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The Long View

The Long View 2008-06-08: None of the Above

Henry Wallace might have been President at the end of World War II, except that the party had ousted him in 1944 in favor of Truman. Wallace as President would have been quite the coup for the Soviets at the time, as some of of the men he was mooting

The Long View 2008-06-04: Toward the Courts of the Crimson Kings

At a request from a reader, I re-published ahead of schedule this review of S. M. Stirling’s In the Courts of the Crimson Kings a little less than a year ago, but I like it enough to re-publish it now when it comes around again. Here are a couple

The Long View 2008-05-31: Spelling Reform in the WSJ; The Socratic Struggle Session

John J. Reilly’s 2008 account of diversity training as a struggle session is a classic. He quickly intuited that the objective was mostly to provide legal and rhetorical cover in exchange for some time and money, a strange tax on business. A final point: Traditional autocracies were concerned with

The Long View 2008-05-26: The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Robert Kagan was a frequently reviewed author for John J. Reilly. The Return of History and the End of Dreams [Amazon link] was useful to John as he tried to generate a synthesis that would move us forward, instead of just arguing about which of our currently inadequate tribal positions

The Long View 2008-05-19: Whom to Throw from the Sled; The Teflon Imperium; The Pope's Astronomer; The Uses of President Bush

Much like John J. Reilly’s blog post today, I took a break here at With Both Hands for the last week. However, we are now back at it. Whom to Throw from the Sled; The Teflon Imperium; The Pope's Astronomer; The Uses of President Bush Let me

The Long View: The Post-American World

This particular book review by John J. Reilly probably makes the most sense in combination with his 2003 review of Fakaria’s The Future of Freedom. I don’t think I can improve on this assessment I made in my preamble to the 2003 review posted here at With Both

The Long View 2008-04-27 to 2008-05-04: Obama is Right; The Pope and the Parliament of Man; The Hanging of Tariq Aziz; Benedict XVI on Liturgical Music and Immigration; Steyn on Hate-Crime laws

In this weeklong collation of shorter blog posts, John manages to slip in the kind of analysis he is best remembered for: finding the thread of historical processes in quotidian events. Here is a comment by John on liturgical music that manages to bring in Jungian psychology and the value