Enjoying the view from Limbo
The Republican Party in the U.S. Congress has advocated and voted for an anti-free-speech bill of the most extreme and unconstitutional sort. The Suck Up to Jewish Donors Bill, publicly known as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, explicitly adopts the arbitrary and absurdly broad definition of antisemitism created out of whole cloth by an “intergovernmental organization” calling itself the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and...
Columbia University is under siege, 1960s style, by violent “protesters” whose goals are, shall we say, mixed. From a brief news clip survey of the ongoing mess at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, it appears that some of these “students” are merely hoping to win a Muslim holy war against Israel by screaming about it from the cozy campus of an elite American university. Others,...
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 29, 2024 · Last modified May 4, 2024
One of the most universal and predictable bromides, spoken by people of all temperaments and political persuasions, in reply to any contemporary warning about the societal dangers inherent in this or that significant change in information technology, educational norms, economic relations, popular entertainment, or public mores: “But that’s what they said about X back in the day.” This rejoinder is meant to carry...
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 26, 2024 · Last modified April 27, 2024
Socrates, in The Republic, defines the five essential forms of government in rank order, from most to least just: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. His cleverest rhetorical trick, the most famous (and probably least understood) conceit in the dialogue, is his redefinition of aristocracy by means of the radical proposal that in order to realize a truly just city in practice, philosophers would...
In honor of the passing of Daniel Dennett, I offer the following foray into my misspent youth, in which I assess Dennett’s materialist critique of consciousness in some detail. Read at your own risk. Daniel C. Dennett’s Sweet Dreams, though concluding with some positive suggestions regarding avenues of future consciousness research, exists primarily as a clearing house for his most developed efforts to...
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most famous and accomplished philosophy professors of the past fifty years, has died. I choose my words carefully, though I confess somewhat (certainly without intention) disrespectfully. Dennett was not a philosopher; he was a philosophy professor, a very different entity. And in saying that he died, I know that I am insulting his thought and that of...
Pushkin wrote the following lines almost exactly two hundred years ago, describing with grim fatalism his vision of liberty’s chances in his fatherland:
“With Freedom’s Seed”
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow.”
With freedom’s seed the desert sowing,
I walked before the morning star;
A few Republicans in the U.S. Congress are finally willing to admit to themselves, and more importantly to the world, what so many have refused to face until now with regard to their populist faction’s opposition to offering any further aid to Ukraine, and to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s newfound willingness to concede the need for some form of Ukraine package. As Texas...
An Orwellian entity called the European Court of Human Rights has declared that duly elected governments which pursue paths of fiscal responsibility and rational restraint with regard to the neo-Marxist demands of climate activists are by definition guilty of violating human rights, such rights now implicitly including the right to have one’s society and economy micromanaged by unfettered climate communists. In Scotland, it is...
Q. What would Donald Trump have to do to change your mind about him? A. He would have to replace his rational faculty with that of Thomas Jefferson, his temperament with that of Ronald Reagan, and his principles with those of George Washington. Unfortunately, his life, past and present, shows him to be on the very opposite end of the spectrum on all...
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