Enjoying the view from Limbo
If someone told you, in the form of an ultimatum, that the only way to combat some new crisis or impending disaster was to submit yourself, your family, and your friends, to a permanent and institutionally self-perpetuating tyranny, i.e., the enslavement of the vast majority of the human population under a universal regime untethered from any notion of intractable and fundamental limits on...
To despise and vilify millions of fellow human beings as one’s enemy and a force to be defeated and eliminated, on the basis of disagreements about practical matters, is implicitly to despise and vilify oneself. For who among us has not significantly altered his own beliefs and attitudes over the course of adulthood, such that his own past views and statements might strike...
Nancy Pelosi, a profiteering progressive fool who happens to be the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, made a brief visit to Taiwan this week. Communist China objected, and claimed her visit was a terrible provocation — because they want to do to Taiwan what Vladimir Putin is currently trying to do to Ukraine. Time Magazine, or whatever they call their online...
In the past, communities were held together, and public morality maintained, by the personal sense of shame and obligation, the habituation of moderate emotional responses, the concern for family honor, and the desire to prove oneself worthy of the responsibilities of individual self-government. Today, in a quest to root out all moral aberrations and imperfections, societies employ school-indoctrinated slogans, omnipresent cameras, algorithmic monitors,...
Noam Chomsky has joined the rising chorus of those who would like to use the pandemic as an opportunity to push the world toward Chinese-style totalitarianism, suggesting that the most suitable way to manage the “problem” of unvaccinated individuals is for the community to isolate these people and, if necessary, let them starve. Referring to the prospective condition of the unvaccinated after they...
Proponents of soft despotism have long understood that with the proper attention to universal schooling and heightened public sentimentality, it is possible to gain absolute power over the majority of any population if one is patient enough to plant the seeds and cultivate them carefully. However, soft despots have also long understood that there will always be a significant proportion of any population...
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...
These days, the standard of newsworthiness in “protest movements,” at least in North America, seems to be “The smaller the bigger.” The news media has taken to shamelessly reporting with the utmost seriousness events that may be represented with headlines such as, “Dozens gather across the country to protest Anti-Asian hate.” The importance of a “protest” or “movement” is now determined, in other...
Who are they? Why should I care about them? Why, above all, should I either aspire to be like them, or at least strive not to look too different from them? Their habits and pastimes annoy me. Their presuppositions and their conception of “common sense” are spoon-fed to them daily by a disreputable governess I rejected when I was thirteen. I dislike their songs, and...
Headline I just read on MSN: “Masks seem to work, even as some refuse them.” Darned humans, always refusing to do as they are told. Perhaps if we condescend and preach to them long enough, and publicly shame them forcefully enough, they will finally learn how to comply.
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