Enjoying the view from Limbo
Caricature: “exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics.” (Merriam-Webster) What is a human being, as ordinarily witnessed? A creature that devotes too much of its brief life and limited energy to the acquisition of goods that would only have ultimate value to a being that was going to live forever. And what is a tyrant? A human that devotes...
Let us start with the easy question. “Did Donald Trump do things worthy of impeachment?” If you have to ask, you are spending too much time parsing your experience through a tribal media filter. Of course he violated his oath of office, in ways directly harmful to the legitimate government and interests of his nation, too many times to count. And of course,...
The blind leading the blindfolded.— We allow the state to decide for us, not because we believe the state knows what is best — practical results consistently prove beyond any doubt that the state does not know — but because we have been convinced that we do not know, and therefore that the easiest course of action is to leave the complex decisions,...
Philosophic hedonism.— The soul naturally inclines toward beliefs, solutions, behaviors, and aims that promise the greatest pleasure. Education is primarily the process of unlearning the childhood weakness for mistaking the quickest or most immediate pleasure for the greatest pleasure. The educated person is thus the one who habitually forgoes the near or easy pleasure in favor of the distant, rarefied one, and the...
Christopher Plummer has died. His life, in a way, serves as a clever synopsis of the fate of man with regard to all our foolish dreams of “being somebody.” There may never have been a more gifted actor, whether on stage or on screen. I am no great admirer of actors in general, nor of acting as a “profession,” but I reserve a...
Regular readers may have noticed that I am writing very little these days concerning The Pandemic That Ate a Planet. Living in Korea, which was the first epicenter of the outbreak outside of Wuhan, China, back in February 2020, I hit the ground running on this coronavirus debacle and its political exploitations right at the outset, and then maintained a consistent stream of...
The Republican Party is currently embroiled in confusion over how to deal with a newly elected congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump cultist who believes the 2020 election was stolen because Trump says so, that Jewish aliens are setting California wildfires with laser beams (I may have rendered that one slightly more sensible than the real theory), and that leading Democrats should face...
Dear Progressives, I just wanted to send this note along to ask you a question, namely why you need me to agree with you so badly that you are prepared to hate me, shun me, perhaps even condemn and imprison me, if I don’t agree with you. Let me frame the question a little differently: Why are you so afraid of being left...
Practical freedom is the best condition for the development of good men — but freedom itself is no guarantor that good men will indeed develop, any more than having a comfortable notebook and a smooth-flowing pen will inevitably produce good writing. More often than not, good writing tools have facilitated the production of mountains of sludge. What if good political conditions are analogous...
The Biden administration, following through on a campaign promise, has issued a mask mandate for all public transportation users in America, suddenly making it a federal crime to refuse to wear a mask in a train station, airport, bus or ferry terminal, and the like. Rather than getting bogged down in questions about whether universal mask-wearing is effective against this pandemic, or even...
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