- Imperial Japan and Soviet communism Peter Gordon, ARB
- Why the West must stop bashing China Phil Mullan, spiked!
- No blueprint for utopia Kieran Setiya, LARB
- A Kirkian look at Houellebecq James Person, Modern Age
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Notes On Liberty 
Yielding to the temptation: Might not both governments and individuals gain from more introspection and less focus upon external solutions?
Maybe, Jack, but I’d argue that an introspective government is a useless government. You might as well have anarchy if your government is around only to be introspective…
I stopped reading Person’s piece when I arrived at this part of a sentence: “…his (French novelist Houellebecq’s) real target is the hypocrisy of the white liberal bourgeois male….” I don’t know if this interpretation is correct in a general way. It’s probably defensible. I am pretty sure Houellebecq did not specify anything about race. I hate it when a writer attributes to another his own preoccupations of the moment, woke or not. It involves a kind of bad faith that is all the more reprehensible because it seldom gets caught.
Yes, and it happens all the time. I’m glad you caught this one. Kirkians have been trying for decades, mostly unsuccessfully, to plant a conservativism in the United States that is alien to its cultural mores. Person’s sloppy interpretation is a good example of this.
And yet, at least they’re talking about Houellebecq. How many libertarians even know who he is? How many of us have read one of his novels?
And further yet: at least we ignore him. The Left takes “interpretation” to a whole new level with Houellebecq…
I think some have heard his name. Current French fiction is kind of boring. Houellebecq is an exception. I think. I don’t know which of his books are translated.