Category: Liberty’s Labors Lost

Running Out of Empathy for Americans

The American voting public, roughly a hundred and forty million people, is divided neatly down the middle between a faction that wishes The United States of America to cease to exist and dissolve itself into the United Nations, after abjectly apologizing for its existence while shamefacedly redistributing all of its wealth to the rest of the world in an act of penance for...

Random Reflections: Property, Isolationism, Partisanship

Private property.– Beware the man who suspects or critiques private property. It is not your material possessions he has in mind, at least primarily. For what is personal property in the ordinary (though artificially limited) sense? It is nothing but the outward manifestation of your life — your time, your thought, and your effort. The tangible results of the time, thought, and effort...

Traitor or Useful Idiot?

Donald Trump has nominated Tulsi Gabbard to be his director of national intelligence. Gabbard is an overtly pro-Putin propagandist, an apologist for communist China, a willing and unmasked agent for foreign tyrants with blatantly anti-American agendas. Does Trump know this, and is he choosing her because she will compromise America’s national security for the sake of furthering totalitarian goals in Europe and East...

U.S. Election Aftermath, Part One

Yesterday, I wrote in my U.S. Election Day post that I was pleased to have the opportunity to set aside the thunderous climax of the flatulent election coverage (Republican tribe version), in favor of enjoying lunch and some reading time with a young friend here in Korea, a philosophic student of mine, who had offered to bring salad and doughnuts to my office....

Jordan Peterson and the Whiff of Mortality

Justin Trudeau has testified under oath that the Kremlin-sponsored media outlet RT is “currently” funding bloggers and other personalities “at the right,” among whom he specifically names Canada’s most famous pop intellectual du jour — or rather du hier — Jordan Peterson. Trudeau’s wording is sufficiently hazy to avoid directly claiming that Peterson himself is knowingly on the take from the Putin regime,...

The Modern Political Quandary, Summarized

An expert is a person who knows more than you do about one thing, and very likely less than you about almost everything else — including, potentially, about the presuppositions underlying his own area of expertise, which he sees not as presuppositions but as facts. That false perception of his presuppositions is part of what identifies him as an expert. Political life is...

Random Notes: U.S. Decline, Populism’s Bright Spot

The U.S. is apparently “unimpressed” with Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan for victory over Russia. This sage judgment coming from a country that has been involved in several major wars over the past sixty years, and has lost every single one of them due to inept planning, cowardly leadership, lack of moral purpose, and a world-historical genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...

Democratic Devolution

On social media.– I have never once wondered what Plato ate for lunch. Nor what Dante looked like on the beach, what Shakespeare gave his children for their birthdays, where Vivaldi spent his summer vacation, or which card game Swift played with Stella. Yet our world is now awash in the lunches, beach pictures, birthday parties, vacation diaries, and personal hobbies of a...

Populism In Microcosm

The U.S. Libertarian convention has chosen its presidential nominee, i.e., has chosen the man who will be the flagbearer for freedom defined as the liberty to get stoned or marry your dog — if that is your “rational preference.” There was one moment in Chase Oliver’s acceptance speech — captured and disseminated by Al Jazeera, for obvious reasons — when the new figurehead...