Latest musings, analyses, and general madness
Back in January, when the Iranian people took to the streets in yet another desperate cry for international support against their theocratic oppressors, and faced death by the thousands for their courage, Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful lying coward, took to social media, where he does all his brave fighting, to send a message to those risking everything on the streets of...
In 1987, in a speech at the annual convention of Kiwanis International, in the context of arguing for his proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Ronald Reagan reiterated his famous remark from twenty years earlier, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation.” How many people in attendance when Reagan delivered...
Mark Levin, former rational human and Reaganite, has used his X account to promote a post claiming that “Nick Shirley says he has proof” that Marjorie Taylor Greene was “bribed” to turn against Donald Trump. I don’t know who Nick Shirley is, and I don’t know why Marjorie Taylor Greene really turned against Trump. But I do know that Mark Levin, who used...
The fatal flaw of all democratic arrangements: The only person who ought to be granted power over other people is one who is temperamentally averse to possessing practical power over others, who sees none of the personal material advantages of power as desirable in the least, and who has pressing concerns and abiding enthusiasms which would make the commitments and duties of political...
It is common sophistry among the performance artists formerly known as the alt-right, along with their millions of useful idiots, to ask with a rhetorical flourish and a pretense of perplexity why — “I mean really, exactly why?” — The United States should be supporting leftist-progressive Europe and the NATO alliance against Putin’s “Christian, anti-woke Russia.” The answer, simplified for the useful idiots...
Every age’s defining desires and corresponding fears are revealed by the gods it worships. For example, an age that worships money and technology — or, if you will, Business and Applied Science, this age’s iterations of Zeus and Hera — reveals its defining desires as material comfort and practical ease (i.e., the absence of desire), its defining sources of fear as personal insecurity...
Thomas Massie is a libertarian and a former leading member of the Republican Party’s “House Freedom Caucus” — a name which can only be used in scare quotes, since almost all of its members in Congress, past and present, have proven themselves to be utter frauds who would, and indeed did, sell their country’s last shred of freedom in a heartbeat to protect...
Recently, a student who got started on the philosophic path a little later than is ideal, and who, in spite of her endless enthusiasm and inquisitiveness, is still occasionally beset — as indeed we all are at times — with belittling self-doubts in the face of the vastness of all there is to know, and the undeniably daunting wisdom of the men who...
Social existence is being surrounded by a hundred relentless and incorrigible replicas of everything you have ever disliked and tried to correct in yourself. Social existence is tolerating what you told yourself you would never tolerate, accepting standards you swore you would never lower yourself to accepting, and pretending you are satisfied with conditions you despise. Social existence is living and working alongside...
“Artificial Intelligence” is the purest of lies, with each of the words of which the phrase is comprised denoting a falsehood as complete as is the phrase taken as a whole. For what it euphemizes as artifice is merely theft; and what it aggrandizes as a form of intelligence is simply an extremely efficient consensus-generating algorithm, one made possible only, and entirely, by...