SPOGBOLT   |   Location: Newfoundland, Canada

February 26, 2007

Glick on "Jihad's campus collaborators"

Caroline Glick points out that certain American campus security services now seem to think they are branches of the Stasi. I wonder how they could ever have got the idea that their employers were totalitarians with an aversion to free intellectual exchange? . . . . CONTINUE

Edmund Burke on natural aristocracy

A voice from a vanished age.

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found—to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences . . . . CONTINUE

February 21, 2007

Peter Hitchens on British tyranny

Peter Hitchens argues that the British police are now more an instrument of elite control of a subject population than a means of defending that population against criminal violence.

. . . the one thing that will bring a rapid and powerful police response to a phone call is a claim that guns are being used by private citizens. And the one offence the courts will always punish severely is the one they call 'taking the law into your own hands'. Why? Because they are much more worried about their monopoly of force than they are about protecting us . . . .

I object strongly to the expression 'taking the law into your own hands'. The law is ours and we made it for ourselves, to protect us and govern us, as a free people. Our freedom to defend ourselves against criminal violence is part of our general freedom to live our lives lawfully. We hire the police to help us enforce the law, not to tell us that we cannot do so. Sadly, the modern British law is not our law, but an elite law, based on ideas which most of us do not share. And the modern police are the elite's police, not ours . . .

February 17, 2007

Henry Taylor on education for public life

In the view of many, the problem of preserving a civilized order comes down to one of education. Classical liberals have always emphasized the need for an educated electorate if democracy is to be viable in the long term. More generally, however, a political or opinion-forming élite of some kind is inevitable, regardless of whether the polity is formally democratic or élitist; the real question is the nature of that élite—whether, for example, it is to set about overturning the traditional values of the civilization, or preserving them. And this will depend essentially on how the élite has been educated . . . . CONTINUE

Labels:

February 16, 2007

Henry Taylor on popularity and humility

Taylor (Statesman, Chapter 7) seems to achieve a synthesis of classical and Christian concepts of humility.

Popularity . . . . is most commonly obtained by an abuse of humility . . . . I say an abuse of humility, because humility well used consists in a constant reference to a high standard and a prostration of pride and self-love before that standard, whether it be merely ideal, or whether we see it embodied in men of virtue and understanding superior to our own: and it does not consist in any undue and untrue self-depreciation, leading a man to postpone himself to what is worse than himself, and thereby to desert his moral station . . . . CONTINUE

Labels:

Advice on marriage from 1836

"Let no man suppose that his character is strong and high enough to resist the influence of a lower character in a wife."—Henry Taylor, The Statesman.

Sounds like a parody, but isn't

"Dr. Wairimu Njambi is an Assistant Professor of 'Women’s Studies' at the Florida Atlantic University. Much of her scholarship is dedicated to advancing the notion that the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is actually a triumph for Feminism and that it is hateful to suggest otherwise. According to Njambi 'anti-FGM discourse perpetuates a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular western image of a "normal" body and sexuality.'" (Brussels Journal)

February 15, 2007

The Red Guards strike again in Britain

According to Cranmer (citing the Daily Telegraph), a Christian woman's application to foster children was rejected on the grounds that her beliefs prevented her from "fully accepting a child's sexuality if he or she were lesbian or gay" and that she would be unable "to actively promote another religion for a child". The founder of a charity to assist single mothers was refused a grant because "Your assistance for single parents includes extending Christian comfort and offering prayer". A local council is threatening to remove the grant of a trust that has ministered to homeless alcoholics for forty years unless it promises to say, "We will do nothing to promote our faith". Cranmer comments,

In the UK, around 20% of charities have a religious basis, and it is testimony to the faith that the vast majority of these are Christian . . . . They may no longer [exclusively?] employ Christians, for that is ‘discrimination’; they may no longer talk of their faith, for that is ‘anti-diversity’; and they may no longer explain their morality, for that is ‘intolerance’ . . . . New Labour has done more to undermine the Christian foundations of the United Kingdom than any previous government in history. The party that was built on sacred motives has become the most secular . . . .

