Enjoying the view from Limbo
The likelihood that the current pandemic was manufactured in a laboratory, by researchers working under totalitarian rulers but funded by tax dollars from the supposed vanguard of the free world, is a neat little reminder of what should be glaringly obvious to every thinking person in the modern world at all times: We are going to annihilate ourselves with progress. This is not...
In his book, O.J. Simpson says that he would have taken a bullet or stood in front of a train for Nicole. Man, I’m going to tell you, that is some bad luck, when the one guy who would have died for you…kills you.
— Norm Macdonald, “Weekend Update,” Saturday Night Live
The darkness of the concept, the patient, deliberate set-up, the bluntness of the punchline…
I saw a headline from Fox News (where else?) declaring that Mark Levin — former “conservative radio firebrand,” now Republican establishment populist for cash — has said that Joe Biden is the closest thing to a dictator that America has ever had. That’s rich, coming from a man who, just five years ago, publicly sold his soul and his former Tea Party audience...
There is more life and sincere exertion of real power in a random blade of grass than is exhibited by any statesman today. There is more discovery in the way a morning breeze can draw the discrete perceptions of many days into a unified experience in the mind than in all the public school textbooks being ground into the immobilized souls occupying today’s...
Governments around the world are well along the path toward forcing all places of employment to monitor their employees or potential employees for vaccination status; forcing all private gathering places, such as restaurants or theatres, to restrict access to their businesses (i.e., their private property) to people with “their papers” in order; and forcing all individuals in and out of the “health care...
I wish you perfect health for yourself and all your loved ones, if you wish me perfect freedom for myself and all of mine. I wish you a safe and secure life, if you wish me a life of self-determination. I wish you a lifetime of prosperity and material ease, if you wish me a lifetime without violations of my person or property....
Liberty's Labors Lost / Pandemic that Ate a Planet
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 9, 2021 · Last modified September 10, 2021
Who knows?– When popular perceptions of reason and truth reach the point at which the categories of “legitimate opinion” and “dangerous misinformation” have become coextensive with the concepts “from the authorities” and “opposed to the authorities,” the last traces of independent thought and freedom of speech will have vanished from public discourse. The Washington Post reports the sad story of Benjamin Franklin, who...
A student sent me a text message this morning with the following question: “Would it be good for me to feel grateful to a person who gave me pain?” Without knowing the specific context she had in mind, I replied: “If the person gave you pain while trying to help you, then yes. If the person gave you pain while trying to harm...
“My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication–it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness–it is all that I have–and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.”
— Franz Kafka, diary entry
There is no existing political arrangement which is not essentially in conflict — often mortal conflict — with the philosophic life. This means mankind has never found its way to a social structure that is inherently accommodating to the fulfillment of man’s nature. That monumental failure of the species is not as implausible as it first seems, given that the philosopher is by...
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