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On Avatar

Peter’s review of Avatar is a must-read: Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that . . . . Continue Reading »

Murder, He Lied

Ross is right to come down on Ezra for reckless and irresponsible hyperventilating on health care. But let me dot the i here. Ezra Klein kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy by accusing Lieberman of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to . . . . Continue Reading »

The Banality Kerfuffle

I woke up to discover that more or less everything I wanted to say last night about Ron Rosenbaum’s misbegotten hit job on Hannah Arendt and her conception of the banality of evil has been said this morning at length by Steven Menashi at the American Scene. (Extra fun: in touching on Carlin . . . . Continue Reading »

Prospects for Secularists

Over at Secular Right , David Hume has words for our PAL: Though the author of Atheist Delusions is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher, Lawler reports that his criticism of the New Atheists starts from a Nietzschian perspective. All I have to say is that homey don’t play that game. . . . . Continue Reading »

Universality Is Not the Issue, Dude

I hoped I could prove this with a link, but back during the presidential primary race, I told at least one person that, when it came to the health care debate, not universality but comprehensiveness was the issue. You can imagine that a pomocon has an ingrained or inherent dislike for . . . . Continue Reading »

Dignity and Identity

In comments below on my post about Yuval Levin’s book, Imagining the Future , Michael Peterson asks : “Will someone, somewhere, define human dignity?” Not me, at least not in this post . . . but here’s an account of what needs to happen first. One of the best passages in . . . . Continue Reading »

Incoherence and Independence

A semi-tangent apropos of the thread developing below on Reagan’s is-it-or-isn’t-it conservatism: it’s true that Reagan’s public brew of conservative moralism and vigilence combined with western-libertarian free-range thought, inclusive of religion, reflects in telling or . . . . Continue Reading »

Rise of the Techno-Rubes

Every big idea that works is marked by simplicity, by clarity. You can understand it when you hear it, and you can explain it to people. Social Security: Retired workers receive a public pension to help them through old age. Medicare: People over 65 can receive taxpayer-funded health care. Welfare: . . . . Continue Reading »

Politics and Nature

Pardon me for writing a linkless post. This is the world that we live in, at least for the time being. Apropos of recent Lawlerian and Kenneallian comments on the allure of History and the trouble with health care, has anyone else been struck dumb walking across their living rooms by footage of . . . . Continue Reading »

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