Enjoying the view from Limbo
I do not believe that some people being egregiously wrong implies that anyone who happens to disagree with those people is right. We may call this the Law of Imbalance. I do not believe that I have to show compassion for, or even interest in, humans who have forfeited their humanity to the vices of existential cowardice, petty survivalism, and the sub-infantile willingness...
Joe Biden, in accordance with longstanding despotic tradition, has urged Americans to accept “shared sacrifice” in “the war” against COVID-19. The meaning of “shared sacrifice,” in government-speak: Private citizens will sacrifice more and more of their liberty, and the government will take that liberty. Hence, “sharing.” So far, the United States of America has fought this “war” exactly the way she fought Vietnam:...
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...
In the past twenty-four hours, I have seen a headline telling me that the infamous “experts” have decreed that masks, if worn universally and continuously by everyone, would save 100,000 lives — which means the experts have borrowed the climate science models and just changed a few keywords in the program. This is a headline because Donald Trump does not wear a mask....
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...
When one objects to lawless government responses to a public health problem — or any other social issue for that matter — it is natural to be asked occasionally, and also appropriate to ask oneself, “But if we are not simply taking a knee-jerk libertarian position, then where exactly should we draw the line limiting government action in such atypical situations?” Here, with...
Perspective is everything, some insist. In any case, this bromide is never more applicable than in a time of universal enslavement. For then, perspective is indeed “everything” — the perspective of an ant looking up at the godlike shoes clomping around its tiny world, capriciously determining its fate at their leisure, almost absentmindedly, and certainly without a moment’s serious consideration of any ant’s...
In the three and a half years since Donald Trump became President of the United States, and thus the informal but historically relevant “leader of the free world,” Xi Jinping has established himself as China’s “president” for life, becoming a more powerful dictator than Chairman Mao ever dreamed of being; Vladimir Putin has established himself as Russia’s “president” for life, ensuring that, barring...
They deliberately prolonged it, so it was prolonged. Now they hope to frighten you by noting that it is lasting longer — as though this were not their stated intention (and implicit wish) from the outset. Dr. Fauci, continuing his daily struggle to justify his superfluous bureaucratic existence, now insists that the lockdown has saved “millions of lives” — and that anyone who...
A summary of the private life of the potential tyrant, or “tyrannical soul,” from Plato’s Republic, Book IX: “When these men are in private life, before they rule, aren’t they like this: in the first place, as to their company, either they have intercourse with their flatterers, who are ready to serve them in everything, or, if they have need of anything from...
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