Lee on Nov 20 2008 | Filed under: Domestic Politics, History
Rasmussen has polled the public on whether they agreed with President Bush’s characterization of capitalism as the “highway to the American Dream.” Only 44% voiced support for capitalism, 33% were undecided and 22% expressed opposition. A grim finding. Only Republicans marshaled an absolute majority of support for the system, commendably voting 4:1, independents had a [...]
Lee on Nov 15 2008 | Filed under: Foreign affairs, History
The subject of the bloody 1965 Indonesian mass murder of suspected communists is not often openly discussed history even in today’s Indonesia. Given the pervasive silence, estimates vary on the actual number of people killed, but it’s generally accepted as being somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000. Yet so infected with fear is the subject of [...]
Lee on Nov 05 2008 | Filed under: Domestic Politics
Barack Obama has been president-elect for exactly one day and James Carville is already arguing for an inevitable Democratic majority for the next 40 years. Imagine predicting Jim’s claim to fame, the 1992 election, from the vantage of 1952, and you get a sense of the stupendous absurdity of this assessment in the light of [...]
Lee on Sep 12 2008 | Filed under: Foreign affairs
Russian FM Sergei Lavrov reportedly went berserk on David Miliband in phone discussions over the Georgia war. Apparently he was raving, shouting obscenities, and ridiculing Miliband’s knowledge of history.
There’s something incredibly deranged about that government. They’ve taken the traditional Russian penchant for seeing itself under siege (real or imagined), and pressurized it to a delusional [...]
Lee on Sep 04 2008 | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Election 2008, History, Media
John Podhoretz thinks the Palin speech might be among the most dazzling debuts in American political history. I don’t know about that, but I do know it was the most powerful, important, and effective speech by a vice presidential candidate since Nixon’s “Checkers.” John later notes that McCain looked relieved by it all. Again, I [...]
Lee on Aug 17 2008 | Filed under: Culture, Education, Lee's Page
The movement of “ethnic studies” curricula from colleges to public schools, is something that troubles many of us who have experienced such classes in modern times. Ethnic studies programs are often called “multiculturalist,” but since they tend to be monoethnic and extremely political rather than cultural, I prefer the term “ethnostatism.”
In defense of the migration, [...]
Lee on Aug 06 2008 | Filed under: History, Lee's Page
Video clip of victims of the Terror recounting their experiences at the hands of the secret police. The levity that many exhibit in revisiting the systematic decimation of human dignity they experienced, is the ageless strength of Russia as a nation. The inhuman brutality they describe, is the curse of that great and unfortunate nation’s [...]
Lee on Aug 02 2008 | Filed under: History
Here’s a five part Uncommon Knowledge segment featuring a superb pairing of Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson, to discuss the new World War II revisionism led by Pat Buchanan. While it’s an entertaining exercise for a Saturday, I’ll warn you that there’s a certain weakness to the discussion, given that both Hanson and Hitchens [...]
Joshua Foust on Jul 10 2008 | Filed under: Books, Foreign affairs
This book was written entirely in the passive voice. The passive voice was used to avoid assigning causation or personhood to various events. As a result, we learn that places were invaded, people were slaughtered, armies were founded, but no one can say by whom.
Good grief, that is exhausting. How is it a book almost [...]
MichaelW on Jun 23 2008 | Filed under: Books, Domestic Politics, Election 2008, History, Libertarianism, MichaelW's Page, Philosophy, social science
Over the weekend I read with fascination William Saletan’s review of the new offering from George Lakoff, “The Political Mind,” and was struck by the remarkable similarities between it and the revolutionary syndicalism espoused during the prior fin de siècle.
In particular, Saletan summarizes Lakoff’s principal idea as the need for progressives to recapture [...]
Joshua Foust on May 06 2008 | Filed under: Foreign affairs, History
Published first at Registan.net, this is the culmination of some research I’ve been doing into the nature and history of Pashtun tribal militancy. It draws from a mixture of out-of-print ethnocgraphic and geographic surveys, as well as contemporary news accounts, and tries to make the case that much of the turbulence there is really not [...]
Lance on Feb 19 2008 | Filed under: History, Lance's Page, Libertarianism
As Ron Paul’s more disturbing and radical views are emerging, especially how closely he has associated himself with the Mises Institute, it might behoove those of us who consider ourselves on the libertarian side of things to more closely examine who these radicals are.
Certainly we have to understand we have many areas of agreement, but [...]
Synova on Feb 11 2008 | Filed under: Culture, History, Society, Synova's Page
Or: What I Learned About the World from Reading Historical Romances.
I learned that sometimes people get *more* uptight over time rather than less.
Victorians, according to custom and any number of novels, were concerned with propriety above all. Certain things were not spoken of and certainly the rougher aspects of life were hidden [...]
Peg on Feb 05 2008 | Filed under: Culture, Education, History, Peg's Page
(Cross posted at Whatif?)
George Santayana told us: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
What on earth do you do, though, with those who never learned any history in the first place?
A fifth of British teenagers believe Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character, while many think Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur [...]
Lee on Feb 05 2008 | Filed under: Culture, Economics, History, Lee's Page
photo: Tal Bright
Thomas Barnett bemoans the grotesque state of economics education in Europe, which often ranges from the anti-capitalist to the simply fatuous. But consider this item he cites:
Great French HS textbook: “Globalization implies subjugation of the world to the market, which constitutes a true cultural danger.”
(Thomas P.M. Barnett)
Somewhat bemused by this, Barnett asks “why [...]
Lance on Jan 24 2008 | Filed under: History, Lance's Page
In the annals of excruciating misery during wartime, few events can compare with what befell Napoleon’s troops during his campaign in Russia. From Strange Maps we see the suffering and tragedy in graphic statistical form. (click image to enlarge)
“The best statistical graphic ever drawn“, is how statistician Edward Tufte described this chart in his [...]
Lee on Jan 21 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web
Henry Louis Taylor on the evaporation of common knowledge about Martin Luther King, Jr: “No one can go further than one sentence. All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don’t know what that dream was.”
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Lance on Jan 08 2008 | Filed under: Books, Culture, Domestic Politics, History, Lance's Page
Echoing a wonderful discussion we had in the fall of 2006 on the nature of Fascism (see here, here and here) Jonah Goldberg writes a book which bristles at the use of the term by the contemporary left. I would really be interested in picking that discussion back up. So anybody interested, please read the [...]
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