Based closely on the outstanding 1999 novel that won J.M. Coetzee the Nobel Prize in Literature, the new art house film Disgrace follows August’s District 9 in portraying the ever-growing Afrikaner diaspora’s dire view of black-ruled South Africa. While most reviewers of District 9 were too obtuse to figure out what Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi movie was about, the portrayal of the … [Read More]

What does imperialism mean? It means the assertion of absolute force over others. ~Robert Lowe, 1878 The G-20 ministers declared their meeting in Pittsburgh a success, but as Rob Kall reports in OpEdNews.com, the meeting’s main success was to turn Pittsburgh into “a ghost town, emptied of workers and the usual pedestrians, but filled to overflowing with over 12,000 SWAT cops … [Read More]

A wealth of ideas rushed through my mind the other day as I was watching the production of Nineteen Eighty Four starring Richard Burton and John Hurt, which was released, by no coincidence, in 1984. Like Orwell’s novel, the film emphasizes the use of factual distortions to strengthen political domination, in this case that of Big Brother. In order to keep … [Read More]

In a recent column for the Charleston City Paper, I explained how my moniker, the “Southern Avenger,” came from my advocating for states’ rights and even secession in my early 20s, a brand of politics I still subscribe to today. Long comfortable with such concepts, it’s easy to forget that plenty of folks are not, and was reminded promptly by a … [Read More]

That Iran is building a secret underground facility near the holy city of Qom, under custody of the Revolutionary Guard—too small to be a production center for nuclear fuel, but just right for the enrichment of uranium to weapons grade—is grounds for concern, but not panic. Heretofore, all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, even the enrichment plant at Natanz—kept secret before exiles … [Read More]

[Editor’s note: see also rounds 1-4 of Takimag’s increasingly acrimonious debate on originalism, interpretation, and whether the Constitution actually means anything at all. Austin Bramwell, “Original Sins”; Kevin R. C. Gutzman, “The Genuine Article”; Bramwell, “Best of Intentions”; Gutzman, “They Really Meant It”] There isn’t much to say in response to Kevin Gutzman’s latest.  He’s had two chances already but still … [Read More]

One of the wheezes I get from my leftist friends in Berkeley is how highly evolved their sense of morality is, as if 21st-century Berkeley were some New Jerusalem of higher moral thought. These are folks who calibrate their exquisitely sensitive moral barometers with a protractor made from renewable soy plastic, a straight edged icon with Germaine Greer‘s photograph in it, … [Read More]

Be it the “public option” (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op,” or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers.  Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault … [Read More]

As another G20 meeting rolls around, this time on home soil, the time comes once again for the economically curious but politically unconnected to wonder what is really happening behind closed doors. But while admiring the pageantry, chuckling at the awkward group photos, and parsing the joint communiqués like newly found Dead Sea scrolls, the overwhelming majority of observers will miss … [Read More]

When FOX News host Glenn Beck said during an interview with Katie Couric this week, “John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama,” his comments made headlines. Beck explained that “McCain is this weird progressive like Theodore Roosevelt was.” Beck laid out this view in better detail on his television program earlier this month: I am becoming … [Read More]