Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged Hitler, Pat Buchanan, Winston Churchill, World War II on July 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I’m not a fan of Winston Churchill. The man had his virtues and did some good but he was also a militarist (of the type that romanticizes war as a grand adventure), an imperialist, a bungling administrator (Gallipoli being only the most famous of his many botched operations), a racist, and a militant supporter of [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged conservative intellectuals, Edward Luttwak on June 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Like his friend Michael Ledeen, Edward Luttwak lives in the weird nether-land where scholarship meets espionage and intellectual journalism meets military adventurism. When he’s not writing learned books on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire or crisp essays for the London Review of Books, Luttwak works as a consultant for the various military and [...]
Posted in Media, Philosophy, U.S. Politics on June 12, 2008 | 8 Comments »
If there is one thing historians understand, it’s that history does really repeat itself exactly. History is the study of the past in all it’s local and unique particularity. Yet still, some forms of human behavior do fall into patterns, and when people make the same mistakes over and over again, it’s worth asking why.
The [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged China, gallup poll, greatest enemy, Iran, Iraq on April 11, 2008 | No Comments »
This Gallup poll on the identity of America’s “greatest enemy” got fairly good press coverage when it was released in late March, but there’s a lot of food for thought in it that is worth addressing even if we’re a couple of weeks on from the headlines themselves. First, it’s not shocking to see Iran, [...]
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged Christopher Hitchens, Iraq on April 4, 2008 | 14 Comments »
Christopher Hitchens: master logician.
September 11 had a strong effect on Christopher Hitchens. “I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration,” he remarked to an interviewer in 2003. “Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I [...]
Posted in Philosophy, U.S. Politics, tagged 300, Frank Miller, Shadia Drury on March 30, 2008 | 4 Comments »
300: The Heroic West versus the Decadent East.
In the film 300, we see an absolute division between two contending armies. The Greeks (and especially the vanguard forces of the Spartans) embody everything good about humanity: they are handsome, cherish freedom, treat their women well, and have healthy loving heterosexual families (that last bit is especially risible for [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged shoddy intellectuals on March 27, 2008 | 3 Comments »
If you subscribe to to Commentary magazine, you can get a “World Terrorism wall map”. The JTA reprinted Commentary’s sales pitch with very little comment. I’ll do the same:
To say “Thank You” for your paid subscription to COMMENTARY, we will send you our full-color 39” x 26” World Terrorism wall map. Features include detailed inset maps highlighting countries [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics on March 24, 2008 | 15 Comments »
Who is responsible for the housing bubble? In the National Post Terence Corcoran manfully tries to pin the blame on the Clinton adminstration.
I’m not fan of Bill Clinton, but Corcoran could have noted that the Bush White House has followed in the same path (taking great pride in the rise of home ownership as a sign of a [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged American Revolution on March 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Jefferson: a loud yelper for liberty.
Studying history always makes you a bit of a fatalist: coming to terms with the complexity of the past means realizing that large scale social changes are like tsunamis; they change the world and you have can react to them but you can’t stop them. You have to deal with [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics on March 23, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The world is what it is; peace of mind requires recognizing that there is no use getting indignant at certain galling situations; all we can do is work, patiently and with good-humour, to change things.
Still, it’s worth recording that five years after the beginning of the Iraq War, major media outlets (for example, the New [...]
