Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
“Embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it
... See moreJeff Jarvis • The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
CRT, again, has three legs: Collective grievance. Subjective historiography. And racial essentialism. The glue that holds it together is the postmodernist rejection of rationality as an arbiter of truth.
Mark Goldblatt • I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism
Peter Thiel • The Straussian Moment
And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about. Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Orthodoxy
Several years ago the students of Stanford voted him the best teacher on the faculty, which must have enraged his colleagues because you cannot maintain proper status in an American university without cultivated mediocrity. You must be academically “sound,” which is to be preposterously and phenomenally dull. Once I had a professor who was teaching
... See moreAlan Watts • In My Own Way: An Autobiography
Nor did Jefferson, any more than Paine, say anything about what kind of government might replace that of the British tyrant. Details weren’t either patriot’s strength. Had they been, independence might never have been attempted, for details dim the flames fireships require. They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings. That’s why Paine a
... See moreJohn Lewis Gaddis • On Grand Strategy
The three things needed to prevent revolution are government propaganda in education, respect for law, even in small things, and justice in law and administration, i.e., “equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own” (1307a, 1307b, 1310a).
Bertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
What distinguished libertarians from mainstream pro-business Republicans—Mailer’s parade of delegates in Miami Beach—was their pure and uncompromising idea. What was it? Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, little else.