Enjoying the view from Limbo
The Commission on Presidential Debates has adopted new rules for the next presidential debate, choosing to mute each candidate’s microphone during his opponent’s initial answer to each new question. That strikes me as a decent start, but I think the commission still has a long way to go to ensure the best possible debate environment for the American voters. Not only should Trump...
According to a headline from The Hill, “Biden slams Trump for calling Fauci a ‘disaster.’” On its face, Biden’s “slam” seems fair. After all, who is the bigger disaster, the government apparatchik who has spent the past eight months on a personal glory tour, deliberately stoking mass panic and actively promoting tangible tyranny for the sake of aggrandizing his own little ego, or...
Ben Sasse, at a very young age, has already risen to the top of both the academic and political pyramids — proof positive that he is a slimy glad-handing dandy and self-promoting double-talker of the highest order. Today’s big headline in Republican implosion news is that Donald Trump has gone on a Twitter tirade against Sasse, after “leaked audio” (please!) from a telephone...
The Washington Post, in perhaps the funniest framing of an election in the history of journalism, presents an analysis of the Trump-Biden presidential race as a clash of two visions of masculinity. I know, I know, and I apologize if you happened to read that sentence with your mouth full. First, in full (and admittedly fair) mockery mode, the Post, a global communist...
It has been a few days since I posted anything here in Limbo, and I suspect a few of you have even noticed this absence, and perhaps begun to wonder, as we have all been trained to wonder over these past several months, “Could it be the coronavirus?” As a matter of fact, the answer is yes. To be precise, I have been...
Socrates cared little for woods and birds. Peaceful riversides and quiet paths meant nothing to him. As he frequently observed, his concern was learning, and his teachers were not the rocks and trees, but his fellow citizens, whom he found and pestered in the marketplace. Nietzsche, at the opposite end of the history of philosophy proper, wrote of his long walks alone and...
Below, I provide an advance sampling of the mainstream news headlines you will be seeing over the next couple of days. I have deliberately omitted the opinion essays, which of course express bias by definition, in favor of limiting my survey to the unbiased, objective news reportage from the major sources. I hope this helps you sort out your reading priorities during this...
This will come as no surprise to anyone who has visited Limbo before, but I believe Donald Trump is an ignoramus, a coward, an insecure willowy fraud willing to say or do anything to keep people from disliking him, and a knee-jerk progressive without so much as a New York values minute to waste on such peccadilloes as “right and wrong.” As I...
Utah senator Mike Lee, one of those Republicans who for a few minutes looked like a relatively serious man of principle in a political environment utterly dismissive of both seriousness and principle, has yet again displayed his essential triviality, as is all too typical among those “principled conservatives” who have allowed themselves to get sucked down the Trump drain over the past four...
No one intuits the basic moral tenor of an age more clearly than those with a vested professional interest in accommodating themselves to that tenor for personal gain, such as advertisers and other pitchmen. If you want to understand the moral condition and collective priorities of your social environment, spend a day analyzing the advertising techniques and campaigns most pervasive in the mass...
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