Joel Belz asks, “Are poor people poor because they’re paying the price for their own personal failures—or because the systems in which they find themselves have been broken and have failed the people within them?” A new book offers a sound, biblical answer.
All posts by Phil
It’s Hell, I Tell You
Why Most Journalists Are Democrats
Barbara Oakley, a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, write in a blog on Psychology Today’s site:
Soviet Socialism, as it turned out, was a perverse system that killed motivation even as it made fear as natural as breathing.
Why wasn’t this widely reported in the Western press?
As it turns out, the preponderance of journalists are Democrats. And socialism, with its idyllic, “progressive” programs, has formed an increasingly important role in Democratic policies. Who wants to investigate a possible dark side of your own party’s plank?
… there’s a critically important concept that students of journalism are rarely taught. It’s easy to find any number of targets to write about in capitalist societies with an open press. But totalitarian governments are journalistic black holes.
(via Frank Wilson)
The 2008 Election: VPs and Racial Politics
Authors Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson have a book released today on last year’s election, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election. World’s blog points to some details about who John McCain had on his vice-presidential running mates list and how those who vetted Mrs. Palin believed she could be a great VP, though probably not on Day One. “She had knocked some of the broader questions out of the park, [former White House counsel A.B. Culvahouse] told McCain. She would not necessarily be ready on Jan. 20, 2009, to be vice president, but in his estimation few candidates ever are.”
On The Politico, the authors discuss Senator Kennedy’s reaction to former president Bill Clinton’s treatment of candidate Obama.
If She Doesn’t Go In . . .
How Beautiful, I Guess
Beauty was once the goal, at least in part, of art, music, and poetry. Now, it is the antithesis of them, states Roger Scruton, who has written a book on the subject.
Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.
Nice Doesn’t Help
And now for something completely different: an advertisement for creative critique services.
Being nice, in some circumstances, can cause more harm than good. 🙂
Four Lost Wodehouse Playlets Found
Four short, satirical plays written by P.G. Wodehouse between 1904-1907 have been discovered and show the great comic author’s politics. He wrote them in support of British conservatives and those arguing for tariff reform.
Literary historian Paul Spiring discovered the works. “They are quite powerful,” he said, “and show that he was very much a supporter of the Tariff Reform League and pro-Chamberlain. His writing has often given people the impression that he was above politics. But the songs show that he was quite astute.”
September 1928: English novelist Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881 – 1975), creator of the characters Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves, at the door of his home at Hunstanton Hall, Norfolk. (Photo by Sasha/Getty Images)
Health Care: The Right to Grant is the Right to Deny
Dalrymple on the rights of health care, the role of government, and what tax-funded health care has done in the U.K.:
. . . the right to grant is also the right to deny. And in times of economic stringency, when the first call on public expenditure is the payment of the salaries and pensions of health-care staff, we can rely with absolute confidence on the capacity of government sophists to find good reasons for doing bad things.
. . . After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.
(via Frank Wilson)
A Shining Moment of Chivalry
Sharon Pelletier writes on her experience among chivalrous men. I used to be chivalrous. Perhaps I still am, but I feel like it anymore. Maybe my light is dimming. Maybe when the dragons you fight are within you, that feeling of chivalry gets lost.