Enjoying the view from Limbo
This past week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the poster boy for the logical fallacy of “argument from authority,” publicly stated that if Donald Trump were to win the presidency in 2024, he, Fauci, would retire from the elite executive branch bureaucratic position where he has enriched himself at the public trough more brazenly, and for more years, than almost anyone in American history. His...
Vested emotional interests, almost inescapable in life, are a constant threat to rational deliberation. If heightened by extreme circumstances, they may prove the enemy of reason itself. The current gulf between the two sides in the debate over the 2020 U.S. election and its fallout provides an object lesson in the danger of allowing one’s mind to become immersed in emotional interests, which...
The title of this post could be taken as referring to the entire Trump presidency, from the infamous day in the summer of 2015 when he slithered down the escalator to the January day, five and a half years later, when he incited his followers to threaten the life of his own vice president. But in this instance I am referring simply to...
Seeing the imperfection of things, it is always tempting, at least to those steeped in centuries of progressive thought in all its forms, to allow disappointment with the imperfect to transmogrify into an assumption that things could have been better. But from a non-progressive point of view, it does not follow from the fact that something is disappointingly inadequate that there must have...
Donald Trump used a media interview this week to directly ask Vladimir Putin to help him defeat their mutual enemy Joe Biden. Meanwhile, Putin’s state media (the only media allowed to speak in that country anymore), in criticizing Biden and calling for regime change in the U.S., has lamented losing its “partner” Trump….
Here is how Republican congressman Jim Jordan responded to Joe Biden’s supposedly unscripted remark that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”: “Here’s the president potentially having more war-triggering type language than probably any president in American history,” Jordan warned. “We need to be careful and precise in things we say, particularly as commander in chief of our country.” “We need to be careful...
Donald Trump and his fan club are fond of saying that Vladimir Putin would never have attacked Ukraine during Trump’s presidency. Of course, the Trump cult’s favorite big claims on behalf of their idol are always the claims that cannot be backed up with proof or tangible results. Since Daddy had his butt handed to him by a crotchety old fool in November...
I just read a headline, accompanied by a photo of the moronic sideways grin of Fox News’ answer to John Stewart’s understudy, Greg Gutfeld, which carries that supposed news network’s disintegration into a completely fabricated alternative universe one more step toward insanity: Gutfeld: Zelenskyy’s tactics are Trumpian. Zelenskyy’s tactics are Trumpian — except for the slight differences that Zelenskyy is not a Putin...
The United Nations Secretary-General actually used his speech addressing Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign neighbor to use one of the stupidest and most corrupt bromides of this age: “Give peace a chance.” That phrase was a childish and ignorant denial of common sense back when John Lennon coined it. Under the current circumstances, it is an outrage against the human race. “Give...
The world in general deserves this moment, having invited it lustfully for years; but the Ukrainian people do not. Vladimir Putin has been an authoritarian punk for his entire career, and since becoming Russia’s “president” for the first time, has systematically carried out the dismantling of all of his country’s flimsy structures of post-Soviet reform. Every world leader that played footsie with him...
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