What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
It’s gratifying to hear something you’ve been saying for years get said on the floor of the House of Representatives. During comments on a bill to remove certain statues from Congress yesterday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said a number of things I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, and have been saying for an even…
G.K. Chesteron opens up The Superstition of Divorce with a passage I think I’ve already quoted somewhere on this blog: It is still in some strange way considered unpractical to open up inquiries about anything by asking what it is. I happen to have, however, a fairly complete contempt for that sort of practicality; for…
Good news, everybody! Turns out it’s not racist to require voters to provide identification after all. Not only that, but it turns out Critical Race Theory is no big deal: it’s just about teaching kids about the history of slavery and race relations in the United States. These revelations are brought to us courtesy of…
An article published on Berlingske.dk this afternoon doesn’t have much “news value” at first glance, but I’m glad to see it because I so desperately want Denmark not to follow America down the road to hell. The headline is “American elite university drops Latin and Greek to fight racism,” and that’s a straightforward summary of…
There’s a passage from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905) that I’ve cited a few times on this blog. It’s a typically playful Chestertonian spin on a bit of the Gospel, specifically John 20:29, but since most of us aren’t as fluent in scripture as Chesterton’s readers were back in the day, let’s refresh: Jesus saith unto…
I was a teenager for seven years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of my friends at the time were also teenagers. My experience of teenagers was mostly limited to my peers in our suburban Massachusetts hometown and the surrounding communities. My horizons broadened when I went away to college in Pittsburgh and…
A drug-addled thug on the brink of (or in the throes of) an overdose died while in the custody of law enforcement. Was it murder? An accident? The family blamed the police; the officers involved claimed they’d done everything by the book. The victim’s name was Alex Billmeyer. He was a white man from Dubuque,…
There’s a giddy anticipation in the air: the trial of Derek Chauvin, accused of manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, is now up to the jury. Which is really exciting, because it could result in riots, and riots are big news, and big news is big business! (It’s a big business that crushes small…
Berlingske.dk put out another piece of American leftwing agitprop today. It gets off to a rough start with a confusing headline: Blacks raging over charge against officer: “He was brutally murdered.” The brutally murdered “he” was of course Daunte Wright; the charged officer was Kim Potter, the officer who shot and killed him. The headline…
Two big stories out of America got a lot of coverage in Danish media today: the “police-involved shooting” of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb (and its inevitable aftermath), and news that 46% of Americans would support Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a presidential candidate. Both are American tragedies. Wright’s death is in itself a…
There’s an awful lot of “woke” in the news these days. So much that it’s hard to keep up. For example, I learned while browsing the Danish news Saturday morning that established European translators had been blocked from translating Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she read at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Shakespeare translator…
A story that got a lot of play in non-establishment American media this week was big enough that the establishment media had to willfully ignore it. It therefore hasn’t yet appeared in the Danish media. Danish media are still dedicating most of their American coverage to Trump and Trump-related issues these days anyway, so there’s…
The “borgerlig” Berlingske Tidende has at last come around to the observation that the New York Times is printing opinion as fact. That’s a positive development, as far as I’m concerned, even if it’s just in an opinion piece. At least, it would be a positive development if I didn’t know its only value would…
An interesting article from DR today: Teens Sue Sweden for Betraying Climate: How It’s Gone in Three Similar Cases, Simon Andersen Nielsen, DR.dk, February 13 It begins with events in Sweden and looks at three similar cases, in Ireland, Holland, and Norway, and explores what it all could mean for Denmark. A group of young…
I’m hearing a lot of crazy talk these days. I’m hearing that the 2020 presidential election was rigged by a massive, heavily-monied, and carefully coordinated national organization of businesses, unions, activists, special interest groups, social media oligarchs, and political operators determined to prevent Trump from being re-elected. I thought we’d be over all that by…
The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists, Tanya Lewis, Scientific American, 11 January Bandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist on the faculty of Yale University. She is the president of the World Mental Health Coalition. (That’s important.) She has also written and edited books about the mental health of a man she’s…
“What you do to your adversaries today, they will do to you tomorrow.” It’s such a simple maxim, and so obviously true, and so easily observable in every sphere of human affairs, and at every level of the animal kingdom, that one would expect it to have been said in a thousand different languages across…
A little over a century ago, a young man died of tuberculosis while in prison, just three months before his twenty-fifth birthday. According to various sources, he had etched a bit of free verse into a wall of his cell: Our shadows will walk through Vienna wander the court, frighten the lords. Gavrilo Princip had…
