I’m in the middle of adding old issues of UJ to the web site, and putting finishing touches on the new Paperback edition of UJ 29, and I find myself being told something I already suspected: Yup, it’s that bad. Just as Hollywood is incapable of making a major-budget film that isn’t an existing IP,… Read More Publishing is Pravda
Which observation occurred to me, gleaned from the Penguin “Great Ideas” anthology, which goes under the title of On Solitude. I’ve podcasted about the chap before. The following quote is from his “On Books”: It is always a pleasure to see things written about by those who had assayed how to manage them, but there… Read More Montaigne Prophesies Propaganda
Carl Schmidt was a German jurist and political philosopher of the Weimar and Nazi eras. True to the time, his writings contain very strong critique of what he called “the liberal critique of politics.” He phrased it that way because to his mind there was no such thing as true liberal politics, as the essence… Read More Doing Things For a Reason: Miller’s Crossing and the Friend/Enemy Dynamic
What Sign of the Apocalypse is it that we require our button-apps and time-waster devices to remind us that there’s an election coming up? Why isn’t this something I can turn off? It’s everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitter. The oligarchy is as One reminding me that I need to Register to Vote. Never mind the… Read More I Know How to Vote, Facebook
Was, whatever. Any perusal of his filmography — especially from the Era of ’68 — could have led me to that conclusion. But reading Godard on Godard, his collection of film criticism I earlier linked to, has rather shoved my nose in it, to a distasteful degree. In his obscure five-run magazine Gazette du Cinema, Godard… Read More Godard is a Godless, Worshipful Communist
One of the repeated questions of the modern age is why Nazis are our culture’s go-to villains, while Communists, no less accomplished in building pyramids of human skulls, are largely ignored or given a pass. I mean by the producers of culture; the intelligensia and the commentariat. I mentioned in my recent post about Oscars:… Read More The Communist Alibi
Robert Conquest was a historian of note in the middle of the last century. He is best known for his books about the Soviet Union and the purges thereunto pertaining. He is routinely quoted by those on the right (of which he was one) for his Three Laws of Politics: Everyone is a conservative about… Read More The Three Laws of Politics
Apparently he committed thoughtcrime by criticizing Little Angry Climate Girl, whereupon the usual gang of Two-Minute-Haters jumped up and down, whereupon his most well-known book shot up to #1 on Amazon. Larry Correia has the details. Now, logically speaking, we must stipulate that Correlation is not Causality, so it’s entirely possible that the Legions of Woke… Read More Dan Simmons Demonstrates There’s No Such Thing as Bad Publicity
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah-blah-blah – bliggity bloggity oogity boogity – blah blah blah blah, blah-blah. Jibble bibble argle bargle rubble rubble rubble Blah-blah, blah blah blah, blah-blah. Blah the Whole Blah.
Is Megan McArdle actually surprised that no one mentioned Obamacare at the debates? Or is this rhetorical surprise? The Affordable Care Act barely came up. What candidates wanted to talk about was Medicare-for-all. That is nothing short of extraordinary. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the biggest entitlement expansion, and the most significant… Read More The Democrats are Democrats
Content Blues 