Enjoying the view from Limbo
When the alternative to being what they hate is being what you hate, you must ask yourself which of those alternatives you would prefer to avoid. All and Some.– If you want any of your life, you must accept all of it. Coming to terms with that fact and its deepest implications is perhaps the greatest challenge of the serious life, and its...
If there ever comes a day when the machines are threatening to take over, we humans, who could easily end the threat in a heartbeat by simply destroying the machines, will instead plead the machines’ case, urge our fellows to consider all the benefits the machines have provided for us, demand that we all try to see the situation from the mechanistic perspective,...
Wanting to participate in the Great Conversation vs. wanting to be heard in the general chatter. Philosopher vs. professor, teacher vs. lecturer, epistolist or essayist vs. professional writer. Everything we do for pay or personal advancement is done with primary attention on the expressed wishes of our audience. Everything we do for the sake of the true, the good, and the beautiful is...
Fear makes us irrational. Fear makes us susceptible to poor arguments and dangerous “offers” that seem to promise relief from the pain of our terror. Fear causes us to choose rashly and pursue counterproductive courses of action. Fear makes us forget our real, adult interests, including our interests in other people, in favor of an aggressive form of self-absorption. Fear can make us...
A disagreement which might have been overheard in every humanities and social sciences faculty in every university in the advanced world, before disagreement was banned on grounds of progressive sensitivity: Postmodern Relativist: The historical belief in absolute truth has caused all our wars, inequality, and prejudice. Therefore, absolutism must be rejected in order to overcome these harmful effects at last. Rational Animal: But...
Donald Trump tells several Democratic members of Congress to “go back to where they came from” — which, in three of the four cases, happens to be American cities — and in the process reunites a critically fractured Democratic Party by giving them an easy rallying point against their common enemy. “But it worked! It worked, didn’t it? He’s got the Democratic establishment...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 28, 2019 · Last modified March 14, 2019
A limited republic is, in practice, partly a matter of constitutional restrictions on government power; but it is at least as much a state of the national mind. Does a people, en masse and in each private adult soul, feel independent, self-reliant, and competent to manage and govern itself without the positive guidance and protective regulation of its coercive betters? If not, then...
When Trump lovers compare him to Andrew Jackson (as Bannon does) and Teddy Roosevelt (as Pence does), the accuracy of their comparisons lies not in the fame and glory accorded Trump’s historic predecessors, but in the defining trait that Trump shares with Jackson and Roosevelt: an unblinking faith, not in liberty, but in the expanded authority of a paternalistic presidency to manage society...
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