Enjoying the view from Limbo
Nothing typifies New Year’s Eve more than the image of crowds drinking alcohol to excess. And nothing typifies social drinking more than the desire to forget. To forget moral restraints, frustrations and heartaches, concerns and fears, people and events — all the things that one ought to remember, the remembrance of which gives life its depth, its texture, its motivations, and its pathway...
Everything that indicates human greatness, to the extent that it does so, is an obstacle to immediate popular appeal. For greatness is by definition not of its time, and therefore intrinsically too detached from current norms — theoretical, moral, political — to be either fully visible or fully comprehensible to those who are immersed in, and thus collectively definitive of, the present. One...
Skimming along the surface, gliding at speed over the tips of waves, blissfully unaware of the depths, is of the essence of this age. American businessman and self-appointed moral scourge Ben Shapiro, who is nothing if not of this age, is taking his usual fake-intellectual-for-profit routine to the subject of global conflict, specifically the war in Ukraine. His speed-talking schtick — skimming along...
Fool’s atheism.– “Why would an omnipotent and benevolent God allow evil things to happen?” So says the scientific fool with great smugness, believing he has thereby confounded the essence of all faith. The problem is that this very question reveals the nihilistic and trivial perspective of the questioner, based as it is upon a child’s presumption of absolute certainty, and an infant’s standard...
Whatever it might once have been, or may someday be, at this moment Fox News — that media entity as a whole, as may be judged, with total fairness, by its most popular and unfettered content — is essentially a fount of quasi-Soviet propaganda served with neo-Nazi overtones. It is an apologist for genocidal terrorism, a willing mouthpiece for messaging framed by the...
Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and dozens of other so-called Republicans are now, with increasingly obvious desperation, expressing open hatred and spreading obvious Russian propaganda about Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine, while deliberately ignoring the fact that they would never have heard Zelensky’s name, or have been able to locate Ukraine on a map, had Russia not invaded...
Reason as hatred.— If disapproving of someone’s behavior, or disagreeing with his reasoning, is to be understood as an expression of hatred for the person, and if all hatred in turn may be regarded as violence, in the moral and perhaps legal senses, then all rational discussion or moral argument is effectively criminalized, and anyone who dares to express disagreement or disapproval of...
Roger Kimball, whose thoughtful discussions of art, education, and progressivism I once attended to with appreciation, and occasionally cited in my own writing, has, over the past five years, become one of the most ridiculously unrepentant and irrational sycophants for Donald Trump. There may be even more irrational cases, but none, I suspect, that have fallen so low from so high. In one...
Many people walk regularly, but we do not all walk for the same reasons. If you walk primarily for your bodily health, or to “get your blood flowing,” then your walking is not similiar to mine. I walk every day, as much as possible, and often for hours. And I do so, in the final analysis and in ultimate effect, for one reason...
Brett Kavanaugh has given the progressive media one more thing to express faux outrage about, by attending a Christmas party with ring-kissing populist Trump punk Matt Gaetz, Trump “adviser” Stephen Miller, and various leaders of the recently-cleansed-of-all-remnants-of-genuine-American-conservatism American Conservative Union (the Trump World CPAC mob). It is understandable, of course, that figures within the government might hobnob with one another, and that in...
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