Enjoying the view from Limbo
Being a true student is harder than being a true teacher. For the teacher, who of course was once a student, has already survived the soul’s harshest test, namely discovering that which is uncomfortable to see, while the student is still facing this trial. Not merely facing it, in fact, but wading through its unexpected depths, stepping painfully among its unseen jagged rocks,...
Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, after reading the Mueller report, has decided that Donald Trump committed impeachable offenses, although his argument seems to be based on the premise that impeachability is kind of a nebulous thing, rather than suggestive of any specific offense. In response to Amash’s peculiar stand, the Republican Party’s “Freedom Caucus,” which Amash helped to form, has voted to “condemn”...
Republican congressman Justin Amash, who leans hard libertarian, claimed this weekend that he had found impeachable offenses in the Mueller report, though he doesn’t seem to be able to specify what these are, and in fact takes pains to argue that the constitutional phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” does not actually imply any definable offense. Meanwhile, President Trump claims that he doesn’t wish...
Socratic Mathematics
Humans cannot fly,
Unless they learn to grow wings —
Ten thousand years on.
This is the profoundest implication of the expression, “Patience is a virtue.” Can you wait, diligently preparing yourself, for one hundred centuries?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, back when progressives were still allowed to talk about moral and political matters without complete deference to the current neo-Marxist orthodoxy, wrote of the decaying moral substance of modern America with the now-famous phrase, “defining deviancy down.” That useful expression is easily adaptable to other, analogous contexts, and today I would like to apply it to Trumpology, in which we...
Here are two items making headlines today, both of them falling into the general category of irrationality, and more specifically into the slot labeled “Lack of a Coherent Principle.” A dean at Harvard Law School has come under attack by social justice warriors, and finally “relieved of his position” by Harvard University, for offering his skills in the defense of Hollywood producer Harvey...
Alabama has passed a law, which the state’s governor nevertheless imagines will be unenforceable for the time being, making it a felony to perform an abortion in that state, with the only exception being cases in which the life of the mother is threatened. I am pleased to see this law passed, not merely because I believe abortion is indefensible in a modern, rights-based...
Donald Trump lives for his ego. He may be the purest living instantiation of Hobbes’ depiction of man in the state of nature, ruled entirely by fear of violent death and vainglory. As he respects no law — let alone the rule of law — he is effectively, subjectively, trapped in Hobbes’ hypothesized condition of raw nature: the war of all against all,...
Donald Trump is convinced he can manipulate anyone with his brilliant financial mind. His true believers, as they watch him doing everything they railed against as anti-market folly for years, anxiously tell the critics to “wait and see what happens before passing judgment.” This means they have forgotten, or they are hoping you have forgotten, what we are supposedly “waiting for.” The question...
Alyssa Milano, a two-bit actress currently playing the role of a two-bit celebrity activist, has come up with a stellar plan for fighting back against abortion opponents: a “sex strike.” Before you get excited imagining alternative implications of that interesting name, what she means is that women should stop having sex as a means of forcing men to stop passing laws restricting abortion...
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