From Rod Dreher

• He tells of one of two bad ideas in the raw, nude performance art, and Chris Johnson of another: ‘gender’s only a construct... stop staring at me’. Well, duh.
• On talking but not listening.
• Reason and morality: a necessary connection? Yes: the ancients and the Schoolmen rightly understood reason as conforming to reality not the modern(ist) ‘create your own reality’.
• Scandal: when is it whistle-blowing and when is it the sin of detraction?
• The evolution of TV-watching. According to my company’s CEO, TV news is still No. 1 but I’ve long thought it’s next in line behind the newspapers we still print as bound to disappear one day at least in its present form. (We’re phasing out the papers over the next five years.) First blogs, now tiny videocams and YouTube: many/most now have the means of production. Wonderful!
• More on all that: digital power. But there’s still a culture-making élite.
• For newspapers, doom, gloom, the usual.
• Why are there slum-dwellers? Throwing money at people who are not very bright and have a gutter culture feels nice to the naïve but doesn’t help. Add to that it usually means stealing your and my money by force (pay by yesterday or else!) to throw. The answer of course is real equal opportunity: no handouts, no quotas, no collectivist identity politics.
• Sex-mad society scapegoats the Catholic Church.
• Hooray for mediocrity! Self-esteem claptrap whilst the Japanese and Indians are excelling in maths and science? Dreher acknowledges that for a strapped state school, even mediocrity is hard to reach. That banner does sounds like something ‘The Simpsons’ would make fun of, Seymour Skinner and Edna Krabappel having Groundskeeper Willie put it up in Springfield Elementary. The thing is its leftish fans would say the answer is to throw more stolen money down the state schools.

Labels: libertarianism, politics, television, the Catholic faith, the Internet