Month: April 2025

Vanity

This empty world obtrudes upon our senses so persistently and with such regularity of effect that thoughts about how real it could be hardly gain purchase. A material world has no trouble getting the attention of  a material man. It punches us hard in our eyes and ears. One must retreat from the multiplicity-positing diaspora of the senses by taking thought in order properly to doubt its ultimacy. But how gossamer is thought as compared to the rude impacts of sensory reality!

And so we impute to this passing scene more reality and importance than it has. Its reality is in part our projection. Teetering on the brink of eternity we take time and its fleeting blandishments to be the end all and the be all.

Here is an old man, a flight of stairs away from a major coronary event, lusting after more loot and land. Hanging by a thread, he is yet convinced that he is securely suspended.

Luigi Mangione and the Death Penalty

Justice demands the death penalty in certain cases. Anyone who opposes said penalty in principle I consider morally obtuse.  As for Mangione, he deserves it. The editors of the Boston Herald demur:

The death penalty should be off the table for Luigi Mangione, accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And not for any reason sympathetic to Mangione.

Attaching the death penalty to Mangione’s trial would only make a martyr out of an accused killer who has already inspired zealous support among legions of fans.

Tell me what you think of this sort of moral reasoning. I don't have time to weigh in, or to lay out my arguments for the death penalty in general or for Mangione's execution in particular.  But I do have one Substack article on the topic that may be of interest:  Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Let Them Eat Woke

Alex Castellanos:

Democrats, your party has a product problem, not a marketing problem. Don’t look around. Look in the mirror. Your problem is staring back. You’ve lost the ability to govern your country. That’s why your party expired in 2024 with Kamala Harris. That election was not a changing of the guard, it was the end of an era. The organizing principles that have defined the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now exhausted and near the grave.

Right. The Dems persist in thinking that their problem is one of 'messaging.' In a sense, it is: they have no message and they have no messenger.  I heard Jen "Circle Back" Psakis last night describe Kamala Harris as "brilliant." Truth is, she's a lazy, inauthentic know-nothing, and the opposite of brilliant. Just listen to her speak. She thinks the Cloud is a physical object up in the sky!

And you voted for her? What were you thinking? Were you thinking? Or were you emoting?  I understand that you don't like Trump.  Do you live your whole life on the basis  of likes and dislikes? Do you make major life decisions on the basis of knee-jerk reactions? Perhaps you are spending too much time on Facebook. Thumbs up! Thumbs down! Don't be a knee-jerk jerk off.

Addendum

My claim that the Dems have no message is not quite right. They have a message, a nefarious one that they wisely do not broadcast plainly, knowing that it would not sell well among the majority if honestly presented.  Hence all the vacuous and obfuscatory nonsense spouted by Kamala and Tampon Tim, together with merely performative clownish gyrations, pantomimed page-turnings, and expressions of unhinged hilarity and 'joyousness.' They must think we are idiots. But the joke is on them since expressions of contempt do not win votes.

As for their message, it is garbage from the git-go. Leading the cavalcade of Unsinn: the claim that there is no biological difference between men and women, a falsehood that underpins the morally offensive policy that biological males must be permitted to compete in women's sporting events.