Enjoying the view from Limbo
The number one requirement for any serious intellectual growth is time alone — a lot of it. The thoughtful young person, full of the self-doubt of ignorance and always worried about disapproval and rejection, needs the freedom to stretch out and wander without fear of continually running into walls of social stigma and ridicule. School seeks to occupy this young person’s days with...
Cultural appropriation is a thoroughly Western notion. Therefore, every non-Western intellectual or activist who declares cultural appropriation in defense of his own society’s exclusive rights to its local customs, fashions, or language is actually committing cultural appropriation in so declaring. For, on the premises of the progressive argument, he is employing ideas to which he has no right, grounded in intellectual concepts and...
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,...
Disclaimer: I have not watched — nor will I ever in my life watch — one minute of the Marxist Tribunal Hour that the U.S. Congress has dubbed the “January 6th Commission.” I have only seen mainstream media headlines and still photographs accompanying same. This assiduously disengaged perspective, I believe, puts me in the ideal position to judge the whole affair from, shall...
Drug advocates who justify their pleasure-seeking or escapism with notions of a “higher consciousness” which they believe may be achieved through chemicals, seem to me much like a man who looks through a kaleidoscope and believes he has discovered the true world. If only insight and understanding were so simple. On the contrary, it would be more plausible to say that we must...
A student who has been reading a lot lately informs me of her latest book, a popular American novel called Wonder, “about a boy with a birth defect on his face. He goes to school, where some children are mean to him.” This story, she explains, reminds her of a cruel trick she played on another girl as a child, and of the...
Political life is over. There are only money and guns now, each of these, in any socially effective quantities, increasingly concentrated in the hands of an increasingly affiliated few. Everywhere, men are cowering, conceding, complying — and not only with their bodies. Modern men, in fact, have developed an impressive ability to feign courage, resistance, and erectness with their bodies, as a veil...
A headline I just read, from the Washington Post: ‘Patience has worn thin’: Frustration mounts over vaccine holdouts My patience has worn thin with propagandized “frustration” against any human being who believes he still has the right to make his own decisions, and judge his own needs. My patience has worn thin with people who assume you will believe exactly what they believe...
You will always have a bed and food, and even last dibs on some medical care, as long as you remain useful. (And who doesn’t want to remain useful?) You never have to solve a significant problem or make a difficult decision — as long as you are reasonable enough to accept your status passively and learn to appreciate the advantages of going...
Here is a fun story I have been following over the past few weeks, as it may become somewhat relevant to me: The spokesperson for Electricite de France (EDF) said on Thursday that while it was “not an emergency situation” at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant, located in China’s southern Guangdong province, it was a “serious situation that is evolving.” If the reactor...
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