Enjoying the view from Limbo
The other day, in my essay “COVID Context Alert,” I concluded by yet again comparing this year’s fake cataclysm in the U.S. to the same country’s battle with the 1918 flu pandemic: The 1918 flu pandemic death total, by the way, if we could estimate its size relative to today’s U.S. population, would be well over two million — about seven times this year’s coronavirus...
Today, the incarnate god of tens of millions of Americans who are allowed to vote spoke to his people from the throne room by way of retweeting this, from one of his most prominent legal advocates: President Trump @realDonaldTrump is a genuinely good man. He does not really like to fire people. I bet he dislikes putting people in jail, especially “Republicans.” He...
The heart of statistical propaganda is the calculated citing of ominous-sounding numbers without any clarifying context, which is to say without those numbers being subsumed within an attempt to provide knowledge, but instead isolated so as to provoke hysteria of the sort that cries out for saving action, any action, from anyone who promises to alleviate the panic state, if only you will...
Over the past couple of days, two longtime readers have expressed disagreement with me (as they see it) over the issue of whether the 2020 presidential election was “fair.” In one case, I was directly challenged to answer whether I personally believe it was a fair election, the presumption apparently being that my dismissal of Trump’s whining “case” for overturning the result implies...
It appears that Vladimir Putin, whose best interests and long-term designs were key priorities of Donald Trump’s foreign policy throughout his one-term presidency, has once again tried to assassinate his influential public critic, Alexei Navalny. This time, Navalny was poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent associated with many previous deaths of Putin critics, while he was being transferred from Siberia to Germany for...
I do not believe that some people being egregiously wrong implies that anyone who happens to disagree with those people is right. We may call this the Law of Imbalance. I do not believe that I have to show compassion for, or even interest in, humans who have forfeited their humanity to the vices of existential cowardice, petty survivalism, and the sub-infantile willingness...
A beautiful world is a comforting thought, until you allow yourself the luxury of comparing that thought to our present reality, at which point the phrase “beautiful world” suddenly becomes a cruel mockery of our lives, and possibly a source of paralyzing cynicism. The danger of “idealism,” then, lies in its potential to eviscerate the will to live by making all hope appear...
Barely one day ago, I noted the impossible position the millions of Trump cultists and apologists are about to find themselves in, as the U.S. Supreme Court laughs at his Texas bootlickers’ groundless and frivolous “lawsuit” aimed at summarily overriding states’ rights and declaring Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 presidential election, against all available evidence to the contrary. As I noted...
Glenn Gould is “the musician’s musician.” That is to say, he appeals to those who wish, for purposes of their own egos, that being an attention-getting performer — a “star” — were equivalent to, or even definitive of, being a great artist. Murray Perahia, to take one obvious contrasting example, is the composer’s musician. He appeals to those attuned to the spirit of...
Donald Trump’s idolaters, along with his more circumspect apologists, have built the most plausible leg of their case in defense of the worst president in U.S. history on an argument that may be reduced — as indeed the cultists typically reduce it — to “But Gorsuch.” In other words, Trump’s greatness, or at least better-than-expected goodness, is nowhere more apparent, his defenders proclaim,...
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