Enjoying the view from Limbo
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 14, 2023 · Last modified April 15, 2023
The United States of America Today: A Dialogue Truth: Donald Trump, with his self-seeking demagoguery, fear-and-lie-grounded radicalization of millions of his supporters, and open praise and normalization of tyrants and tyrannical methods at home and abroad, has done catastrophic and possibly irreparable harm to his country. Tribalism: But what about Biden, Hillary, and Obama! Truth: Fine. In that case reason affords you two...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 5, 2023
Hostility, incivility, and outright barbarism are breaking out in our midst, on a mass scale. This proves that John Stuart Mill was wrong, and indeed that all progressive views of historico-political development — using progressive in its earlier theoretical sense, rather than in its current euphemistic sense — were wrong. There is no “stage of development” at which a society or civilization…
America Descending / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 26, 2023 · Last modified March 28, 2023
Has Donald Trump committed offenses for which he could and should be indicted? Very likely. Has Joe Biden done so? Equally likely. Two pigs who have made their livelihoods, in various ways, slurping at the elite level of the public trough for ages, abusing their power and influence in ways that only seem normal and “within bounds” from the point of view of...
Lo and behold, it turns out that right from the beginning of Donald Trump’s election fraud hoax, the leading voices in the so-called conservative media — the prime time hosts at Fox News — openly stated among themselves that they knew this was a hoax, that there was no massive election fraud, and that Joe Biden had won the election. But they decided,...
America Descending / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 16, 2023
Death counts, be not proud.– If you want to sound credible criticizing pandemic alarmists for padding the Covid death numbers and overstating the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, then it would be a good idea to stop shouting “Aha! The vaccine again!” every time an athlete, actress, or geriatric rock star happens to die. Reminder to both tribes: Dying was invented, and...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 4, 2023 · Last modified January 5, 2023
You can make absolutely any factual claim you wish, supported with the boldest and most unflinching evidentiary assurances to back it up, by merely promising that this overwhelming supporting evidence will be made public very soon. How about not making any factual claim at all unless you are prepared to present the evidence at the same time you make the claim? But no,...
Roger Kimball, whose thoughtful discussions of art, education, and progressivism I once attended to with appreciation, and occasionally cited in my own writing, has, over the past five years, become one of the most ridiculously unrepentant and irrational sycophants for Donald Trump. There may be even more irrational cases, but none, I suspect, that have fallen so low from so high. In one...
Much has been read into Donald Trump’s recent meeting with rapper Kanye West and his friend of antisemitic convenience Nick Fuentes. Trump is a celebrity opportunist and publicity whore whose troubled mind and untethered ego get him, along with anyone foolish enough to take him seriously, into a lot of trouble. Kanye West, as far as I can see from my vantage point...
From Day One of his mock-political career, Donald Trump has been a classic and self-evident example of the unprincipled sycophant who pretends to be strong by parroting in an authoritative voice whatever he perceives to be the feelings or preferences of the people whose love and admiration he so weakly and desperately craves. In other words, the danger of Trump, like all of...
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...
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