No definition for the word “democracy” has ever made sense to me but this one: a society of self-governing men and women banded together in self-governing communities–in other words, free citizens that possess the autonomy and power to govern themselves.I have friends that dwell in some of the earth’s most despotic domains. They are often […]
Last week’s posting (“Everything is Worse in China”) caught the attention of Rod Dreher, who reblogged it with comments over at the American Conservative. I sent him an e-mail in response introducing a few Chinese thinkers who might be relevant to the traditionalist cause, especially in its Benedict Option version. As he has published the […]
One of the benefits of living in China is a certain sense of perspective. China exists outside of the Anglophone culture wars. It would not be accurate to say the Chinese don’t have an opinion or even a stake in American cultural crusades. They do. But our fights are not their fights, and even when […]
Go, Soul, the body’s guest, Upon a thankless errand; Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant: Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie. —Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Lie,” (c. 1592) A question many of us should be asking: do I […]
There was once a time when the first thing I would do in the morning was rush to the computer so that I might check the comment threads of the five to ten blogs I followed on national security and strategic theory. It was the golden era of the old Strategy Sphere: a time when […]
“Photo of the Hawelka Cafe on a Quiet Thursday Morning,” Photograph taken by “KF” (Vienna, 2 Feb 2006). Image Source: Wikimeda There have been many responses to last week’s post, “Requiem For The Strategy Sphere.” Ryan Evans, Brett Friedman, Adam Elkus, Kelsey Atherton, Andrew Exum, and Mark Safranski all participated in long tweet streams discussing the piece. […]
I typed “online communities” into Google images and this was the best thing it gave me. Image Source. I began blogging in December, 2007. I chose to name this blog The Scholar’s Stage mostly because I thought the alliteration was neat. The title was not without irony. When I began blogging I completely lacked the […]
Many of the Stage’s readers will be familiar with the work of “Pseudoerasmus,” currently the internet’s best blogger working on both economic development and macro-history. His most recent post is titled “Where do Pro-Social Institutions Comes From?“ I strongly urge you read it. In essence, Pseudoerasmus’s post tries to answer two questions: Why do humans cooperate? […]
A “Family Temperance Pledge” from 1887. Group pledges such as these were central to the success of the temperance movement. Source: Library of Congress. “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera.” 2004. In the comment thread of the post “Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: Three Centuries of American Political Culture” a […]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.(1929 – 1968) stands in front of a bus at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott. Montgomery, Alabama December 26, 1956 Image Source Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who penned The Righteous Mind, wrote an important blog post a few days ago responding to a paper by sociologists Bradley Campbell […]
