News Briefs Feb 25, 2009
February 25th, 2009
- Forward Area - Interview with America’s only Social Nationalist Punkrock Band. Otto Strasser meets Johnny Rotten.
- George Orwell, “Tory Anarchist” & “Third Way” socialist: “Any reference point for Orwell’s politics has to be British, indeed, even more precisely, English, since that is where, despite his internationalism, he drew his political inspirations.”
- James Burnham on Our Managerial Class- The managerial society will be promoted as the salvation of mankind ushering “in an age of plenty, sweetness, and light such that no man in his senses could do anything but welcome with rapture the prospect of the future.”
- Capitalism 24/7: Will the Recession Doom the Last Sunday Blue Laws? God forbid we go one day without shopping!
- The Anti-Bono: Q&A with African anti-Western “humanitarian” aid activist Dambisa Moyo.
- Reality TV goes Amish. Television cameras have the power to undermine even the most closely-knit community but the reviewer, unfortunately, misses that point entirely.
- Carl Schmitt, anti-Semitism, and liberal democracy: “Schmitt was an exceptional thinker who, for his time, had an unexceptional prejudice [...] To smear all of his ideas on the basis of his political activities in the Thirties, however, would be like dismissing a humane diet because Hitler was a vegetarian.”
- Was the Tri-Racial, Crypto-Muslim “Tribe of Ishmael” really a romantic leftist myth? So says Nathaniel Deutsch in Inventing America’s “Worst” Family, reviewed in both Reason and the Wall Street Journal. The original story is also summarized here. And yet, says Reason’s Jesse Walker, the story does contain a kernel of truth: “The Ishmaels were, by and large, independent Americans, and they weren’t eager to embrace any effort to raise their station that would diminish that autonomy.” Am I the only one inclined to think that Deutsch is a bit of a spoilsport who should have left this exotic myth- this Curio Americana- alone?
- Draft Dodgers: For DIY brewers, Prohibition lasted until 1978. But once unleashed, they revolutionized the industry (i.e. the U.S. boasts 1,463 breweries, including 975 brewpubs).