Enjoying the view from Limbo
I just read a headline from the LA Times declaring gleefully that — according to someone called Erika Smith — California Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder is “the black face of white supremacy.” Because nothing says journalistic integrity like accusing a well-known, highly educated black man of being a front man for the Ku Klux Klan. Because nothing fights systemic racism more effectively...
U.S. President Joe Biden, always a fountain of wisdom, says that he does not believe there was any way the U.S. military could withdraw from Afghanistan without precipitating the “chaos” we are seeing now. First: Then the simple solution is, “Do not withdraw.” Second: Stop using the rhetorical masking word “chaos.” What is happening is not chaos; it is a strategic and systematic...
I do not believe in the income tax, because I believe taxing income is a direct violation of the principle of self-ownership that lies at the heart of property rights, which in turn is the cornerstone of modern practical liberty. I would never advocate the continuation of the income tax, nor would I ever make excuses for any government that sought to raise...
Joe Biden, as president, has acted like a cowardly capitulator to thugs on the world stage. His policies, in fact, are merely extensions of Donald Trump’s. The difference is that Biden has lived his entire adult life in the world of progressive government, where national cowardice and capitulation are regarded as virtues, or at least as useful means to the creation of the...
To lose the most, you must have the most. America was modernity’s great winner, it once seemed; but that turns out to have been a shortsighted perspective. For insofar as America was the modern age’s exemplary case, its practical proof, we must concede that modernity’s conclusion, which we are privileged to be witnessing firsthand at this moment, may be most accurately described as...
The Daily Mail reports that a survey of five million Americans regarding public attitudes about Covid-19 vaccination has turned up a “surprising” (i.e., inconvenient and soon-to-be-buried) result: When the population is sorted by education level, the highest degree of “vaccine hesitancy” is found not among the mainstream media’s favorite whipping boys, knuckle-dragging illiterates — aka “Trump voters” — but rather among those with...
If I cared about human suffering, not to mention the special plight of women, I would be unable to eat or sleep in the face of my awareness that the United States of America has, over the course of the past two presidencies, coldly abandoned to tyranny, plunder, and predictable catastrophe people to whom the U.S. had solemnly vowed solidarity and security against...
All thought, as expressed, is in part a temperamental response to circumstances. Thus it is a mistake to imagine any single great thought is The Thought, unless it be a thought arisen from universal circumstances. This is why all searches eventually return to Greece, which, partly due to its being the first flower of mature poetry, philosophy, and politics, appeals to all thinking...
U.S. presidential politics in the End Times.– “X is either an incompetent know-nothing or a strategic genius who plays the fool to throw off the other side. After all, he did become President of the United States, and how could an incompetent know-nothing do that?” X just talks, but has no idea what he is saying, and even less concern with whether anything...
A student who has been investigating the subject of “identity” informs me that she became somewhat lost amid all the diverse explanations of this notion that one encounters from various sources, until at last she settled on an approach reminiscent of Socrates’ famous “second sailing” (Phaedo, 99dff), a path she explains as follows: I just thought, after talking with you about this topic,...
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