Friedrich nietzsche

Tuesday

Tibor Fischer

What will we do when all our jobs are done for us?

From our UK edition

Laughs are in short supply in the academic world unless that world is serving as the victim of satire. So full marks to the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom for loading Deep Utopia – his reflections on life in a ‘solved world’, perfected by technology and science – with self-mockery and slapstick. Bostrom isn’t the first to fret about the travails of extreme leisure. John Maynard Keynes feared that economic abundance would produce more disgusting aristo-like behaviour. It’s nice to see how mighty minds can be so wrong. Bostrom cites John Stuart Mill being seriously depressed by the prospect, as humanity solved its problems, of there not being enough music to keep everyone happy all day.

Thursday

Taki

A brief history of the death of God

From our UK edition

A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman and never recovered his faculties again. It was early 1889. He was 44 years old, his books had just begun to be noticed, and he lived for a decade longer, empty-eyed, silent and entirely unaware of the fame that was about to engulf him. Was his tragic end divine punishment for his sacrilege? My devout Catholic wife begs to differ. Our Lord is not vengeful, she insists. That’s the only thing wrong with him, I reply.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Why Biden is hiding

Have you seen the new variation on the children’s book series Where’s Waldo? It’s called Where’s Joe? and it is taking DC by storm. So where is Joe, leader of the free world, black-belt in political glossolalia, a potentate without power, our version of Nietzsche’s 'Last Man’ who not only blinks but gibbers. When I was a child, some scalpel-happy doctor determined that I should have my tonsils removed. In order to reconcile me to the procedure, I was promised all the ice-cream I could eat. That turned out to be a lie, of course, and I somehow suspect that poor Joe Biden feels the same now. Here he is, after decades of feeding at the public trough, and he is trough master supreme. It was supposed to be all ice-cream and young girls’ heads of hair.

hiding

Thursday

Taki

The mob mentality of the elite

From our UK edition

Gstaad I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments was going on. Decadent bourgeois society was in the great man’s sights, but then he went bananas. Later on, young Nietzscheans believed that what was needed to save the world was an insurrection of sons against their fathers. But things do change, and mostly for the worse. Imagine if Mr N. and his followers were around today — the past four weeks to be exact. They’d be exhorting fathers to kill their sons. And daughters. My higher thoughts were interrupted by a telephone call from a woman who spoke with what sounded like a parody of a female voice.