February 14, 2007

Eidelberg on moral relativism

A lengthy excerpt from Eidelberg's On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence (1976): . . . . CONTINUE

Labels:

Valentine's Day greetings


from batr.net (2006)

(click on image to enlarge)

February 10, 2007

Lee Harris on cosmopolitanism and patriotism

(See preceding post) . . . . How is it possible for liberal cosmopolitans to claim the moral high ground in debate with political particularists? This, Harris implies, results from the prevailing intellectual habit of preferring abstract ideals to realities. The utopian ideal of a nonexistent world community is compared with a "living, breathing community of real men and women" and found to be superior. Such a comparison is "a bit like saying that the novel I intend to write one day will be far superior to War and Peace because of my intention to make my novel perfect".

The true choice facing us is not between particularism and liberal cosmopolitanism, but between "actual historical communities that embody the values of liberal civilization to a high degree and those that do not" . . . . CONTINUE

Labels:

Lee Harris on historical forgetfulness

One of the themes of Harris's Civilization and Its Enemies (2004) is the inherent danger to civilization of forgetting the prerequisites for its own existence. In particular, prosperity and security beget an unwillingness to risk one's individual or national life; but when one is faced with ruthless enemies, it will sometimes be necessary to take such risks in order to avoid enslavement and the destruction of one's civilization . . . . CONTINUE

February 06, 2007

A Russian looks at Britain

Peter Hitchens quotes a handy summary of the current state of Britain by an unnamed Russian reporter.

Under its corrupt government, which is widely believed to sell seats in the upper house of parliament in return for contributions to ruling party funds, the once-free nation of Britain is rapidly turning into a police state. Pre-trial detention, once limited to 72 hours, is being repeatedly extended to far longer periods. Old rules about the accused being innocent until proved guilty are being cast aside. The right to silence has been abolished and so has the law which prevented anyone being tried twice for the same offence. The police increasingly take action against individuals for expressing opinions which defy 'political correctness', the official orthodoxy of the British state. The major churches claim that new laws discriminate against their freedom of conscience. The streets are under perpetual surveillance by closed-circuit TV cameras . . . . CONTINUE

Elaborating Eidelberg's election scheme

As far as I am aware Eidelberg has not spelled out the details of his proposed combination of senatorial nomination and popular election of presidential candidates, other than to suggest that the senate nominate no more than three candidates (in addition, perhaps, to the incumbent, if he is eligible to run again). It is interesting to try to work out what these details might reasonably be . . . . CONTINUE

Labels: ,

Britain is not doing well in Afghanistan...

. . . in the judgment of Richard North of EU Referendum. He points out, among other things, that in a recent attack on Jugroom Fort to retrieve the body of a dead British soldier, "[élite] British forces were repulsed by a numerically inferior force of Taliban". However, North also believes that the British news media are so incompetent at reporting military matters that civilian observers must largely resort to reasoning from first principles in order to get any idea of what is going on. Such deductions about the state of affairs in Afghanistan are necessarily tentative.

February 05, 2007

Alternatives to Eidelberg's election scheme

Eidelberg's proposal, in combination with some form of élite "senate" or upper legislative chamber, would be a method of choosing a chief executive who was both independent from the legislative branch and likely to be competent. It would accomplish this by relying on the senate to identify qualified presidential candidates, but making the successful candidate dependent on popular support to remain in office . . . .

Notwithstanding the indispensable role of the legislative branch, the choice of the chief executive is, as I think Eidelberg somewhere observes, the most crucial decision the political system must arrive at. Theoretically speaking, his proposal thus seems extremely important.

There are two or three other possible ways that I can see of achieving the same combination of competence and independence from the legislative branch . . . . CONTINUE

Labels: ,

February 04, 2007

Painful transition to New Blogger (4)

Your indulgence, dear reader(s). I've just spent most of the evening trying to get the much-touted new Blogger to work. I waited until Blogger kicked me off the old version, correctly anticipating that there would be many bugs in the new one for some time after it was made available. But even so, the new Blogger first displays a blank editing frame when I try to edit an existing post. The official help section suggests that I switch from my Opera browser to IE6 or Firefox. The Blogger technical people seem to look down their noses at anyone not using Firefox, but last time I checked Firefox it seemed too big for my machine. So, I download and install IE6, which takes the best part of an hour (and incidentally wipes out all bookmarks from IE5: nice going, Bill). Lo and behold, I can't even log in to Blogger with IE6 . . . . CONTINUE