Enjoying the view from Limbo
Here are some numbers that might interest you — or might not. In fact, I really don’t care if they do or don’t. I report them for the record, for posterity, for my soul, or merely for the satisfaction of typing what I would rather not scream. Ten: The approximate number of humans on this planet — beyond my friendly band of Limbo...
America is sliding quickly toward socialist tyranny. Joe Biden, or more precisely the people controlling his hologram, would accelerate that slide, full speed ahead. Donald Trump would continue that slide at the measured pace over which he has presided for the past four years, steady as she goes. If an alcoholic is drinking himself into ruin, is he better off draining his bank...
What post-Soviet progressives have gradually learned, and what anti-totalitarian observers from Tocqueville to Huxley understood long before them, is that oppression maintained with hard walls will be short-lived. For hard walls, precisely because they are so overtly rigid, are vulnerable. Men locked within those walls naturally convulse at restraint so bluntly asserted. They will not produce, thus gradually rotting the oppressive power structure...
Washington Post headline at the moment of this writing: “Trump alleges ‘left-wing indoctrination’ in schools.” My first reaction: “Gee, what a revelation.” My second: “Does the Washington Post really expect its readers to find Trump’s claim wild and outrageous?” My third: “Yes they do, and their expectation will prove true. The indoctrinated rarely know they are indoctrinated — and what is more, they...
In Utopia, the presumed goal in confronting a new virus would be to prevent a single death, a single illness, even a single infection. With an imaginary social purity, defined in the narrowest physical terms, as the overriding purpose, there would be absolutely nothing — no folly, no delusion, no atrocity — Utopia would not commit (or submit to) in the name of...
We all know the expression of Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, commonly misattributed to Voltaire himself, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Believers in modern liberty are wont to see this sensibility, elevated to the status of a principle, as a guarantor of the free speech so essential to classical liberalism....
Nobody hears what you are saying. Nobody sees what you are seeing. Nobody senses what you are feeling, or would understand why you feel that way if they did sense it. Has there ever been a lonelier time than today? Indeed, how many of us fully realized before today that a time can be lonely? I am not talking about subjective time, of...
As I have noted since the earliest days of The Pandemic that Ate a Planet, none of the hysteria of this season, and therefore none of the political fraud and usurpation we are seeing each day, would have been possible without the willing assistance and very able wheel-greasing of the mass media. We are witnessing the perfect alignment of all of the media’s...
The New Teacher is a dispenser of grades and ranks, an administrator of late modernity’s societal ordering and sorting system — essentially a bureaucrat or accountant. The Old Teacher was a guide of the soul’s desire, channeling a few young people’s restless and potentially self-devouring hunger into a happy and habit-forming quest for timeless and necessary understanding — essentially a lion tamer or...
Our new gods are of the only sort that remains possible when the longing for eternity, the desperate grasp after meaning, and the lifelong pursuit of truth, have been debunked and expunged from the modern soul. We are left with ephemeral idols, cardboard cutout heroes-for-the-season, blustering attention-seekers without a substantial purpose beyond their own egomaniacal lust for popularity and affection.
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