Enjoying the view from Limbo
I just read the following headline from MSNBC: “Justice Sotomayor, the conscious of the supreme court.” If Sotomayor represents judicial “consciousness,” then perhaps a full supply of sleeping pills for judges everywhere would go a long way to answering all the world’s problems. Millions of tiny humans would surely appreciate a little less judicial consciousness, on this standard. The error is repeated in...
I see that the estate of George Orwell, apparently related to its namesake’s legacy roughly as Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth was related to his, has given its official stamp of approval to a feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Though the new story will allegedly present Orwell’s dystopia from the perspective of Julia, Winston’s love interest in the original, the explicit emphasis on the “feminist”...
Former U.S. Senator Bob Dole died a few days ago. Dole fought, and was severely wounded, in World War II. He was a member of congress for most of his adult life after the war, and a leading Republican senator for a generation. In 1996, he was the Republican Party establishment’s chosen presidential candidate, where his intended role was roughly the same as...
The dream entertained by men of a totalitarian mind is an illusion that will quickly dissipate, if not during their lifetimes then very shortly thereafter. For all such men are craving immortality, as indeed we all are, but their peculiar notion of everlasting life entails creating a society so all-encompassing in its centralized control — which is to say under their personal control...
We can gain more from one painful confusion than from a hundred satisfying pleasures. This formula is most true — is amplified — in those times when recourse to easy pleasure might seem most comforting, or even essential. For pleasure, by its nature, reinforces certainties and reassures us against doubts, thereby softening precisely those hard edges of the practical and psychological status quo...
Mark Meadows, a member of the falsely named House Freedom Caucus — falsely because, beginning in 2016, they speedily and collectively transformed themselves into the Congressional Demagogue Pom-Pom Girls — has, like almost everyone else who siphoned fame and glory (read shame and ignominy) out of the former president’s gasbag, written a book to salvage his reputation and rake in some easy money....
If governments explicitly spelled out the truth on all the “emergency measures” and “crisis responses” they have initiated during the pandemic — namely that not one of these new measures, powers, or mandates will ever be repealed, but rather, on the contrary, that every one of them will be expanded, and cited as convenient precedent, in perpetuity, to encompass an ever-increasing range of...
Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / Socialized Medicine
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 7, 2021
Covid-19 may be debated for years on a number of levels, but there is one point on which no one — no scientist, no statistician, no philosopher, no policy maker — has ever been in doubt, whatever some of them may have said for the sake of their political vested interests: This pandemic, judged as a mortality risk, is primarily, overwhelmingly, and in...
Five years ago, I posted my book, “The Case Against Public Education,” here in Limbo, both as an e-book download and in a readable online version. It made no discernible difference to anything, of course. Five years is rarely long enough for serious ideas to take root, particularly ideas which run counter to all the social conventions and intellectual trends of the day;...
Amusingly, just a couple of days after posting my brief argument about “Abortion Rights,” I have stumbled across the following title of an article from (no surprise) Salon: “I’m a philosophy professor. The argument for making abortion illegal is illogical.”
The author, one Nathan Nobis, announces his professional credibility as a judge of logic in his article’s very title…
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