Enjoying the view from Limbo
I just read the following headline: “11 things we learned from Harry and Meghan’s explosive interview.” I have been inundated with headlines about this alleged interview between the quasi-royal nobodies for days now, and I have yet to see a single one that did not refer to the alleged interview as “explosive” or a “bombshell.” Could Oprah Winfrey, the onion-peeling billionaire queen of...
Marvelous Marvin Hagler died over the weekend. (Yes, for the uninitiated, “Marvelous” was his legal first name, adopted in response to his perennial sense of being disrespected by the image-obsessed sports media.) I have lost all my youthful enthusiasm for spectator sports, as I believe is proper and natural as one matures, as well as being almost morally mandatory in this age in...
America Descending / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 15, 2021 · Last modified March 18, 2021
Republican senator Ron Johnson, apparently eager to demonstrate the extremes to which a human mind may be reduced by cult idolatry and tribal allegiance, told a radio interviewer this week that he was not frightened of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, because — wrap what is left of your rational mind around this one — “I knew those were...
On the philosophers and the sophists– Heraclitus: “One man is worth ten thousand if he be the best.” Jordan Peterson: “Why be a rigorous teacher for three hundred university students when I could be a self-help guru for three million YouTube subscribers!” On self-government– The less centralized the state, the more localized the rule. The aim is to approximate as far as possible...
Amazon, which is angling to become the only retailer of anything, anywhere on Earth, has announced that it will no longer sell any book that discusses the possibility that non-standard “gender identities” are symptoms of mental illness. This decision, of course, is merely one of thousands of analogous choices being made by major corporate entities, major government agencies, and major social media lynch...
Anyone who writes for attention is not a real writer. Writing is spiritualized hiding. It is no accident that Shakespeare, the greatest of all writers, is the one about whose life and person we know the least. He wrote dozens of the most magnificent works in literary history, and yet we are not certain who he was — or even whether he was....
Donald Trump, a humiliated little girl who still cannot understand, let alone accept, that he was only president in the first place because the Republican Party establishment anointed him as its (highly effective) blunt instrument with which to destroy their hated Tea Party grassroots opposition, is now out there simpering to his cult from their shared alternative universe — Soreloserdom, let us officially...
LeVar Burton, an actor best known for roles in Roots and one of the many Star Trek rebirths, but also a longtime host of the popular children’s program, Reading Rainbow, has decided to throw his two cents into today’s mandatory moralizing about minds and works from the past that are so vastly superior to anything that can ever be produced in our era...
If a Marxist calls you a fascist, should you care, let alone worry yourself about disproving the charge? (Likewise, for that matter, if an authoritarian populist or corporatist oligarch calls you a Marxist.) If someone criticizes your honest opinion on the grounds that it undermines “the movement,” is it more reasonable to defend your actions against that criticism, or to ask why the...
From Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. You want, if possible — and there is no more insane “if possible” — to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and...
Follow: