What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
I quote it all the time, here and elsewhere, but here once more are the closing lines of G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics: The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a…
A couple of recent opinion columns by Berlingske Tidende’s opinion editor Pierre Collignon offer some hopeful signs that at least parts of Denmark’s thinking class may have begun to realize the depth of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. . . and may have begun speculating on ways to actually climb out of it. Collignon…
News of the collected works of Roald Dahl having been edited for sensitivity came to my attention at some point over the weekend. It was impossible to miss on the anglophonic internet. As culture war stories go, it’s a good one, but it seemed less significant to me than the one that was bobbing around…
In its Sunday opinion section, Berlingske ran a “debate interview” with Alex Vanopslagh, the chairman of Denmark’s libertarian Liberal Alliance party. The first three sentences set the table: On the bookshelf in Alex Vanopslagh’s office in Christiansborg stands a copy of a dangerous book. A book whose author can get both (communist green party) Enhedslisten’s…
Yesterday I wrote (here) about the importance of the survival of our species: We have one job as adults: produce the next generation. Given the amount of time it takes for a human child to achieve maturity (about 16-18 years for females and 60-70 years for males), “producing” the next generation goes well beyond the…
Don’t just stand there: gesture! One of the most iconic moments in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark comes during a chase sequence through the crowded and colorful streets and alleys of Cairo. Indiana Jones suddenly finds himself surrounde d by a crowd from which emerges a menacing master swordsman. The swordsman brandishes his sword and swishes…
AUDIO NOTE: No audio today, just ran out of time. Maybe I’ll add an audio version of this post later in the week, after I’ve upgraded the default WordPress audio player to something better—i.e., pretty much anything. Notice what didn’t happen in America this week? Two things. Democracy didn’t die and a second civil war…
The fault lines and tectonics responsible for the rattling of western civilization can be seen or described as a right-left conflict, a globalist-localist conflict, or a collectivist-individualist conflict. Each of those perspectives has its merits and its uses, and at one point or other I’ve used each of them, but none of them seems to…
Yesterday’s post about smiley icons got me scratching at my memories of the 70s—the first decade from which I have any. I remember a lot of smileys—all of them on t-shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers, and most of them accompanied by text saying “Have a nice day.” I was just an akward, acne-bespattered 14-year-old with…
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the election on Wednesday. It will be held on the first of November. The first party leader debate was televised the evening of Frederiksen’s announcement: there were fourteen party leaders on stage. Not all of them were ready for prime-time. I was unable to watch the full debate, which ran…
The other evening Danish televison aired a news program entitled “the time of the crises.” I don’t remember what channel it was on, who was hosting, who was participating, or even any specifics about what was discussed for the few minutes I gave it attention. It was a panel discussion about all the various crises…
In reading this DR article about Giorgia Meloni, the woman who may well be Italy’s next premiere, I was struck by how freely they referred to her and her party and their allies as neo-fasicsts (nyfascister). I don’t know what to think when I encounter such adjectives in the western press, because when the president…
The phrase “virtue signalling” entered the lexicon several decades ago as a critical description of moral valor being asserted without being demonstrated. The phrase is used often enough these days that everyone knows what it means. The earliest example I can recall of such posturing was probably the “nuclear free zones” declared by liberal municipalities…
I’ve been struggling to understand the verious stupidities and absurdities of the world for a while now, but two two stories about immigration—one American, one Danish—have finally opened my eyes: we’re living in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. For the kids in the back row: I’m not saying Kurt Vonnegut is god, or even a god,…
Not long ago I wrote that the Democratic Party was driven by the twin-engines of hatred and utopianism. The reaction to Queen Elizabeth’s death suggests, however, that at least one loud chunk of the Democratic base is a single-engine affair, and it’s not utopianism that’s driving them. When I say the activist American left, I…
