The legendary Billy Wilder is my all-time favorite director. Many friends and those who read my reviews wrongly assume that Alfred Hitchcock is, and that’s understandable. No other director, before or since Hitch, has had as intuitive a grasp of film as a visual medium, or of how to use not only the camera but also the editing to tell a story.
January/February 2007 -- Will Robert Gates change anti-terrorism tactics? The Sentinel is informed by associates of incoming Defense Secretary Robert Gates that in the ongoing war against Islamist terrorism, he will depart from past policy of drawing clear moral lines of “good” versus “evil,” and instead approach the war with crafty pragmatism—perhaps even blurring clear lines between ally and enemy.
January/February 2007 -- Rigidity is the besetting sin of old age, as zealotry is of youth and cynicism of maturity. That is why, having embarked on my sixtieth year to heaven, I accepted Robert Bidinotto’s offer to write a regular commentary column for The New Individualist. It gives me a motive to survey the passing scene, not just to proclaim what is good and true and beautiful (everyone in the Information Age does that), but to reflect critically on the lifelong beliefs and attitudes by which I have typically formed such judgments.
January/February 2007 -- In her famous speech at the 1984 Republican convention, the late UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick famously attacked those whose reflexive reaction to anything bad happening anywhere on earth was to “blame America first.”
December 2007 -- As the story is told, a scientist was discussing with the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand how her vision of a laissez-faire society would affect scientific projects. She explained that all such projects (apart those undertaken for the limited functions of government) would have to be privately funded, either through corporate research-and-development departments or through foundations.
December 2007 -- Russia is about to have a problem with the legal transfer of executive power.
Jed Babbin, a political commentator who served as a deputy undersecretary of defense for the first President Bush, warns that Americans are too optimistic about the prospects of making peace with our enemies, either because we ignore the things they write and say, or because we interpret their words through the lens of our experience with reasonable, decent people. This is a mistake because, as Newt Gingrich warns in the Foreword, “if we fail to understand that our enemy is evil, we have failed to understand what we are fighting.”
Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This dictum threatens to be prophetic in the West’s war against Islamic jihad. Our failure to understand the true origins and nature of jihad is as dangerous as our blindness to our own peculiar cultural weaknesses. As Lee Harris argues in his new book, both failures of knowledge are contributing to the “crash of Western civilization.”
ROM THE ARCHIVES: May 2008 -- Late last February, Michelle Obama spoke to a group of voters in Zanesville, Ohio, which is a relatively poor city whose median household income is less than $40,000 a year and 20 percent of whose adults lack even a high school education. In her conversation with the audience, Obama (Princeton ’85; Harvard Law ’88) warned them, somewhat superfluously it would seem, about the sin of avarice and the camel’s difficulty in passing through the needle’s eye.
May 2008 -- Whenever the media are not bashing business for being insufficiently green, or for exploiting various groups, they are advocating that businesses be more “socially involved.” This is certainly true with the cries to help education. With increasing frequency, the notion is promoted in op-ed pages and commentaries that businesses should be doing more to help our schools or “partner with” the education system.
May 2008 -- Whenever the media are not bashing business for being insufficiently green, or for exploiting various groups, they are advocating that businesses be more “socially involved.” This is certainly true with the cries to help education. With increasing frequency, the notion is promoted in op-ed pages and commentaries that businesses should be doing more to help our schools or “partner with” the education system.
This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " Nietzsche and Objectivism ."
Diana Hsieh criticizes Nietzsche’s genealogical method because it does not start with the right questions, because it is not “likely to be fruitful,” and because it produces “just-so” stories. It could be further argued that it does not address the rightness or wrongness of certain moral actions. I think that these objections are, in some sense, misplaced.
On Demand Webinars: An Objectivist View of Honesty
This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " Nietzsche and Objectivism ."
This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " Nietzsche and Objectivism ." Essays and Comments on Nietzsche's View of Metaphysics and Epistemology:
December 31 seems an appropriate day to officially call a close to the Fall 1999 CyberSeminar in Objectivist Studies. In the next few days I will be posting the last installment of the Fall archive. I hope you all will check it out to remind yourselves of the interesting essays and discussions we have enjoyed over the last three-and-a-half months.
This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " Nietzsche and Objectivism ."
This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 1999 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " The Continental Origins of Postmodernism . "
This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 1999 online "CyberSeminar" entitled " The Continental Origins of Postmodernism ."
