Wednesday, November 30, 2005

O tells me that JimmyG is not given homework at CBA.

ME: How can that be?

O: CBA is a “fake” school.

ME: What about Maginn?

O: Maginn is a “joke” school.

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In blogs:

. . . A civilization may be wrecked without any spectacular crimes or criminals but by constant petty breaches of faith and minor complicities on the part of men generally considered very nice people. . . . If all men had only what we consider a reasonable degree of cupidity, politics would still be driven into dialectical jams—into predicaments and dilemmas which the intellect has never mastered. . . .
—Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History, quoted by Caryl Johnston, Post-Thanksgiving, 2005

These are strange times. It is passing strange to hear a self-styled exponent of conservatism [Laura Ingraham] argue that one’s own whimsical, often frivolous amusements should be exported to others with crusading zeal; for the conservative believes in moral freedom, which is not a right of a gift but an existential fact, and also in the constant inclination of every human being to debase that freedom. It is positively bizarre to hear an orthodox Jewish male several years my senior [Dennis Prager], who is paid thousands of dollars whenever he delivers an hour’s lecture on “conservatism”, declare that he cannot so much as understand why anyone would deplore the sell-out of our neighborhoods and our economy to the automobile.
—John R. Harris, On the Discomforts of Being Right, or What is Conservatism Conserving These Days?