As the 1960s sitcom Get Smart makes its way back into popular culture with the release of the film adaptation starring Steve Carrell, it is amusing to note that the series has also had an unlikely impact on legal discourse. In both Canadian and American legal briefs and court rulings, the idea of the ‘cone of silence’ - which never worked on [...]
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For those of you interested in the rather big question of how concepts like East and West have evolved, and how such abstractions have influenced global history and continue to influence the politics of our day, Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East & West is very much worth reading. Here’s a [...]
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“The Flight of Aeneas” (1595), by Peter Brueghel
I can’t remember if it was the late Col. David Hackworth or the late Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. (author of the influential retrospective on the Vietnam War, On Strategy) who made the telling point that any American general in World War II worth his stars would make [...]
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In a comment on my post on “the Conservative International” (below), A.M. refers to George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965). More than forty years old though Grant’s book may be, reading the following footnote makes one wonder if George was less a traditionalist conservative and more a visionary:
The next wave of American “conservatism” is [...]
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In his Guardian essay (here, and introduced in his post below), Jeet raises a very interesting question: just what was it that caused political conservatives in Canada and the United States to first join hands? As he correctly points out, Canadian conservatives have traditionally been more suspicious of America than have their liberal counterparts: “No [...]
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Hatoyama Kunio, Japan’s Justice Minister, gave an interview in the magazine Weekly Asahi last October that has been reprinted on Japan Focus, (a peer reviewed electronic journal and webzine on Japan), and reported recently in the Japan Times. The interview has some fascinating nuggets, but none so interesting as Hatoyama’s explanation for why Japan should continue to uphold the death penalty [...]
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Sans Everything is a blog that supports animal rights. So it seems amiss for me to keep beating the same poor broken-down horse, whether it’s dead or alive. Still, there is one last comment to make about Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. [...]
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Worth reading this winter: This Republic of Suffering (Knopf, 342pp) Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust’s study of the changing nature of death at the time of the U.S. Civil War, and the ways in which such changes in turn helped to transform Americans’ relationship with their government. A graf from my San Francisco Chronicle review:
The [...]
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