Enjoying the view from Limbo
Last week, I noted that the made-up “anti-Asian hate crime” mantra being manufactured by the American media in the aftermath of a local crime story involving a sick young man in Atlanta has thus far failed to gain any traction in the general population. Today, after a week to get organized and really make a statement, I read this new remarkable headline at...
Among Nietzsche’s many excellent insights into the mind of nineteenth-century socialism, here is one from his early days (1878) that particularly appeals to my way of thinking: The Socialists demand a comfortable life for the greatest possible number. If the lasting house of this life of comfort, the perfect State, had really been attained, then this life of comfort would have destroyed the...
Here is an enthusiastic rant about socialists by Razumihin, Dostoevsky’s crystallization of the good-natured man of common sense, in Crime and Punishment: I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to...
Patterico has a very good post at his blog today, examining both sides of the “Trump vs. the socialist” dynamic that is causing principled conservatives and constitutionalists in America to lose sleep as they look ahead to November 2020. For some time, he has been toying with the idea of voting for a Democrat (hopefully a “moderate” one) as a small stand against...
“Property is theft” is the cleverest expression of greed and envy. It is greed masked as righteousness, and envy proffered as insight. Every enlightened person today — from every successful social science professor, acclaimed film director, and bestselling pop singer, to every socially adjusted teenager and right-thinking government office worker — says “the system” is set up to enrich the few at the...
Yet again, socialists are out to prove beyond any doubt that their ideology is entirely rooted in, and fueled by, one overriding passion: envy. There is no subject more revealing of the Marxist mind than “the rich.” The moment a Marxist (or socialist or progressive) is asked to explain why it is problematic that some people are enormously wealthy, while others are not,...
The problem with espousing Marxist political philosophy, in any of its many modified iterations, is that every time Marxism is attempted in any kind of systematic way, it fails. It fails economically, and it fails morally. It devolves into corruption, scarcity, criminality, violence, and starvation. It fails so profoundly that the world’s enlightened academics are consistently reduced to shaking their heads, half-embarrassed, while...
One Myth of “Fiscal Conservatism.” — There is a vast difference between saying, on the one hand, that the free market is intrinsic to liberty, which it certainly is, and saying, on the other hand, that the free market is a cause and guarantor of liberty. The free market, i.e., unrestricted voluntarism in trade, causes wealth; but wealth does not cause or maintain...
The U.S. national women’s soccer team has qualified for the World Cup final match, as expected. It is interesting that women’s soccer is dominated by a team from a country that doesn’t really care much about soccer. Perhaps this teaches us something about the politicized nature of women and “women’s sports” in North America. I’m not sure what it teaches, to be honest,...
I see that the “Trump right” (i.e., the nationalist left) is all up in arms today, half hooting and half aghast, at the latest Marxist abomination from the revolution’s new mascot, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. From Right Scoop: The latest socialist idea from the mouth of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is to put the government in charge of basic banking to use the US Post Office to...
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