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The Long View

The Long View 2006-11-16: Rising through Humiliation; House; Quiverfull; Einstein

Last month, I guessed that the House would swing Democratic, but the Senate would not quite. That looks pretty close, but I didn’t make any kind of fancy prediction with numerical probabilities. I just looked at 2006, which seemed similar, and asked myself what seemed different this time. There

The Long View 2006-11-13: TXT, Steyn, Spengler, Tridentine

It has genuinely been long enough that a terrorist attack that I have no personal stake in, like the Madrid bomadmbings of 2004, with 193 people killed and 2,000 injured, seems like it happened in another lifetime. At the time, I remember reading hot takes [which wasn’t a

The Long View 2006-11-10: The Morning of the Day Before

I hadn’t known [or had forgotten] that John J. Reilly was among the Catholics who find the logic of Humane Vitae less than airtight. He was also among the much smaller group who thinks the doctrine is correct, it just needs to be explained a bit better. The Morning

The Long View: Third Law Conservatism

John Reilly proposes here an interesting psychology of schism: The usual motive for schism, however, is conservative: new groups form because they believe that the old one has departed from tradition in some way. For groups like the Old Catholics [split from the Catholic Church after Vatican I proposed papal

The Long View 2006-11-06: The Zombies in Retreat

John Reilly used to poke fun at the sclerotic state of Republican economic policy with the phrase “capital gains zombies”. Gains…gainssss! I see that twelve years later, this idea is still current: The alliance of social conservatives with the business lobby in the United States is contingent. If the

The Long View: Up in the Air

Up in the Air, Walter Kirn’s 2001 satirical novel on frequent flyer culture, later made into a movie starring George Clooney and written by Jason Reitman, has always been of topical interest to me. My father-in-law has lived that life for almost all of the time I have known

The Long View 2006-11-06: Wretched Excess

Twelve years ago, dissatisfaction with W brought both houses of Congress to the Democrats. This time, it looks like the House may swing, but the Senate may not. We shall see. Wretched Excess So how many stunning rebukes to the Bush Administration have we seen in the past few days?