So I’m reading Spinoza, or at least the first fifteen pages of the Theologico-Political Treatise, and I’ve already come upon a question. What is prophecy? I don’t mean the everyday, casual sense of the word, where Omni has an article…
There has been a lot of loose talk lately (which I won’t link to, so you can’t find out how well-written and persuasive it is, or on the other hand whether it exists at all) about how the anti-war faction…
Without saying anything positive about Amir Taheri’s conclusions, or agreeing with anything Amir Taheri has to say about … well, pretty much anything, I would like to direct my Gentle Readers’ attention to this article in the National Post, which…
First: so far, so good. Most of my fears about the war in Iraq have not only not come true, but no longer have a chance of coming true. The US military (and the coalition forces) were very very good…
I just today came across the Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia which uses the amazing breadth of the Internet to create a collaborative work of impressive size. It’s one of the things that could not have existed before the Internet (OK,…
The provocative Bill Berkowitz writes about a truly scary thing; the possibility of the US government giving preferential treatment to Christian proselytizers in post-war Iraq. Why is this scary? Well, remember that the real nightmare scenario in all this is…
Hey, Gentle Readers, what time is it? It’s Rossiter Time! 6. The fallibility and potential tyranny of majority rule. OK, I’ll begin the note by saying that majority rule is certainly fallible (what isn’t?) and is potentially tyrannical. I am…
Your Humble Blogger would like to thank Jed for his nifty comments widget; from now on, you, yes, you, Gentle Reader, can correct my egregious errors. In Real Time. This is, perhaps, a segue to the point that what I…
A friend writes, in response to my earlier comment on Gandhi: “In the process of slogging through lifetime after lifetime one closes in on the harmonic understanding; which is paradoxical; because the understanding (as put in Albert Brooks’s movie “Defending…
Well, and Your Humble Blogger is up to the fifth of 21 Conservative Tenets, from Clinton Lawrence Rossiter’s book Conservatism in America (New York: Knopf © 1955). 5. The need for a ruling and serving aristocracy. This seems to me…