Enjoying the view from Limbo
Phone calls and message alerts at any moment; one learns to stop in the middle of anything — and worse, to expect to have to stop. After all, the social rule in the age of ubiquitous digital communication is determined by our new understanding that not only is everyone immediately accessible at any time, but what is more, everyone knows that everyone is...
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the thug who leads Russia’s most effective military force — a private group of criminals nominally allied with the Kremlin — is now threatening the official Kremlin leadership with armed rebellion, and openly declaring the war in Ukraine to have been undertaken on false pretenses, with phony rationalizations based on fabricated nonsense about non-existent threats from Ukraine and NATO. In other...
The most effective way to enslave a man — most effective in the sense of providing the greatest possible assurance that one need fear no significant rebellion — is not to forcibly restrain him, against his desire to flee. For such restraint merely reminds him, at every moment, that there is a place which your interests demand that he never go, thus whetting...
A headline I just read from Jacobin: “True Democracy Is Incompatible With Capitalism.” My random responses to this headline and accompanying article, as they occur to me on the fly (since flying past quickly is the only reasonable way to look at such blather): How presumptuous to assume that one has discerned which sense of democracy is the true one — but never...
To the extent that a machine becomes your memory, you have no memory. To the extent that a machine becomes your calculator, you have no numeracy. To the extent that a machine saves you effort, you are drained of the ability to exert yourself. To the extent that a machine sorts out the options for you, you have no practical wisdom and no...
Tolerance is not equivalent to approval or “acceptance.” On the contrary, the very notion of tolerance presupposes differences of opinion, disapproval of behavior, and perhaps even personal distaste. In a political context, tolerance entails a willingness to forego any legal objections against, or punishments for, beliefs or behaviors that are regarded as socially unorthodox or disagreeable to the common view, but which have...
Nature’s balance.– The United States of America: a nation founded by modernity’s noblest and most philosophically inclined statesmen, and peopled by history’s rarest melting pot of intrepid individualists willing to throw all security to the wind and gamble their lives on their own sweat and ingenuity. Today, a nation ruled by mentally disabled thugs, and peopled by the most cowardly collection of safety-obsessed...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 4, 2023 · Last modified June 26, 2023
The challenge in teaching Plato’s Apology used to be overcoming the students’ incredulity and incomprehension faced with the historical fact of a supposedly democratic society rejecting the philosophic activity so stridently as to put a man’s freedom and his very life on trial, merely for asking questions that the political establishment did not like. “How unjust and intolerant the Athenian people must have...
The modern materialist insists he is right because his explanations obviously work. In this case, “to work” entails (and more than just incidentally) sucking all the sense of meaning out of human life as such. But to say that something works is to assume a specific goal in accordance with which “working” may be judged. Materialism works, therefore, if one’s goals are unrelated...
We are all supposed to defend the idea of democracy today as though our lives depended on it. In fact, anyone who fails to do so, or who dares to ask questions such as whether this democracy we are all bound to defend amounts to anything in practice but the blunt force of absolute majority rule, is condemned or ridiculed as an enemy...
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