Enjoying the view from Limbo
All the populists and ersatz conservatives who continue to claim, in response to every disaster unfolding today, “This wouldn’t have happened on Trump’s watch,” should be held to account to explain why, if Trump’s watch was so brilliant, all of this is unfolding so precipitously and unstoppably in the immediate aftermath of that wonderful period of the Trump presidency. Far more accurate and...
The recent actions of the United States of America and the Russian Federation with regard to Afghanistan and Ukraine, respectively, offer us a tidy summary of some essential differences between a declining democracy and a declining tyranny — differences which, characteristically, the tyranny recognizes and hopes to exploit, but the democracy does not. Democracy regards twenty years as too long to sustain a...
Joe Biden, as president, has acted like a cowardly capitulator to thugs on the world stage. His policies, in fact, are merely extensions of Donald Trump’s. The difference is that Biden has lived his entire adult life in the world of progressive government, where national cowardice and capitulation are regarded as virtues, or at least as useful means to the creation of the...
To lose the most, you must have the most. America was modernity’s great winner, it once seemed; but that turns out to have been a shortsighted perspective. For insofar as America was the modern age’s exemplary case, its practical proof, we must concede that modernity’s conclusion, which we are privileged to be witnessing firsthand at this moment, may be most accurately described as...
If I cared about human suffering, not to mention the special plight of women, I would be unable to eat or sleep in the face of my awareness that the United States of America has, over the course of the past two presidencies, coldly abandoned to tyranny, plunder, and predictable catastrophe people to whom the U.S. had solemnly vowed solidarity and security against...
We are currently witnessing the unilateral, completely unprovoked surrender of the United States before every significant world dictator, terrorist organization, and angrily pointed finger. (They sometimes call it “withdrawal” and send out their representatives to say stunningly conscienceless things like, “I think Kabul will hold. The question is, can it hold long enough to create a political solution between the sides?”) And the...
Bill Gates, who has devoted much of his adult life to increasingly manipulative efforts to insinuate himself into the private life of every human being on the planet, has suddenly had the tables turned, and found his private life the subject of everyone else’s insinuations. This is poetic justice, to be sure, but not the kind of poetry a decent society would relish....
I’ve written recently about how far past its expiry date John Bolton’s warmongering crusader shtick is smelling these days. Well, apparently intending to squeeze every last drop of attention from the Trump administration’s flirtations with Bush era militarism, Bolton is continuing his siege of Fox News, first expressing disappointment that Trump’s Afghanistan speech wasn’t tough enough — on China — and now pleading...
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