Enjoying the view from Limbo
After four years of Donald Trump’s faithful service as Vladimir Putin’s lackey and not-so-covert agent, one might have hoped that Joe Biden, who pretended to strike a less forgiving tone toward the Putin dictatorship as an easy way of distancing himself from the alt-right Putin shoeshine regime of the Trumpkins, would do at least slightly better at repelling the impending Russian invasion of...
Vladimir Putin appears to be on the verge of launching a full-on military assault against a democratic ally of the Western democracies, a country that was most infamously decimated by the Soviet tyranny under which Putin did his dictator training course, and the renewal of which was one of the West’s great boasts at the supposed “end” of the Cold War. In response...
The government of Canada has now officially established the precedent of treating citizens with grievances or dissenting views not as compatriots to be addressed with reason and understanding, but literally as enemy combatants to be publicly vilified, their frustrated group behavior smeared as a “siege” and an “occupation,” and their basic constitutional rights overridden by the government’s invoking of the most extreme wartime...
Ottawa police are punks and thugs, enforcing the demands of punks and thugs. Full disclosure: I grew up in that town, and never had a single unpleasant run-in with the police. But then, I never publicly objected to being tyrannically bullied by the federal government either. If I had, then I’m sure the Ottawa police would have treated me more or less as...
A student with whom I engage in regular philosophical discussions sent me the following musing, after admiring the night sky during a full moon: A few stars reveal their existence by the tiny but clear sparkle, and I think of how tiny I will be from the point of view of the stars. How short human life will be, and how small some...
A lot of Canadian truckers from across the country, though it seems primarily from Western Canada — historically hated and belittled by those at the heart of downtown Trudeaupia — have “descended upon,” or rather rolled horizontally into, the nation’s capital, and subsequently fanned out to various other conspicuous locations, to announce their objection to certain Trudeau policies related to the Covid-19 pandemic,...
Here is a headline I just read, summarizing a letter to the editor at the LA Times criticizing Bill Maher’s calls to let Americans move on from Covid restrictions: “‘Done’ with COVID? Thank God our grandparents weren’t ‘done’ with World War II.” The obvious difference between the two cases reveals the even more obvious difference between the American mainstream of today, as represented...
I do not have much to say about the news that P. J. O’Rourke has died. All I know about him is that he was a libertarian of sorts, and that he was a very funny writer, and on occasion — the phrase “on occasion” in this context being not a belittlement but a high compliment — an insightfully funny one. For a...
During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, those of us naturally inclined to resist propagandistic media hyperbole and distrust tyrannical models of government “efficiency” spent a good deal of our time, and inordinate amounts of our nerves, arguing with some of the dumbest or most fear-driven humans we had ever encountered, over the strange new question of whether allowing the governments of...
A thing is no more likely to be true because its truth would be very convenient. Conversely, a thing is no more likely to be false because its truth would be inconvenient. In general, truth and falsity have no intrinsic relation whatsoever to what would make things feel easier or more accommodating to you, in your conditions, with your associations, subject to your...
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