The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

—Lazarus Long


Archive for August, 2009

From radical evil to farce in two generations

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

There just isn’t any better marker for the fundamental narcissism of today’s left-wing politics that this:

That’s Che Guevara’s granddaughter, Lydia, We are told that she posed semi-nude to promote vegetarianism and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
There are so many levels of wrongness and unintended irony here that it’s hard to know where to [...]

“The new literacy” ain’t so new

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Today, Wired magazine gives us an article, Clive Thompson on the New Literacy, busting the supposedly conventional wisdom that cellphones, social networking, and the Internet in general have accelerated the decline of writing skills. The author says we’re actually in an age of rising literacy unparalleled since classical Greece. Er, what?

In which I learn that I am vindicated…

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

This morning I had the delightful “I was right all along!” experience of learning that the one grammatical bugaboo in my life is probably bogus. The next time a copy-editor invokes it on me I shall gleefully kick him or her in the snout…

Quiddity has a qualia all its own

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

I changed my mind about a significant philosophical issue today, and in the process parted ways with a thinker I’ve been a serious fan of for a couple of decades now. The issue is raised by a thought experiment, of which I was previously unaware, called Mary’s Room. The simplest way of getting [...]

Dr. William Short’s “Viking Weapons and Combat”: A Review

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

I expected to enjoy Dr. William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques (Westholme Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59416-076-9), and I was not disappointed. I am a historical fencer and martial artist who has spent many hours sparring with weapons very similar to those Dr. Short describes, and I have long had an active interest in [...]