When I say that fascism or Nazism was of the Left, I’m using as my yardstick the Anglo-American, classical-liberal, tradition. Many people want to track the Left by a kind of lineage interpretation. So they go back and look at intellectuals (usually quite selectively) and say something like: These people called themselves the Left, the people they hated were “the Right,” they hated the Nazis therefore the Nazis were right-wing.

[…]

So, yes, sure fascism was seen as being to the “right” of Communism, because it was. Even Trotsky considered fascism to be right-wing socialism or middle-class socialism. It seems to me that the key word there is socialism, which is properly understood as a phenomenon of the Left.

(source: The Corner | National Review Online)

Stalin’s definitions of “right” and “left” are probably not the ones most appropriate to American politics.

Well, so far, at any rate.

Even a lot of actually married folks need to learn something from this article about what’s right when bringing children into the world.  

It’s not about the “right” of a man or a woman to “have a child” if that’s the fashion accessory of the moment, or the satisfaction of some sentimental wish.  Rather, every child just by existing has an insuperable claim on some man and some woman–on those who participate in the fundamental procreative act.  Turning that act into commerce, turning “having a baby” into the province of prosthetics and services bought and sold, whether surrogacy or IVF or contraception or abortion, abrogates or attenuates that claim:  it makes the adjudication of percentages of responsibility distributed over many people, and adjudication of some mysterious quantum of “consent” and some other mysterious quantum of “welfare of the child,” seem as necessary as it necessarily must be impossible.  It denies children their rights, and deludes all of us concerning the nature of our rights and obligations.

Those who reflect well on the realities of marriage tend to come to the same conclusion as reliably as every civilization that outlived its self-destructive fads has done:

I have always wanted to be a father. I would give just about anything for the chance to have kids. But the first rule of fatherhood is that a good dad will put the needs of his children before his own—and every child needs a mom and a dad. Period. I could never forgive myself for ripping a child away from his mother so I could selfishly live out my dreams.

Same-sex relationships, by design, require children to be removed from one or more of their biological parents and raised absent a father or mother. This hardly seems fair. So much of what we do as a society prioritizes the needs of adults over the needs of children. Social Security and Medicare rob the young to pay the old. The Affordable Care Act requires young and healthy people to buy insurance to subsidize the cost for the old and sick. Our schools seem more concerned with keeping the teachers unions happy than they are educating our children. Haven’t children suffered enough to make adults’ lives more convenient? For once, it would be nice to see our society put the needs of children first. Let’s raise them in homes where they can enjoy having both a mom and a dad. We owe them that.

(source: I’m Gay, And I Oppose Same-Sex Marriage)

Texas is where terrorists go to get out-gunned at an art show.

(source: In Garland, We Got Lucky)

There’s more to the article–to be read and debated–but this line is worth the rest of it.

When we tolerate and promote willful evil, we get more of it.

When we think we can achieve security and prosperity by making life thinner and less precious, we find that wrath and envy thrive, that life is cheap.

When we tolerate and promote a society whose “common good” is the endless warfare of all against all, where each individual must shout in a unique voice and never sacrifice any desire, yet where race and class and sex can never be eclipsed as social and political forces, then how can we be surprised that we get such incoherent results?

Their very incoherence is their coherence.

(Seattle)

Their logic is the logic of nihility.

(Portland)

Their spirit is the spirit of the age. Continue reading →

Would you trust this man with a razor?

Kudos to Matthew Schmitz for his beautiful summary of what has been called “reverse Whiggism” or medieval hipster irony. I plan to link it often when this sort of thing comes up.