Enjoying the view from Limbo
Cherish the rare few who can see you. Above all, cherish them as living reminders that what makes a man worth seeing at all is precisely what makes him difficult to see. Be strange, not by artifice or for show, but by nature and without shame. Explanation: Anything done for show is the opposite of genuine strangeness, for its aim, by definition, is...
If you had spent decades in a position of public authority, signing off on government funding for laboratories conducting dangerous research on certain types of infectious diseases, including funding for overseas laboratories conducting research so dangerous that your own government had once instituted a moratorium on allowing such research to be done on your own country’s soil, and then one day a new,...
Human society will be imperfect because humans are imperfect. Progressives believe society can be corrected to eliminate the frustrating and limiting social effects human imperfection, by means of intentional and all-pervasive government intervention.
But government is comprised of humans; thus….
When theoretical reason is forsaken in favor of practical reason as the human standard — or, to say the same thing, when the theoretical is reduced to the status of handmaiden of the practical — this will necessarily have certain verifiable and visible effects on life in the civilization in which this reversed perspective takes hold. In brief, this reversal reduces thinking to...
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...
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