Enjoying the view from Limbo
Every likely Democratic voter in the United States who is even remotely aware of current events knows that Joe Biden is absolutely not up to the rigors of a conventional presidential campaign, either mentally or physically, and furthermore that he can no longer even be dragged uneventfully through an ordinary televised debate by the friendliest moderators, regardless of which sentient being the Republican...
About a year ago, John Cleese was interviewed by Reason Magazine editor-at-large Nick Gillespie, in front of an enthusiastic audience of libertarians. One of the topics of discussion was creativity, a subject on which Cleese has spoken extensively over the years. At one point in the interview, full of giddy expectancy, Gillespie, citing Cleese’s Monty Python writing partner (and alcoholic) Graham Chapman as...
Fox News hosted a fake presidential debate among a bunch of yokels who couldn’t get elected president if you offered all the voters in America free MAGA hats for going to the polls. The guy who stockpiles those hats in his gold bathroom, as camouflage for the boxes of national security documents he stole from the White House, was not present at the...
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. (Ralph Waldo Emerson) Of course, that means you really have to make the decision, not just think of or wish for something. For it is only the mind that has decided sincerely and seriously that can inspire a cosmic conspiracy. And of course, that power encompasses poor decisions as well as...
It is fairly obvious now that President Biden’s administration (not Biden himself, who of course has no idea what is happening or why) wishes to help Ukraine stave off Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion just well enough to inflict severe damage to Putin’s military, but not well enough to defeat him outright or restore all of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. In other words, the goal...
Decadence, in normal language, means “deterioration” or “decay.” (The Latin root suggests falling down and the French derivative form suggests decaying.) For a long time in English, the word has been used only about human behavior and social conditions. If we say someone is decadent, we are saying his way of life is deteriorating or wasteful, such as one who lives for luxury...
The mistake that Donald Trump’s admirers and defenders have consistently made since 2015 may be reduced to one fundamental error of confirmation bias: They saw his flouting of ordinary party politics, ordinary presidential rhetoric, ordinary administrative state regulations, and ordinary Republican establishment conciliation, as evidence that he saw the corruption of modern American politics the way they did, and that he was standing...
The heirs of Frankfurt. — The American left’s intellectual strategists have long believed that the way to break the country’s resistance to progressivism was to forge ahead, with their vanguard fringes displayed in bright colors, in open defiance of the popular consensus, precisely because those fringes would be perceived by the “silent majority” as too much, too extreme, too immoderate and anti-American. The...
A group of highly credentialed conservative lawyers is publicly arguing that Donald Trump is constitutionally disqualified from running for the presidency ever again, on the grounds of his “participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.” Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz, the most distinguished liberal lawyer of the past forty years, has spent the past seven of those years so deep in the...
If you absolutely need something to be true, that would be an excellent place to begin your most painstakingly openminded inquiry. For emotional investment is the hardest obstacle for the mind to overcome, and therefore the greatest bar to discovery. A philosopher, essentially, is a man whose investment in a certainty never supersedes his desire for the truth. Consistency across time is not...
Follow: