Enjoying the view from Limbo
Boycotting is a perfectly legitimate form of behavior within a democratic political structure. A group of individuals strongly object to the way a business or other entity is using its profits or its public profile to promote ends of which that group disapproves. Knowing that this entity is able to exert public sway, or to influence public opinion, precisely because, or to the...
A dumb police officer (I do not defer to the now-standardized thug lingo, “cop”) carelessly uses excessive force to restrain a crime suspect, accidentally killing the man. There is no way to interpret this event as anything other than a run-of-the-mill sad story — a very local, ultimately insignificant story — of your average (or slightly below average) modern police officer, too taken...
What the slaveowner knows.– A society of strong and virtuous men would never make a great cause out of liberalizing so-called “recreational drug” laws (nor would they ever have to make a cause out of it), since they would be too busy enjoying all the more essential forms of liberty to care much about such things. By contrast, if a society does make...
After a second mass shooting within a week, the propaganda servers inform me that, “Celebrities react to Boulder shooting, call for gun legislation.” And this is news because “celebrities” — professional fakers, pretenders, generally empty-headed people of little or no talent who (poorly) entertain others for a living because they never learned how to do anything adult or serious with their lives —...
I have too many things to do in whatever life I have left, and not enough life left to do all of them, to have wasted one second of my time watching this year’s Trump sore losers’ denial party that self-mockingly called itself “CPAC” (Conservative P….something, whatever). I am therefore unbesmirched enough to comment on this lost boys festival and its meaning. Donald...
In my recent “Reflections On Independence,” I noted that modern man, as a mechanism of soft despotism, has gradually been convinced, or rather conveniently allowed himself to be convinced, to judge important decisions, particularly those regarding the wellbeing of society as a whole — the sort of decisions that once formed the very core of the republican idea of self-government — as being...
I just read a new headline from The Washington Post that absolutely crystallizes the essence of our hysteria pandemic: “The coronavirus is airborne. Here’s how to know if you’re breathing other people’s breath.” The details of the article, urging the use of carbon dioxide monitors as a proxy gauge for determining whether the air in any given space has traces of human breath...
The Biden administration, following through on a campaign promise, has issued a mask mandate for all public transportation users in America, suddenly making it a federal crime to refuse to wear a mask in a train station, airport, bus or ferry terminal, and the like. Rather than getting bogged down in questions about whether universal mask-wearing is effective against this pandemic, or even...
Has ever a man built a more solid reputation as a principled non-conformist within an environment dominated by opportunistic conformism, only to demolish that reputation in order to sell himself as spare parts, in a shorter span of time? Has ever a man been more rhetorically effective at publicly attacking false declarations of “conservatism,” only to turn around and become the biggest abuser...
A society in which the great mass of the population has no shared idea of what human life is supposed to be is not a community. If that social division includes fundamental disagreements about the proper relationship between citizen and government, then the society is in faction. If, in turn, this political divide consists of one or more large parties seeking to use...
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