Enjoying the view from Limbo
Mike Lee, since he stopped being the pre-2016 Ted Cruz’s more principled and less self-promoting sidekick and became a pathetic panderer to the Trump cult, seems to have lost his intellectual moorings. No longer sounding like a rare libertarian with a moral compass, Lee increasingly sounds like a slightly less smarmy and disingenuous imitation of the post-2016, pathetically bootlicking Ted Cruz. Lee’s new-found...
The single most indispensable explanation of what a philosopher is comes in the context of the most famous trial in legal history. Socrates, who in Plato’s presentation of him was and remains the definitive philosopher, the embodied essence of the philosophic life, was tried, convicted, and executed on two charges: impiety and corrupting the youth. The philosopher is thus, by definition and essential...
You do not have to like or choose any of them. You can dislike, distrust, and reject them all. It is not your duty to choose. It is your duty to think. “Opinion is for the many, truth for the few. Therefore, the truth seeker has an obligation not to publicly corrupt or undermine the opinions on which society depends.” This principle or...
Yet again, Jordan Peterson, the energetic academic psychologist cum profiteering alt-right blowhard, has put his mouth where he believes the money is. That is, since most of his paying audience — believe me, he has no interest in any audience that is not paying, and by god they certainly will pay — is comprised of young males who believe Donald Trump is infallible,...
Ron DeSantis, who is planning to run for U.S. President in 2024, and must therefore suck up relentlessly to the Republican Party’s MAGA-QAnon base, which is in love with Vladimir Putin, has publicly adopted the standard position of all current Republicans who have need of gaining the favor of the grassroots, without necessarily being one of them. That is to say, he has...
The publisher and copyright holders of the famous children’s stories of Roald Dahl have systematically expunged certain progressively offensive words from the new editions of his books, in order to bring them into line with current progressive notions of “inclusiveness” (read Marxist mind manipulation). A character who was “enormously fat” is now simply “enormous,” lest anyone be infected with the horrific, antiquated idea...
Lo and behold, it turns out that right from the beginning of Donald Trump’s election fraud hoax, the leading voices in the so-called conservative media — the prime time hosts at Fox News — openly stated among themselves that they knew this was a hoax, that there was no massive election fraud, and that Joe Biden had won the election. But they decided,...
The more practical power one has (or believes one has), the less able one is to admit error or rethink previous decisions. The willing assumption of godlike authority, and by extension the creation of a permanent audience before whom one exercises that authority, seems to infuse the soul with a parallel dread of being seen to lack godlike infallibility. This dread (sometimes mistaken...
America Descending / Government vs. God / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 14, 2023
Headlines I have read over the past several hours…. NFL World Reacts To What Donald Trump Said About Rihanna. Well, I know there are three extremely popular entities in that exciting headline, none of which any of us would ever have heard of if we lived in a semi-rational universe. And as completely uninteresting and irrelevant as is whatever Rihanna does, or whatever...
Any deliberative process will eventually work its way down to a binary choice — A vs. B. The danger in all deliberations is that the last two options left at the end of the winnowing will not be the best two options that were available to you at the outset, which is to say that you will overlook or undervalue other alternatives that...
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