Enjoying the view from Limbo
Private property.– Beware the man who suspects or critiques private property. It is not your material possessions he has in mind, at least primarily. For what is personal property in the ordinary (though artificially limited) sense? It is nothing but the outward manifestation of your life — your time, your thought, and your effort. The tangible results of the time, thought, and effort...
Democratic Surrender.– A headline in The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of record for Americans with a milquetoast’s craving for the status quo and a middle class investor’s innate aversion to risk, announces that European leaders, by which the WSJ means the particular leaders they wish to highlight, are showing “growing acceptance” of Donald Trump’s “plan” (what plan?) for a negotiated settlement over...
An expert is a person who knows more than you do about one thing, and very likely less than you about almost everything else — including, potentially, about the presuppositions underlying his own area of expertise, which he sees not as presuppositions but as facts. That false perception of his presuppositions is part of what identifies him as an expert. Political life is...
On social media.– I have never once wondered what Plato ate for lunch. Nor what Dante looked like on the beach, what Shakespeare gave his children for their birthdays, where Vivaldi spent his summer vacation, or which card game Swift played with Stella. Yet our world is now awash in the lunches, beach pictures, birthday parties, vacation diaries, and personal hobbies of a...
On being aloft.— I know that if I had never heard the works of Mozart and Beethoven, my understanding of the art of music, the soul of modernity, and the heights of human aspiration would be far dimmer, and my own thoughts and tastes far coarser. I fear, by contrast, that if I ever willingly heard a song by Taylor Swift or Billie...
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 26, 2024 · Last modified April 27, 2024
Socrates, in The Republic, defines the five essential forms of government in rank order, from most to least just: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. His cleverest rhetorical trick, the most famous (and probably least understood) conceit in the dialogue, is his redefinition of aristocracy by means of the radical proposal that in order to realize a truly just city in practice, philosophers would...
Q. What would Donald Trump have to do to change your mind about him? A. He would have to replace his rational faculty with that of Thomas Jefferson, his temperament with that of Ronald Reagan, and his principles with those of George Washington. Unfortunately, his life, past and present, shows him to be on the very opposite end of the spectrum on all...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the third party presidential candidate who is essentially running as Donald Trump with a fully developed brain — admittedly a significant step up from the worn-out brain stem that is currently running as the real Donald Trump — has made headlines this week by declaring, to the incredulous consternation of the CNN talking hairdo who was interviewing him, that...
A Symptom.— Public shaming implies a character that is incapable of mercy, which implies a lack of empathy, which implies an inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, which implies seeing the other as specially separate and thus essentially unfamiliar. The inability to recognize one’s likeness in the other, i.e., to see the subjectively unfamiliar as objectively familiar, indicates an uncivilized man....
Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum has gotten himself in trouble with the mainstream media again. And as is often the case, he has done it in a way that reassures me that I was right to lend my loud support to his bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, at the moment when he was the last conservative standing against eventual nominee Mitt...
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