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Patrick Link
https://www.goodreads.com/plink
Spain’s failure to colonize the interior of North America, the erosion of Spanish imperial authority in the Southwest, and the precipitous decay of Mexican power in the north. Ultimately, the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why
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“It is for this reason that this book dramatizes how Cold War liberals reimagined the canon of political thought. Perhaps the greatest recent nominalist historian of liberalism, Duncan Bell, has reminded us that one part of the reshuffling of the liberal tradition is recanonization. Nothing about this, of course, is specific to liberalism; if all history is contemporary history, then all canonizing is too, as the past is reconfigured in light of the present. There may, indeed, be no better way into understanding political thought than by studying what ancestry it claims—and whom it censures or expels. “It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule,” Shklar observed in 1959. “The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation.”13 Yet how mid-twentieth century liberalism invented its own past has barely been broached. In Bell’s classic article, he makes the destabilizing but narrow claim that it was only in the twentieth century that Locke was anointed the founder of liberalism. There is much more to say about the canonization process. It overturned a prevalent nineteenth-century version of liberal theory with perfectionist and progressivist features that Cold War liberalism transformed. Creative agency had been liberalism’s goal, and history its forum of opportunity. The mid-twentieth century changed all that.”
― Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
― Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
“It was in part because he understood Zionism’s roots in nineteenth-century thought—crossing into its Romanticism, Hegelianism, and historicism—that Berlin could sometimes be half-sympathetic to “the nations,” as he once put it, “which feel that they have not yet played their part (but will) in the great drama of history.”93 Yet there was an undeniable disparity between his Zionism and his far less indulgent attitude toward other new states after World War II. He felt free to criticize “the resentful attitude of those new nations which have exchanged the yoke of foreign rule for the despotism of an individual or class or group in their own society, and admire the triumphant display of naked power, at its most arbitrary and oppressive, even where social and economic needs do just call for authoritarian control.”94 The tension with Berlin’s Zionism, which didn’t invite such criticism, was glaring. Postcolonial emancipation was not just necessary but moving—for one people.”
― Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
― Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times
“The head of the Los Angeles Fraternal Order of Police told CBS Evening News, “I believe that the rap music promotes, by its very language and by its very actions—promotes violence against authority and, consequently, violence against law enforcement.” The music was “infecting young people with hate and bigotry,” editor Philip Gailey wrote in The St. Petersburg Times. “No amount of government aid to the cities will be able to repair the damage the hate rappers are doing to race relations. They are as sick as any Klansman.”
― When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
― When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
“The Times was founded by the Korean cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon in 1982 as a conservative counterweight to The Washington Post, but also as a beachhead for his Unification Church in D.C. Another investor was the government of apartheid South Africa, which funneled several million dollars to Moon’s outfits for an interest in the paper.”
― When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
― When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
“The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.”
― When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
― When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
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Patrick’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Patrick’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
653 books
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1,205 books
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7,832 books
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124 friends
929 books
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2,595 books
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219 books
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