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The Long View

The Long View 2008-01-03: Warren on Dynasties; Sarkozy on God; Steyn on Trial; Nations on the Downslope

There is a fascinating bit here at the end of John J. Reilly’s blog post about how current “independence” movements are always really “dependence“ movements, as the states in question never have any ability to function or defend themselves without a more powerful sponsor. This can happen recursively, for

The Long View 2008-01-01: Happy New Year: Thanks & Advisories; The Mark of Soros; Uninformed Predictions

And so we come to a new year of John J. Reilly’s blog. As was usual for John on New Year’s Day, he issued some predictions. His 2008 predictions were unusually bad: The subprime-loan question is starting to look like the Enron scandal: an important story that has

The Long View: Bhutto Assassination; the Speech & Silence of Hillary Clinton; Catholic England; Spelling Upgrade

With hindsight, it would appear that Mark Steyn’s comment, quoted here by John J. Reilly, that the prime ministership of Benazir Bhutto was an anachronism was entirely accurate. The secular, liberal movements that her family represented were the dream of the mid-twentieth century West, but the rest of the

The Long View 2007-12-24: Merry Christmas!

John J. Reilly lays out an argument here that religious tolerance in the United States doesn’t really have a neutral point of view as to what constitutes “religion”: First, we should recall that religious toleration, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, is the legal embodiment of a Protestant notion

The Long View 2007-12-21: Alternative Futures; Bombadil; New Greenhouse Model; Huckabee & Political Physics

There is a great deal of 2007 political controversy in this post by John J. Reilly that doesn’t matter much anymore, but his passing aside on Tom Bombadil reminded me of a series of tweets by Misha Burnett earlier this month. While it isn’t true that Tolkien invented

The Long View: Heroic Conservatism

This long book review from 2007 is almost enough to make me remember why I liked President George W. Bush at the time. Michael Gerson, chief speechwriter for the 43rd President, had some genuinely good ideas. Unfortunately, giving the nod to subsidiarity in local relief initiatives cannot make up for

The Long View 2007-12-19: Tradition; Kenosis; CBC on Neuhaus; Laws of Nature; Hobbits

John makes an off-hand comment here that helps to illustrate why it was so hard to figure what my taste in fiction was: In principle, The Lord of the Rings is the sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien's publishers thought they had commissioned another nice little children's