A few years ago I did a post on how country music seemed to have a Southern bias. Well, Donald Federikovich Trump owes his victory to the northern counterpart of rednecks, whatever they are called, that won him the states […]
Culture
The Religious Right Failed to See What Was Coming
We have repeated Francis Schaeffer’s warning about ‘personal peace and affluence’ often at Blue Kennel, but it’s time to do it again. He declared, back about 1970, that the ‘Silent Majority’, a term Nixon had begun to use, was composed […]
Authoritarianism is a Hot Subject Nowadays
There is a lot of intellectual fuss about ‘authoritarianism’ nowadays, because of the rise of Donald Trump and what appears to be the overthrow of traditional ‘fusion’ conservatism. A long essay by Amanda Taub in “Vox” is the most thorough […]
The Adams Map: A Different Spectrum, A Challenge – Part 2
It occurs to me that Adams anticipates Trump. However, when I wrote this I thought the people on the lower left corner weren’t going to turn out to vote. Therefore the culture wars between the upper left and lower right […]
Andrew Sullivan on Trump and Tyranny: A Response
Andrew Sullivan, having retired from blogging and writing after first giving us the idea of same sex marriage and then being lambasted by his followers for wanting to be tolerant to their enemies who lost over that particular issue, has […]
The Beach Bum’s View of Real Estate Values
As one who lives by the beach in California, I’m prone to think of housing values as being almost exclusively the land underneath the house, and the improvements as almost irrelevant. Several times a year a widow dies, and her […]
Face, Respect, the Sin of Gossip, and ‘Freedom From Speech’
The debate about ‘freedom from speech’ has accelerated. Greg Lukianoff, author of the Freedom from Speech broadside, has cooperated with Jonathan Haidt, an author I have quoted on Blue Kennel to write an article for The Atlantic criticizing the concept of […]
Christians May be Decreasing in Number in America, But Not Because of any ‘War’
Jay Michaelson, in The Daily Beast, proclaimed on Christmas Day that there is a decrease in the numbers and influence of Christians in America, but that the “war” on Christianity is a myth. I’m not sure the war on Christianity […]
More on the Whole ‘Judeo-Christian’ Meme
In my post four years ago, “9/11, Ten Years Later” I talked a little bit about the concept of ‘Judeo-Christian’. I’d like to expand on it. As my source says, the meme ‘Judeo-Christian’ originated in the United States after World War […]
What Really Happened to Poetry and Classical Music?
In recent years one would get the impression that both poetry and classical music have declined in popularity except in rather esoteric “hip” circles; at least the newer kinds of poetry and classical music being written are not, for the […]