Enjoying the view from Limbo
Perspective is everything, some insist. In any case, this bromide is never more applicable than in a time of universal enslavement. For then, perspective is indeed “everything” — the perspective of an ant looking up at the godlike shoes clomping around its tiny world, capriciously determining its fate at their leisure, almost absentmindedly, and certainly without a moment’s serious consideration of any ant’s...
In my “Impolitic Reflections,” I noted Plato’s antagonism toward democracy, rooted in his presumption that the majority of men will always have appetitive natures, and therefore be unfit to direct a city that wishes to be just and wise. For this reason, I explained, he has his Socrates argue that in founding a good city, “you would never place any of its decision-making...
Plato’s Socrates begins his great political speculation with the presumption that the vast majority of men in even the best imaginable city will be ruled by appetite, from which he infers that if you actually wanted a city to be governed wisely, you would never place any of its decision-making authority in the hands of the innately and irreversibly appetitive majority. The modern...
One path of a good reader, perhaps the most common modern path:
1. Find depth of meaning in the mediocre books of youth, which usually means the popular books deemed serious in your time, or among those of your “type.”
2. Realize that one’s “found” meaning was in fact deeper than the thoughts of one’s favorite authors, which in effect…
Before the start of an NFL game Thursday night in Kansas City, players made a league-endorsed political statement by standing arm-in-arm across the field in support of racial justice, or against racial injustice, or whatever namby-pamby sensitivity-cops nonsense they thought they were representing. It’s a wonder the Kansas City team, called the (euphemized for children) “Native American Tribal Leaders,” had the gall to...
Dr. Fauci, America’s Comforting Grandfather of Doom, says, “We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter, because it’s not going to be easy.” “Hunker down” is a polite way of saying “Ruin what’s left of grandma’s life with forced isolation, provoke thousands of suicides among the lonely and desperate, destroy the life savings and career aspirations of tens of...
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 10, 2020 · Last modified September 13, 2020
Bob Woodward, a man who has parlayed his role in the American Left’s great shining moment since the New Deal, namely Watergate, into a lifetime appointment as living embodiment of the Journalist as Hero fantasy, has a new book out, and — shockingly — it is about Donald Trump. This is Woodward’s modus operandi. Almost every election season, he has a new book,...
Trump admits he hid the virus because he thought it would only kill Democrats.
COVID-19 invades the brain, makes victims feel like they have a bad flu.
Biden promises if elected, he will mandate private isolation chambers for all Americans.
Polls show Biden now leading Trump by triple digits.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the unquestionable giants of world literature: essential to the development of the nineteenth century anti-romantic novel; one of his century’s two great prophets and critics (Nietzsche being the other) of the then-growing nihilism that was devouring European intellectual life, and has since — as he (like Nietzsche) predicted — settled like volcanic ash over the entire civilized world;...
The cosmos self-corrects, and that certainly includes the human portion of the cosmos, to the extent it may be regarded separately. One might object that to say the cosmos self-corrects is to suggest that “The Whole” itself is flawed, which might reasonably lead one to ask, “Flawed against what standard?” Nevertheless it is so, although I prefer to say incomplete rather than flawed...
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