Enjoying the view from Limbo
Empedocles is the only evolutionist whose theory impresses me in the least, because he is the only one who is rational enough not to imagine he is describing a rectilinear development, and expansive enough not to harbor any self-flattering hidden premise that he is living in an “advanced” stage of the process he describes. On the contrary, he saw all too clearly what...
Black Lives Matter. What does that even mean? You don’t know, so don’t bother trying to answer. You don’t know, because the phrase actually means exactly nothing, or at least nothing to do with the words that comprise the phrase. It is a slogan meant to sound brave and ideological precisely to obscure or deflect from its lack of any comprehensible significance in...
On September 29th, 2001, less than three weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, one of America’s tentative popular steps back to some semblance of normalcy was the return of Saturday Night Live (filmed, of course, in New York). In an attempt to earn the right to make silly jokes again, the show began, in typically modern maudlin fashion, with...
I have friends I have never met face to face whom I would trust with all my money. Meanwhile, very few of the “friends” I have made through the normal social accidents of my life have ever been more than useful or pleasant acquaintances in the end — “nice,” agreeable enough, but lacking the essential kinship of soul that is the essence of...
If you were the biggest coward, fraud, and two-bit nothing in the entire history of your nation, and had somehow managed to flim-flam your way to the presidency (thereby revealing the demise of your nation), you would have to be gifted with some kind of genius at denying direct responsibility for…well, for your existence. Donald Trump is just such a “man,” and his...
Carlyle wrote, “No pressure, no diamonds.” That is very true. We might also add the unstated implication of Carlyle’s epigram: “No pressure, dull carbon — which is to say graphite.” As modernity reduces the heat and pressure of existence, humanity produces fewer and fewer diamonds, instead becoming increasingly uniform and stable in softness, adherence, and conductivity. A useful writing implement or fuel cell;...
Here is an enthusiastic rant about socialists by Razumihin, Dostoevsky’s crystallization of the good-natured man of common sense, in Crime and Punishment: I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to...
Let’s get this over with, shall we? I frankly have four million better things to do with my time and energy than spend them on a story that is filled to overflowing with so many of my least favorite things in modern political reality: social justice warriors, Donald Trump, race politics, international progressive activism, white guilt…you get the picture. But a dying nation’s...
Tired of being right all the time, bored of having all his interpretations verified and all his predictions realized, seeking the challenge of subjects in which the answers are not so obvious to one who merely turns off the chatter and listens to his own reason for five minutes, erstwhile political commentator takes a break to look at things that actually matter, and...
What could be more ideal, from a socialist revolutionary point of view? Millions of people forcibly removed from the norms and equilibrium of ordinary life by government lockdowns, many of them looking at artificially-induced unemployment, and living in a climate of propaganda-sustained public fear and mass uneasiness. Throw into the mix a media-hyped flash point…
Follow: