Enjoying the view from Limbo
If you found a woman’s private diary under a pillow at a drug rehabilitation facility, would you read it, publish it, use it to humiliate her family and potentially cause serious material harm to the woman herself? If you would, then you would fit right in among today’s American conservatives. Perhaps I come to this story very late, because I try to avoid...
A thoughtful Korean student who frequently reads my writing, and to whom I recently mentioned my essay about the disappearing craft of handwriting, “Are We Solving the Mystery of Atlantis?” sends me the following thought: “I want to understand the writing on your website. It’s not easy, but I like that it’s not what everyone can get easily.” To which I reply as...
Dinesh D’Souza, having been given a presidential pardon by his owner after being convicted of violating federal election law, has decided to devote the rest of his earthly life — or the rest of Trump’s shelf life as a viable gravy train for conservative media profiteers, whichever ends first — to licking Trump’s boots on the “election fraud” fraud, specifically by accusing anonymous...
That cynical men will exploit a human problem for their own petty advantage, without concern for ultimate outcomes beyond their own immediate gain, is obvious. This cynicism explains most of what is called “foreign policy,” most of what is called “medicine,” most of what is called “education,” most of what is called “entertainment,” and most of what is called “lawmaking.” But none of...
The more uniform and repetitive the conversation, the more any alternative or outlying opinion sounds like irrational extremism.
The more everyone is encouraged to speak, the less most people have to say — and the less audible above the din is anyone who does have something to say….
The desire to be heard vs. the desire to be understood.— Heraclitus spoke for all time: “One is worth ten thousand to me if he be the best.” “‘Like a dog,’ he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.” Kafka thereby describes the condition of every one of us in the very late modern world, hounded, herded, and...
In her opening statement at the January 6th hearings in the U.S. Congress, Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick “Deep State” Cheney, spelled out an interpretation of that day’s Capitol riot that, if it had crossed all the Ts and stated its unstated premises, would essentially have supported the interpretation I have offered here in Limbo all along. Put simply, all or...
Libertarians, in their twin obsessions with freedom understood as carte blanche to do anything one wants, and a desperate search for more votes, have increasingly defined themselves as the party of recreational drug use. There is nary an issue that a libertarian cannot eventually bring around to a discussion of basic individual liberties, and nary a discussion of basic individual liberties that will...
Vladimir Putin is not Russia, nor is he “the Russian people.” He is a ruthless dictator who murders or imprisons his most popular opponents and critics, propagandizes his subjects out of any clear alternative perspectives on life and the global political situation, and exploits the poverty and hopelessness that he himself has fostered to cajole the weak and desperate “masses” into viewing him...
You will not achieve much that you set out to accomplish in your life — but you will correct your intentions retroactively in order to persuade yourself that you did. The best things you do will never be the things you do for money, attention, or other tangible forms of reward. On the contrary, the best things you do will most often be...
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