Who Were the Sea Peoples?

For illogic : "This is the kind of brinksmanship you get when leaders of a rogue regime are under growing pressure. The only hope to get them to reverse course is to relentlessly increase their feeling that, if they don't, the Arab states, Israel, the Europeans and America will, one way or another, ensure that ruin is visited upon them." He's talking about how Iranian president Ahmadinejad recently claimed that the US and Israel were planning on attacking two Mideastern countries soon. How exactly this represents "brinksmanship" on Ahmadinejad's part is a little unclear -- he's not, after all, threatening any attacks, he's claiming others are doing so -- but even more startling is Krauthammer's prescription: Since the pressure on Iran is making the president crazy and reckless (as Krauthammer's sees things), the solution is... even more pressure ! Of course, for Krauthammer, the solution to every foreign policy difficulty is for Am...

Last step done, and we're ready to print! Oakeshott on Rome and America 1 Introduction 6 What Is Rationalism in Politics? 7 Comparing the Theory with Some Evidence 8 An Outline of This Work 9 The Manner of Enquiry 12 I. Politics as the Crow Flies 16 Was Oakeshott’s Critique Merely an Apology for Conservatism? 16 The Rationalist ‘Founders’ 18 A Further Examination of the Rationalist Character 22 An Example of Rationalism in a Modern, Liberal Democracy 28 What Is the Character of ‘Anti-Rationalist’ Politics? 31 Conclusion 34 II. The Development of Oakeshott’s Critique of Rationalism 35 Experience and Its Modes 35 The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism 37 Morality and Politics in Modern Europe 43 On Human Conduct 45 Aristotle on Practice Versus Theory 49 O’Neill on Abstraction Versus Idealization 51 Conclusion 53 III. Misunderstanding Oakeshott 54 Some Typical Criticisms 54 Traditionalism as an Apology for the Status Quo 54 Traditionalism as De...

My kids are watching some animated kids show from Britain. The teacher character is "educating" the children that "people call tomahtoes a vegetable, but they're really a fruit." I know I've blogged this before, but I am an OCD sufferer, so I just have to keep blogging it until I fix the problem: ' Vegetable ' is a culinary category. It means, roughly, "the non-sweet, non-starchy things we eat as sides to our main course." "Vegetable" has no scientific meaning! No one considers bread or beer to be vegetable dishes, although they clearly come from plants, while most people consider mushrooms to be a vegetable, although they are not plants at all. (I recall watching with horror as another "educator" asked my daughter's class "Which part of a plant does a mushroom come from?" That's like asking "Which part of a plant does a t-bone steak come from?") "Fruit," on the other hand, has ...

Big Questions Online , lead by "Crunchy Con" Rod Dreher.

Nice post from John Médaille. A sample: 'However, the elimination of ethics could only be accomplished by a ruthless reductionism: man was reduced to an “economic calculator” capable of acting only in self-interest, while all markets were reduced to a single model of supply and demand curves with a single, well-defined equilibrium points. The new homo oeconomicus was conceived as a pure individual with no natural ties and was no more than a collection of unfulfilled desires, always waiting for the entrepreneur to fill them up, while creating new wants.'

Rationalists like to believe that they have tossed aside all prejudices, and that the way they do things is based upon pure reason. I recall a rationalist, in the comments here, scoffing at my nod to the importance of tradition in judging the propriety of laws. At one point he asked me, "I suppose you'd be fine living in a culture that forces women (but not men) to cover their face in public, as long as that is customary?" Of course, as Oakeshott pointed out, devising some "rational" way of behaving by starting from a blank slate, after having rid oneself of all influence from traditions of behaviour, is an impossibility. So to a student of Oakeshott it comes as no surprise that my rationalist interlocuter didn't seem troubled by the fact that he is just fine living in a culture that forces women (but not men) to cover their chest in public, because that is customary.

My daughter asked me the above question today. I replied, "He was the white Michael Jackson... well, at least until Michael Jackson became the white Michael Jackson."