Absolut Radicalism
A new ad campaign for Absolut vodka shows open hatred for the United States.
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April 15, 2008
March 26, 2008
The Changing of the American Mind
Two crime movies based on the same play nicely illustrate the change in the mind of the American elite during the twentieth century.
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March 20, 2008
David Mamet Swings to the Right
TAC correspondent Michael D'Virgilio analyzes the cultural implications of the political journey of David Mamet, another modern liberal mugged by reality.Continue reading "David Mamet Swings to the Right" »
March 05, 2008
The Light in "Dark" Fiction
"Dark" fiction can have highly positive values behind it, writes S. T. Karnick. From the Feb. 25 issue of National Review.
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March 04, 2008
What Kind of Culture Should We Want?
Most contemporary commentators on both left and right believe that freedom of expression and the promotion of positive, life-affirming values are antithetical goals. That is not true, as many past societies demonstrate. In this article, reprinted from Conservative Battleline Online, S. T. Karnick outlines just what kind of culture we should be working toward.
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February 20, 2008
Monk and God
In the absence of God, humans seek ultimate control over the world—and never find it. TAC correspondent Dean Abbott examines the religious implications of the USA Network show Monk.
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January 27, 2008
The Cultural Hegemony of Identity Politics
In all the controversy over the Dana Jacobson issue, I suspect that it is all too easy to lose sight of what actually is important about it. What happens to Jacobson as a result of what she has done is important to the general public, but not because Jacobson is any serious danger to society. Of course not.
It is important because the response to her by her bosses and the elite in general represents what kind of society and culture we live in and whether we can cause positive changes in both.
It is not obvious that we can do so without much struggle.
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December 31, 2007
Christmas Wisdom from Lee Harris
Lee Harris, a very intelligent man who writes thoughtful books and contributes insightful articles regularly to TCS Daily, recently wrote a very interesting and well-informed article about Christmas for that online publication. Harris is clearly sympathetic to the celebration of Christmas while being fully cognizant of the pagan foundations of both the date chosen and the various traditions associated with the day.
In contrast to many complainers on both sides of the arguments over whether public celebrations of this great holy day should be encouraged or even allowed, Harris points out that these varied foundations are not faults but strengths. He correctly characterizes Christmas as "a great multicultural festival" good not only for Christians but indeed for everyone.
His conclusion is particularly interesting and sensible: not only should Christians embrace the celebration of Christmas wholeheartedly, so should non-Christians as well.
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December 07, 2007
"Golden Compass" Movie Opens Today
The controversial fantasy film The Golden Compass opens today in theaters across the United States.
With a production budget reported to be in the $150 million range, the film will have to sell a boatload of tickets in the United States and abroad if the investors are to get any return on their money—and the controversy over the film's origins in the first novel of an openly atheistic trilogy of books does not help things from their perspective.
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November 10, 2007
Norman Mailer and the Hipster Cataclysm
Novelist-journalist Norman Mailer has died at age 84, according to his literary executor. Malier, known for his interesting but often overly dense prose, puzzling choices of story material, combative journalism, "existential" philosophisizing, and aggressive self-assertiveness in his personal life, burst on the scene at the age of 25 in 1948 with a well-written, critically acclaimed, and popular debut novel, The Naked and the Dead.
Intelligent, wily, handsome, charismatic, and highly personable when he wanted to be, Mailer was the embodiment of the "hipster" culture that arose after World War II, in which authors such as he, Gore Vidal, Jack Kerouac, and Stanley Baldwin rebelled against the overly bureaucratized and stifling, government-dominated society that had arisen during the first half of the twentieth century and found its greatest expression during World War II, when nearly everything in American society was under control of the national government.
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October 30, 2007
The Problem of Democracy
Are democracy and free markets inherently hostile to each other? That's the question Brian Anderson takes up in his new book, Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents, my review of which appears in the Nov. 6 issue of National Review, currently on sale at newsstands and online.
In my view, the problem is with democracy, not markets. Finding any faults with democracy is undoubtedly a bizarre thing in our time, but it is clear to me that the contradictions that seem to be inherent in democratic capitalism are in fact inherent in democracy itself, and that market capitalism is the victim of democracy, not an abuser. Hence my thought, taking after that of the American Founders, is that where democracy interferes with freedom, it is democracy that ought to give way.
I recognize that this proposition may sound rather radical, and I shall defend it further in future, but in the meantime, here's my review of Brian Anderson's book, which will give you a sense of the outlines of the argument:
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September 18, 2007
What Is Progressivism?
