Thomas Jefferson wrote, in 1789, that “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government;” he backed up that claim by founding the University of Virginia, about which he wrote, in 1820: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth ( Read more... )

It was curiosity, not stupidity that killed the Dodo. For too long, we have held to the unfair myth that the flightless Mauritian bird became extinct because it was too dumb to understand that it was being killed. But as Stefan Pociask points out in “What Happened to the Last Dodo Bird?”, the dodo was driven into extinction partly because of its ( Read more... )

For perspective: a gang of about four-hundred in Quebec, thirty-four hundred in Canada. Fewer than a low-end biker gang.

In the early evening darkness, four figures huddled in the parking lot of a Quebec City arena, all wearing black sweatshirts emblazoned with a drawing of Odin, a Norse god of war ( Read more... )

Well, this is a revoltin' development. Seems that I'm rather off the ball and out of the loop to not have noticed this before the CBC... We'll see how or if they dissolve. Forty-three thousand Facebook followers doesn't really amount to much, and Quebec Orangemen could probably boast proportionally bigger numbers and actual influence back in the ( Read more... )

My sole statement on the ongoing political debacle to the South:

In a book, titled Hitler and the Germans, the philosopher and political scientist Eric Voegelin, echoing Karl Krauss, lambasted several different cohorts of the self-styled intellectual class for creating and perpetuating the conditions in which men like Hitler and Goebbels could ( Read more... )

5 December 2016

Sexual Violence PolicyThe Board of Governors approved a new sexual violence policy on 1 December 2016. The version of this policy that was passed (here or see the meeting materials posted online for 1 December 2016) was essentially identical to the draft released by the administration on 6 October 2016, a version that many ( Read more... )

Following on a previous transcript of the Alt-Right event by the New York Times' Joseph Goldstein, the Atlantic has released a video of Richard Spencer's before his organization, the National Policy Institute.

Click to view

WASHINGTON - By the time Richard B. Spencer, the leading ideologue of the alt-right movement and the final speaker of the night, rose to address a gathering of his followers on Saturday, the crowd was restless ( Read more... )

It might be preposterous in this, the year of Trump, to even think about conservatism as an intellectual movement. Trump’s unexpected rise seems to lay bare a simple fact - that conservatism has not only lost the battle of ideas but ceded the terrain of sophisticated thought altogether ( Read more... )

It is early November and in the streets of Toronto, men and women are pinning bright red poppies onto their dark winter coats. They do this in remembrance; they remember the men and women who gave their lives in the two great orgies of violence that defined the twentieth century in order to build a saner and a better world. That world, which the ( Read more... )