Can national pride create national blind spots?
February 2010
Is happiness found in fan-dom?
Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.
It may be the great sentiment of this American moment: “I want to build something of my own. How do you not understand that?”
Both the Right and Left in American politics agree with this aim – to keep America “number one.”
Natural disasters and security threats seem to beg for a response that is massive, coordinated, and centralized. If so, how can the consolidation of state power be tempered and the principles of localism advanced?
The future of the Tea Party is uncertain, but there are interesting possibilities.
Lovers of snow and cold are qualitatively different from the lovers of sun and surf; they are different moral beings altogether.
My own views would fall most accurately along the continuum between anarcho-capitalist and conservative-traditionalist…
Men cut off from their origins and alienated from their selves become desperate, and desperate men do desperate deeds.
Even as he denounces the conservative justices for activism and for creating “legislation” from the bench, as well as the general conservative movement for a “double standard without apology” . . . he fails to note the double-standard that he (and others on the Left) are employing in their demands for judicial modesty.
Here’s a sign of the times: if you’re worried about what all these digital and internet technologies are going to do to books, you can join a movement to signal your support of books (and other pen-and-inked things).
Here’s what really makes that a sign of the times: the movement is online.
Let’s just go all the way, folks.
We have for so long asserted that we are a force for good in the world and that our efforts are in the service of “democracy” that we can no longer see the irony of a nation refusing to call itself an empire when in possession of military bases around the globe and expending nearly half our annual tax receipts on war efforts without foreseeable end.