The philosophically inclined blogger Pascal Fervor has recently been trying to recover the word progressive from today's radical political activists who have taken it to provide an appealing label for a highly oppressive program of action.
Pascal writes:
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September 13, 2007
Twilight of Liberty
According to Reason magazine senior editor Radley Balko in testimony before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Crime on July 2 of this year,
800 times per week in this country, a SWAT team breaks open an American's door, and invades his home. Few turn up any weapons at all, much less high-power weapons. Less than half end with felony charges for the suspects. And only a small percentage end up doing significant time in prison.
Please bear that in mind as you read the following guest commentary by Steve Stanek, a research fellow of the Heartland Institute.
The points Steve has to make are of immense importance, and I endorse his view here.
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September 10, 2007
Defending the Indefensible, Based on Skin Color
The journalist and novelist Mark Goldblatt has frequently gone out on a limb to criticize insalubrious aspects of today's black American culture, an activity that tends to bring anger, fear, scorn, and general cultural exile. His posture is truly a courageous one, and it is highly salutary for black Americans, who, like all of us, cannot reach their great potential unless they are held to the same high expectations as other Americans.
Hence Goldblatt's excellent National Review Online article today on Michael Vick and on Whoopi Goldberg's absurd defense of him on the TV program The View is very important indeed. Goldblatt writes,
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August 17, 2007
Free Will, Determinism, and Pop Culture
The central moral issue of the past century was whether a traditional (in fact, millennias old) assumption behind moral thinking should prevail, or should be replaced by a newer, seemingly more compassionate thought. It is a matter over which American society is still struggling.
The classical Western notion, of course, was that an individual is responsible for his or her own actions, even if outside circumstances contributed to the person's decision to break a rule. That meant, for example, that even poverty did not excuse theft.
Of course, even if personal responsibility was assumed, mercy and common sense were essential to the dispensing of true justice. Western morality and our sense of justice always recognized that sometimes, albeit rarely, an individual's circumstances can be so compelling as to excuse rule-breaking. And of course anything not done by choice, such as killing a person in self-defense, was automatically excused.
This mindset was challenged in the past century by the philosophy of determinism.
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August 04, 2007
The Case for Ingmar Bergman—and Against
Thomas Hibbs has produced a strong defense of Ingmar Bergman's works, for National Review Online. I tend to agree with Diane Keaton's eponymous character in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall, who said, as Hibbs notes,
his view is so Scandinavian, it’s bleak, I mean all that Kierkegaard, right? It’s really adolescent, you know, fashionable pessimism, I mean The Silence, God’s silence, OK, OK, OK, I mean I loved it when I was a graduate student but I mean alright, you outgrow it, you absolutely outgrow it!
Hibbs, on the other hand, agrees with Allen's character, according Bergman a place in the pantheon of great artists of the past century. He makes the case about as well as it can be made.
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August 03, 2007
Penn and Willis, a Study in Contrasts
Two stories in the news vividly encapsulate the astonishing gulf between left and right today. First, actor Sean Penn in Venezuela, where he applauded Marxist, America-hating President Hugo Chavez. AP reports:
That's bravery, all right. Penn languishes in prison to this very day, beaten brutally hour after hour, for those statements, as he would in Cuba or Venezuela.Chavez met privately with the 46-year-old actor for two hours Thursday, praising him as being "brave" for urging Americans to impeach President Bush.
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July 20, 2007
Christianity on Rise in Europe
The many Americans who think atheistic, socialistic Europe is the greatest place in the world and the United States is a putrid backwater populated overwhelmingly by hicks and weirdos will be awfully dismayed by the latest news from Europe. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Continent has increasingly been getting religion, especially of the Christian variety:
After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.
God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. . . .
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July 09, 2007
The Great Disruption—Is There Any Hope of Deliverance?
In an article ostensibly considering the literary legacy of science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, John Derbyshire veers off into an interesting discussion of the current American culture. Derbyshire's conclusion is that a great separation of American society has taken place since the 1950s:
America has always had elites, of course, and we have always had an underclass of some kind. Both seem to be much bigger now than they were then, though. Furthermore, if you subtracted off the elites and the underclass in Heinlein’s time, what was left—the great middle—was far more homogenous then than it is now, its members much better acquainted with each other. The social distance between (say) a doctor and (say) a cop, was smaller then than it is now
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May 30, 2007
Was Mill a Classical Liberal?
Short answer: Not always and in every way.
The question arose when my Tech Central Station article outlining a classical liberal view of the Iraq War brought criticism from my friends at the American Spectator, on the AmSpec Blog:
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