smith and Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic writing

2,197 words

If you want a mouthful of history, just say “mouthful of history.” It’s a hybrid phrase, Germanic and Greek, combining two great European traditions that met and mingled on the island of Britain. But there’s a local flavor to it too: the second consonant of “mouthful” is distinctively English. That’s why we once had a good way to write that second consonant: in Old English, “mouth” was muð, pronounced “mooth.”  (more…)

1,962 words

The New England schlockmeister Stephen King is a bad but interesting writer. Success is an interesting phenomenon, after all, and King is one of the most successful writers who have ever lived. Born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, he has sold millions of books in dozens of languages and won even wider exposure through film adaptations of novels like Carrie (1974) and The Shining (1977). (more…)