Enjoying the view from Limbo
A couple of days ago, I spent an idle hour rifling through Nietzsche’s Gay Science, one of my personal favorites among his books. Reading various familiar but half-forgotten aphorisms almost at random, I came across the following excellent passage discussing a very “German” topic on which Nietzsche is always profound, scholars. Specifically, Nietzsche is addressing the problem of the scholar through the lens...
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s latest vulgarization of the U.S. presidency — his remark about “s—hole countries” — the cultists are out in full force arguing that (a) Trump was only speaking the truth (as if the truth could only be stated with ugly schoolyard imagery), and (b) his complete and repeatedly-demonstrated lack of propriety, respect, or civility is all part of...
One day, Trump says DACA is a “bill of love,” he’ll sign anything Schumer and Feinstein put on his desk, and there will not be a real wall. His idolaters scream “treason.” On Thursday, Trump promises to “build a Great Wall” and complains about immigrants from the “s—hole countries” of Africa and the Caribbean. The cult is in heaven again. In other words,...
Wonders never cease. In this era in which pop culture is little more than a propaganda arm of the progressive neo-Marxist identity politics elite, and pop icons little more than half-conscious prostitutes for global communism — i.e., the basest “capitalist pigs” of all time — the “entertainment industry” is the last place one should ever expect to hear truth spoken to power. Well,...
On January 10th, global warming delivered an ominous message to the south coast of Korea: a rare snowstorm. This fall and winter have been colder than normal — evidence, as we all know, that the planet is getting warmer; and the sudden snowfall in a region that sees such events only once every few years only highlights just how much warmer it is....
Sunday night, during the Golden Globules of Self-Righteousness Awards ceremony, Oprah Winfrey received this year’s Clooney Prize, for rousing the emotions, and even presidential fantasies, of hundreds of her fellow Hollywood enablers, thousands of her fellow public purveyors of pop-pornography, and millions of people around the world who always conveniently assume their overflowing toilet must have been clogged by someone else. Winfrey’s speech...
Trump is committed to an immigration “bill of love” for the Dreamers, which is supposedly also going to include funding for his infamous wall. And what does this “deal” teach us? That Trump is not using DACA to get the wall. He is using the wall to get DACA. He has been all along. His tough guy anti-immigrant ruse during the primaries was...
Throughout the latter portion of the Republican primaries, during the presidential campaign, and even more intensely since the election, Trump supporters have relied on the smear “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a catch-all reply to any criticism or question regarding Trump’s words, actions, or mental acuity. I myself have been accused of being a TDS sufferer often, by all the best cultists. But even...
The following, originally published at American Thinker in 2012, was my attempt to offer a synoptic account of the intellectual grounding of modern constitutional republicanism — i.e., political freedom — and of how that grounding is undermined by progressivism. This essay is assigned annually in a required discussion course taught at University of Missouri, where I suppose it has made hundreds of young...
Indignation, as I have recently noted in another context, is the soul’s rebellion against uncomfortable questions about itself. But indignation retains a semblance of rationality (or at least rationalization) at its core. One step beyond indignation lies the even more revealing spectacle of a man responding to criticisms that touch sensitive nerves by melting down into hysterics. Here, then, is a Trump tweet...
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