Enjoying the view from Limbo
If the universe were infinite, everything of which it is comprised would by necessity be infinitesimal, and a universe of incalculable vastness thus comprised of an array of incalculably small components — with both the incalculably small components and the incalculably vast whole becoming increasingly so (small and vast, respectively), without end. In such a condition, everything — both the world and its...
Arrive faster, and fatter. Work longer to pay for the luxury of getting to work more efficiently. Race unaffected past a year’s worth of interesting potential observations each day. Do a hundred transient and inconsequential things in the time it would have taken you to do just one meaningful thing in the old days. Accomplish thousands of tasks without having to go through...
“Love is blind,” they say. The same, however, might be said just as surely about anger, envy, indignation, and above all, fear. Any passion, if allowed to become dominant in the soul, causes blindness. For by highlighting an object exclusively so as to make it appear overwhelmingly preeminent within its context — which is in effect to remove the object from its proper...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 20, 2021 · Last modified July 31, 2021
Today’s mass entertainment is obsessed above all with two themes: superheroes and zombies. This is self-revealing, as we are indeed trapped in the age of the undead, whose only mode of living is to suck the life out of others, and whose only hope of being saved from their emptiness is to lose themselves in the last realm of imagination left for hollow,...
Garry Kasparov describes socialism, correctly, as communism with “better marketing.” He abhors dictatorship and all evidence of authoritarianism, and believes it is incumbent on free nations to take hard stands against global aggressors like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and the Mullahs in Iran. Why, then, is he a consistent and vocal supporter of the Democratic Party? Please do not say, “Because at least...
I just read that Antifa has clashed “violently” (how else would Antifa clash with anything?) with Los Angeles police outside a Korean spa where, according to a video complaint by a woman (actual), a transgender woman (non-actual) exposed “herself” (man, this stuff gets complicated, typographically speaking!) to young girls. Needless to say, Antifa, tireless fighters on behalf of flashers everywhere, refused to take...
It’s all relative.— I have never felt particularly brave in my life. Nor do I believe I have ever acted with any special degree of courage even in an isolated moment. On the contrary, I have often been disappointed at what I have regarded as a deficiency in this area. These days, however, judging myself relative to what I see around me, I...
U.S. President Joe Biden has taken the official position that people spreading social media “disinformation” (a word now used by the U.S. government and media interchangeably with “misinformation,” effectively blurring the lines between the debatably false and the intentionally fake) regarding Covid-19 or the vaccines are “killing people.” In other words, Biden, speaking as the U.S. Federal Government, is holding private individuals personally...
Everything in our experience can be divided in two. After all, that most basic division explains why we have our world of experience in the first place: the primordial world-egg was split in half, or God created heaven and earth, or the Yin and Yang were distinguished — as you please. And this is why we rational animals are so naturally apt to...
There are gods even here. — Aristotle, Parts of Animals When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is amusing herself with me more than I am with her? — Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond We imagine we are better than we are, because we instinctively exaggerate the value of the things we do well. Every time I watch a sparrow...
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