“As a former graduate student in religious studies and writer of the classics, it is deeply regrettable that the scholarship of the academy does not reach further and that century-old myths no longer of any substantial prominence in academic study still hold public sway.”
“A disconnect ensues: Even as the American public has indeed polarized, our elected representatives have fled to the extremes to an even greater degree.”
“So, yes—my friend has a point: To someone who has never given a moment’s thought to whether Jesus was a real person or not, he does seem like an entirely fictional character.”
“At the time, I would not have guessed my encounters with Roger through YouTube and a handful of books would lead me to studying with him just prior to his death.”
“The only thing Brooks’s ‘true conservatism’ is ‘responsible’ for, however, is progressivism’s thoroughgoing dominance of our culture. For Brooks, a ‘responsible’ conservatism must concede the moral legitimacy of every progressive ‘advance.'”
“Without the notion of socially necessary labor time, nothing in Marx’s value form or overall theory of exploitation makes sense.”
“One of the causes of tension with Noam Chomsky, for example, Burgis observes, was Hitchens’ recognition that the forces of anti-imperialism today are dissimilar to ‘Ho Chi Minh or the Sandinistas.'”
“Policing needs to be seen as a profession to whose ranks people of every class might plausibly aspire.”
“As a matter of economics, scarcity is the source of all value, even if it is a combination of ‘manufactured’ scarcity via monopoly control and relative scarcity due to the costliness of extraction and the preferences of consumers.”
Here are our editor’s choices for his favorite interviews of this past year.
“As is tradition at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite Merion West articles of this past year.”
“So, the fact that what is now called wokeness is a minority persuasion, believed by a small group of elite left-liberals and pursued through the instruments of the managerial state and corporate oligarchies, should not be surprising.”
“National Conservatism, one strand of a broader emergent post-Cold War fusionist conservative movement, has the potential for both capturing youthful energy and enthusiasm while grounding and directing it with prudence and realism.”
“In the aftermath of the fiasco that was the Fall of Kabul, it was predictable that American commentators would detect a mirroring effect of the Afghan loss on political crises in the United States.”
“I pedal away with an all-too-familiar question bouncing around my head: ‘What are we doing to these kids?'”
