Enjoying the view from Limbo
The American voting public, roughly a hundred and forty million people, is divided neatly down the middle between a faction that wishes The United States of America to cease to exist and dissolve itself into the United Nations, after abjectly apologizing for its existence while shamefacedly redistributing all of its wealth to the rest of the world in an act of penance for...
Ireland, whose most influential modern artist described its capital, a century ago, as “that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” and which seems to have been a country on the edge (or further) of collapsing into some strange combination of drunken suicide and murderous self-indulgence for centuries, finds whatever life force it has left (not at all paradoxically, but rather characteristically)...
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...
What the budding socialist says explicitly: “I am willing to pay more taxes in order to help the underprivileged.” Implied meaning (Level 1, moral belief): “Everyone should be willing to pay more taxes in order to help the underprivileged.” Implied meaning (Level 2, moral imperative): “Everyone must pay more taxes in order to help the underprivileged.” Implied meaning (Level 3, political activism): “The...
I have said and done things in my life — and thought far more than I have said or done — that today’s Overseers of Righteous Certainty (ORCs) would condemn as politically unacceptable, and as grounds for summoning me before the Marxist Tribunal of Progress to confess my guilt, sign my confession, and then accept my oblivion as an obsolete man, a relic...
Before the start of an NFL game Thursday night in Kansas City, players made a league-endorsed political statement by standing arm-in-arm across the field in support of racial justice, or against racial injustice, or whatever namby-pamby sensitivity-cops nonsense they thought they were representing. It’s a wonder the Kansas City team, called the (euphemized for children) “Native American Tribal Leaders,” had the gall to...
Perhaps the most prominent of this week’s batch of progressive public executions in America is that of Cincinnati Reds’ broadcaster Thom Brennaman, essentially for the crime of using jock language to say a jock type of thing, while not realizing his voice was still on air. Here is an account of the crime from the New York Daily News: On Thursday, Fox Sports...
In a classic example of the way progressivism, like all aggressive irrationalism, devours itself, we have the spectacle of the ubiquitous and increasingly literal policing of politically incorrect attitudes, a social deformity which has now grown into its final (in the sense of fatal) shape: today’s infantile world of safe spaces and public shaming. For generations, progressives attacked so-called social conservatives for their...
After being convicted and condemned to death by a jury of hundreds of his fellow Athenians, Socrates, awaiting execution, was offered a chance to escape from prison and live in exile. He rejected the plan, primarily on the grounds that by choosing to live in Athens his whole life, to marry and raise his children there, and to practice his preferred way of...
Here are two items making headlines today, both of them falling into the general category of irrationality, and more specifically into the slot labeled “Lack of a Coherent Principle.” A dean at Harvard Law School has come under attack by social justice warriors, and finally “relieved of his position” by Harvard University, for offering his skills in the defense of Hollywood producer Harvey...
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