Author: Tim
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Do Better People See More?
Do good people perceive anything at all that evil people do not? Anything? Once this line is crossed, we must allow for the existence of persons, castles, dragons, and unicorns that the good can see and the bad cannot. If there is any moral dimension at all to percipience, and if we allow that everyone is…
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Omit Needless Words?
We’re all told to omit needless words, that this is the key to good writing. Simple, we’re told. Just cut those extra or latinate words and you’ll find under the fluff the sinews of virile prose. And the connotation is that this is almost a scientific exercise, one which yields objective truth which multiple…
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Miles Mathis: “Randomness is not art.”
Oh Fathers and Teachers, I claim that analysis is not art. Philosophy is not art. Politics is not art. Destruction is not art. Framing is not art. Finding is not art. Thinking is not art. Randomness is not art. Pathology is not art. Everything that a fool does easily is not art. Fathers and Teachers,…
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Dorothy Sayers: “…filled with an inexplicable hostility…”
If we refuse assent to reality: if we rebel against the nature of things and choose to think that what we at the moment want is the centre of the universe to which everything else ought to accommodate itself, the first effect on us will be that the whole universe will seem to be…
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The Three Stages of Democracy
As a society deteriorates, first elections don’t matter much, then they matter desperately, then they don’t matter at all. 1. When the central government regulates and legislates just enough to keep property safe from theft, elections are an important but minor part of life. 2. As the central government metastasizes so that any prosperity is…
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The Moral Meaning of Individual Deaths
Some of us believe souls survive death, and some of us don’t. The two beliefs are nakedly adversarial. They are two religious positions which are so far apart that conversation usually cannot bridge them. At some deep stratum these are actually the two camps that make up the human race, and many moral and political…
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No Random Event is Interesting.
No random event is interesting. Some thinkers, materialist by temperament, will express wonder at some part of what they insist is a random universe. But this is borrowed wonder, a stolen emotion, stolen from the stored cultural capital bought by people who lived in a different cosmos. Fortunately, insight is a free gift within language…
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“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses…
