Enjoying the view from Limbo
Seeing the imperfection of things, it is always tempting, at least to those steeped in centuries of progressive thought in all its forms, to allow disappointment with the imperfect to transmogrify into an assumption that things could have been better. But from a non-progressive point of view, it does not follow from the fact that something is disappointingly inadequate that there must have...
“With all the atrocities and the humanitarian crisis ongoing in Ukraine, how can anyone care about something so insignificant as Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards?” So say many self-important voices today, as they attempt to show their moral superiority over those who dare to care about this little Oscars story during a war. On its face, the criticism rings...
Denzel Washington, who outdid himself at the Academy Awards in his career-defining performance as a fake mediator between an unprovoked assailant and his victim, and then as a fake crier in sympathy with Will Smith’s temptation by the devil — who, he supposedly told Smith with fake sagacity, “comes for you” at your highest moment — has now attempted to take the most...
Russian forces are withdrawing from the area around Kiev. This is a good sign on its face, and a testament to the will of the Ukrainian population, the courage and competence of their leaders, and the effectiveness of their military. Having said that, it is far from obvious to me that this retreat is an unqualified good, given that the man who ordered...
Parmenidean: If it is true that there is nothing, as you claim, then this still proves that there is something, namely that very truth and a mind capable of knowing it. Nihilism is self-refuting.
Nihilist: Oh, but the nihilist does not deny that there is something, but merely that the something has meaning.
Parmenidean: But a something without a meaning….
Materialism as a social foundation leads to nihilistic self-loathing as a moral principle. The reason is clear to anyone who has thought through the implications of human life as matter seriously, which is to say without the self-deceiving funhouse optics of materialism as “scientific rationality” or “absolute freedom.”
Ukraine may well be winning the war at this moment. In fact, the amount of damage and humiliation they have already inflicted on the Russian war machine is a moral victory for the world, on so many levels, regardless of the long-term outcome of the war for Ukraine’s sovereign territory. I say “regardless of the long-term outcome” because it is obvious that the...
Donald Trump used a media interview this week to directly ask Vladimir Putin to help him defeat their mutual enemy Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Putin’s state media (the only media allowed to speak in that country anymore), in criticizing Biden and calling for regime change in the U.S., has lamented losing its “partner” Trump….
Random musings on the piddling celebrity ugliness of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Academy Awards show: What a wonderful distraction this has made for people who thought the invasion of Ukraine was great fun until it started to look like an actual war, rather than one of those tasty crisis-of-the-week things that, when the dust settles, dutifully leaves everything that matters...
The goal of life, as humans must live it, is not to get what you want so much as to find out what you want. Human life is essentially a search, not an awards ceremony.
Cuteness vs. Beauty.– Here in brave new world, mankind has systematically and insidiously substituted trivial and infantile playthings for all those notions that were once definitive of human aspiration….
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