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Daily Blogs for 3/2005
by Christopher Chantrill
Saddam WMDs Down, But Saddam WMD Budget Up | 03/31/05
So we didnīt find WMDs in Iraq, according to the ...
Taking Hillary Seriously | 03/30/05
Peggy Noonan reminds us not to ...
Mixing Religion and Politics | 03/29/05
In this long article, Edward Feser ...
Democrats Worry About Catholics | 03/29/05
Democrat consultants Stan Greenberg and Matt Hogan look at ...
Cab Drivers are Giving Real-Estate Tips | 03/28/05
Old Joe Kennedy knew that something was wrong when his shoe-shine boy started
giving him ...
Steyn: It's Still Wrong | 03/27/05
As usual, the incomparable Mark Steyn gets to the ...
Clueless Old Europe | 03/25/05
Enjoy these ...
Here Comes Polyamory | 03/23/05
After mainstreaming the idea of gay marriage, the radical left is limbering up for the ...
Steyn Won't Let Up on Old Europe | 03/21/05
Gloater Mark Steyn is at it again, needling aging Europe about its population crash and ...
Tory Party Sees a Glint of Hope | 03/21/05
Ever since the mid Nineties, the British Conservative Party has been on the mat, the old ...
Republicans are Cracking Up. No They are Not. | 03/19/05
Which is it? Andrew Sullivan says the Republicans are ...
Competitive Sports? For Children? Whatever Next? | 03/19/05
In Britland the progressives are just as firmly opposed to competitive childrensī sports ...
Britain's Flourishing Slave Trade | 03/18/05
So you thought the ...
Krauthammer "Tells It Like It Is" | 03/17/05
Back in the Seventies when liberals ruled the world, a sports-mad liberal Jewish kid ...
The Witness of Ashley Smith | 03/16/05
The enormity of the Brian Nichols affair in Atlanta speaks for itself. Conservative bad ...
And Now This... | 03/15/05
First Wali Jumblatt said it: “[W]hen I saw the Iraqi people voting [on January ...
What Went Wrong? No Fairness Doctrine | 03/14/05
Political philosopher John Kerry has ...
Democrats in the Desert | 03/13/05
Michael Barone surveys the ...
Steyn: Yeah, Terrorism in Ireland | 03/13/05
Never mind Al Qaeda. Letīs talk about the ...
Ronnie We Hardly Knew Ye! | 03/10/05
As democracy starts to bud in the Middle East, this commentator ...
Slip in the Shiv | 03/09/05
Letīs stick it to ...
Cuddly Pessimist Admits Error | 03/08/05
Americaīs most cheerful pessimist, Ex-Brit John Derbyshire, cheerfully ...
Steyn: Assad Checks the Eye Chart | 03/07/05
Finally, the “arab street” is being heard from, and it is holding up an eye ...
Spengler: 20th Century Losers are Dying Out | 03/07/05
Look at the UN population projections, ...
Your Bias is Showing! | 03/06/05
David Frum takes The Washington Post to task for its instinctive liberal bias. ...
Idiotarianism, A Brief Survey | 03/03/05
Said Nelson Mandela: “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is ...
"This does not mean that George Bush has been right all along." | 03/02/05
Oh no. Perish the thought. But Britainīs lefty Guardian is doing a ...
Business as a Learning Process | 03/02/05
Arnold Kling wants to bury the equations of the mathematical economists and proposes ...
Finding Jews for GOP | 03/01/05
When the left is becoming more and more anti-Semitic by the day, the world wonders why ...
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
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