Enjoying the view from Limbo
In 2019, a young comedian named Shane Gillis won the career-making prize most North American comics dream of, earning a job as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. In response to this hiring, someone named Seth Simons took to social media to draw attention to a past performance in which Gillis (“who is white,” as the media would announce today, as though...
Nature’s balance.– The United States of America: a nation founded by modernity’s noblest and most philosophically inclined statesmen, and peopled by history’s rarest melting pot of intrepid individualists willing to throw all security to the wind and gamble their lives on their own sweat and ingenuity. Today, a nation ruled by mentally disabled thugs, and peopled by the most cowardly collection of safety-obsessed...
French President Emmanuel Macron, a classic little nothing who pretends to importance by proudly serving as Europe’s message delivery boy, has bravely submitted a resolution to the UN Security Council begging for permission from Vladimir Putin to “guarantee unhindered humanitarian access to meet the urgent needs of the remaining population in Ukraine.” They did nothing to help Ukraine prepare for this unjust and...
Here is a headline I just read, summarizing a letter to the editor at the LA Times criticizing Bill Maher’s calls to let Americans move on from Covid restrictions: “‘Done’ with COVID? Thank God our grandparents weren’t ‘done’ with World War II.” The obvious difference between the two cases reveals the even more obvious difference between the American mainstream of today, as represented...
“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
It’s all relative.— I have never felt particularly brave in my life. Nor do I believe I have ever acted with any special degree of courage even in an isolated moment. On the contrary, I have often been disappointed at what I have regarded as a deficiency in this area. These days, however, judging myself relative to what I see around me, I...
American conservatives — and I am thinking primarily of the famous money-grubbing ones on television, radio, and internet, but this applies to the grassroots dupes as well — love to spew venom and vitriol at the many public victims of “cancel culture” who have felt compelled to apologize to their executioners in a desperate attempt to save themselves. These so-called conservatives ought to...
A couple of months ago, I wrote here about two of the most unlikely topics for this website: A contemporary pop musician and a contemporary display of genuine courage. The first topic is unlikely because I have little interest in, and even less respect for, most popular artists of the day; the second is unlikely because genuine courage, of the sort that involves...
I recently wrote about Van Morrison’s courageous, legacy-endangering “No More Lockdown” songs, celebrating the sanctity of natural rights and condemning the tyrannical government expansions being imposed in the name of public health. I also explained that the only famous musician to answer Morrison’s call for allies in this daring project was Eric Clapton. Allow me to add one consequential note: Neither man drinks....
Life imitates art.– When fiction is transformed by circumstances and attentive subjectivity into the reader’s own self-revelation, it effectively ceases to be fiction, and becomes something more like figurative memoir. Hence, I may say without any hint of hubris or exaggeration that as of this moment, Brave New World is my autobiography, The Trial my last few diary entries, and Invasion of the...
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