Enjoying the view from Limbo
Kafka’s burden — the bureaucrat of practical necessity suffocated by life in the bureau — embodies in its tortured anxieties the modern diminution of the raging Heracles: Why must I, a soul full of passion, strength, and cravings for eternity, succumb to these expectations of others, to these odious priorities of daily life, to the duties of my lot, my status, my family,...
One of the great falsehoods of late modernity is that our political structures are so ingeniously self-renewing and self-correcting that the days of the just revolution are over. This position is not only untrue, but likely an indication of devious motives on the part of those who maintain and seek to perpetuate it. For political leaders to say, as President Biden and others...
Over the next forty-eight hours, the United States Federal Government is either going to become substantially dumber and more unhinged from reality, or substantially more Marxist and inclined towards the coercive silencing of all alternative thoughts or ways of living. In either case, however, the U.S. is about to become more overtly authoritarian (which is saying quite a lot given the recent trajectory),...
In this age of social media, social thought, and social truth, the richest man in the world, a pot-smoking cool kid with his hands deep in the government cookie jar, is now the controlling owner of the world’s dominant social discussion forum. Meanwhile, in this age of ubiquitous internet addiction, online surveillance, and the dubious boons of universal interconnectedness, the most influential and...
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fascist dimwit of the first rank, essentially the Republican Party’s direct answer to communist harpy Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, announces at a campaign rally that “the only border [Democrats] care about is Ukraine, not America’s southern border. Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. Our country comes first.” By falsely framing the border issue as “southern border versus...
There is an increasingly open discussion, at the highest reaches of banking and government the world over, of adopting new forms of digital currency controlled by central banks, which banks in turn will work out the details together, thus coordinating the parameters and conditions of this exciting new age of digital currency at a global level. The parameters and conditions being discussed in...
Everything today is for stupid people. If anything exists today that is not fundamentally aimed at the stupid, then it falls entirely outside the public eye, resides beyond social discourse, has no connection to the quasi-life that the society around you is engaged in. Hence, if anything you like, do, or care about does fall within the public eye, occupy a corner of...
To interpret a thing is to categorize it. We may categorize only in accordance with existing categories, of course, which in practice — an obvious point but one easily forgotten — means in accordance with categories we know. Hence, the limits of interpretation, for each man, are determined by the modes of existence that he himself has previously recognized or intuited from his...
A U.S. president should only be truly relevant during a crisis, when someone — someone with authority over the military, for example, or even just having the sobriety and character to set the right national tone — must have the capacity and the will to make essential decisions on the fly, based on a combination of adequate information, sound principles, long-range vision, and,...
Recently, two radicalized children threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery. They supposedly did this to protest the continued reliance on fossil fuels. Perhaps their reasoning was that Van Gogh painted in oil, which means he too contributed to global warming in some way. Otherwise, their defining “statement” as they glued themselves to the wall beneath the famous painting...
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