Intensity as Sanctity

“Romantic ideals of love, notably the stress on incest, dramatize the belief that sexual extremism, the cultivation of the pathological, can restore personal existence to a full pitch of reality and somehow negate the gray world of middle-class fact . . . The artist becomes hero . . .” (George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, p. …

Nancy Wilson’s New Blog

I am very pleased to announce that my wife, Nancy Wilson, has started a blog called Femina, which can be found here. The look of the blog will change over time (probably in the very near future), but she is getting started now with a standard template. She has a lot of material that she …

Ecochondriacs

“By the end of this century, the demographically doomed Italians and Spaniards will be so few in number there won’t be enough Continental environmentalists left to man the local Greenpeace office. The Belgian climate-change lobbyist will be on the endangered species list with the Himalayan snow leopard. And, from an American point of view, the …

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The Uber-Goober

“In Nietzsche, the ethic of transgression has been stripped of scenes of explicit sexual torture and destruction and raised to an alluring intellectual Valhalla of lyric philosophy. We have no evidence that Nietzsche ever read the divine marquis. Nevertheless, the philosopher of the Overman offers a modified product with enhanced appeal for some: Sade without …

And We Are Not Even Counting Ahmed

“What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular boy’s name in the United Kingdom” (Mark Steyn, America Alone, p. 6).