Enjoying the view from Limbo
Benjamin Netanyahu has acted as a blowhard, a media hound, and a flatterer of thugs, tyrants, and autocrats for years. He fawned humiliatingly over Donald Trump to get what he wanted from the manipulable orange fool. He has been a waterboy for Vladimir Putin for years, right up to Israel’s refusal — almost unique among allegedly free countries — to take a hard...
Two climbers in different fields can understand and respect one another, and perhaps even be friends — with a wink. Two climbers in the same field can understand and respect one another, and may even appear to like one another, albeit with a slight sneer. But to the climber, nothing is more offensive, more viscerally disruptive, than the presence of a non-climber within...
In early 2020, moved by nothing but the basest of all human motivations, petty fear of personal harm, the populations of the entire civilized world succumbed to the basest of all human inclinations, the urge to protect one’s physical existence at all costs by harming or destroying others. Lacking the self-reliance and strength of their prehistoric ancestors, however, they allowed this latter urge...
From Day One of his mock-political career, Donald Trump has been a classic and self-evident example of the unprincipled sycophant who pretends to be strong by parroting in an authoritative voice whatever he perceives to be the feelings or preferences of the people whose love and admiration he so weakly and desperately craves. In other words, the danger of Trump, like all of...
Nothing epitomizes the moral and political discourse of this moment more definitively than the rhetorical reduction of all dissenting opinions or alternative voices to just so many expressions of irrational hatred. This is what our age of rambling academic Marxism and raging democratic tribalism have wrought. Having forsaken the rational assumptions that (a) there is an ahistorical truth and (b) all meaningful thought...
When the political discourse of your age has whittled itself down to such ranting characters as Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg, you may be certain that politics has ended, and something else has taken its place — something ugly, soulless, and brutal. Donald Trump is a laughably stupid vulgarian “businessman” who has successfully raped the fragile minds of tens of millions of true...
A dragon sitting on his gold.— Nothing that makes life worth living requires that one’s life be particularly long. On the contrary, to state what is self-evident, the obsession with longevity represents little more than a search for more time to postpone what one ought to do — ideally, to postpone it long enough that one forgets what the prolonged time was for,...
They won’t like you if you don’t do things their way. And you won’t like yourself if you do. Whose judgment will matter more to you in the long run? Hatred is a most intense pleasure, tempting us with the addictive thrill typical of any titillation that bears the tincture of the taboo. For hatred is the revenge fantasy of the man who...
Follow: