Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 13, 2026 · Last modified January 14, 2026
The leaders of the MAGA cult, looking at every video of an ICE shooting in Minneapolis, insist that they see, and therefore that you must also see, an honorable law enforcement officer being rammed by a car driven by a domestic terrorist and therefore fully justified in defending himself with lethal force against this act of extremist violence. The cult submits its perceptual...
The president of the United States told The New York Times within the past few days, with perfect equanimity and matter-of-factness, that his authority and decisions with regard to foreign policy, up to and including any threats and military engagements against America’s allies, are limited only by “my own morality, my own mind.” This may provide reassurance, or more likely rapture, to his...
Donald Trump, fresh off his great victory-that-will-end-in-quagmire in Venezuela, has instantly returned to his repeated threats to attack Greenland if Denmark does not cede that territory voluntarily. To state the obvious, it is long past the time when anyone can rationally try to explain away such threats as “trolling” or “joking.” He is saying explicitly that the United States “needs Greenland,” and that...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 6, 2026 · Last modified January 7, 2026
For decades, the world has been stabilized, in the sense that the democratic or nascently democratic nations’ greatest external threats and adversaries have been relatively constrained, by a tacit acceptance of, and acquiescence to, U.S. military and diplomatic preeminence. That is to say, Europe, most of the Americas, and much of East Asia had welcomed, or at least submitted relatively comfortably to, America’s...
“The soul” is mankind’s general name for everything we are and are meant to be. “The body” is our name for every obstacle, hardship, and distraction that would prevent us from becoming what we are and are meant to be. The old war between the Ancients and the Moderns turns on the fact that the Ancients understood this relation and therefore perceived the...
Nietzsche is, without question, the most influential philosopher in today’s world, and his influence has grown steadily for more than a century. While it is probably true that more people read Nietzsche’s words these days than those of any other major philosopher, book sales are certainly not the way a philosopher achieves profound influence. Rather, the great philosophers influence the world to the...
Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of Cowardly Murder and Russian Capitulation, has said that Americans are too fat and too dumb to serve in the military. He is surely right about this. Fortunately, Hegseth himself is not fat. There is no such thing as a “narco-terrorist,” just as there is no such thing as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” These terms of art have been manufactured...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 16, 2025 · Last modified December 21, 2025
In the immediate aftermath of the murder of the politically trivial and offensively pseudo-Christian MAGA grifter Charlie Kirk, Rob Reiner, a knee-jerk and sometimes offensive Hollywood progressive (though one who actually earned his living and reputation through honest work rather than by playing up to powerful political factions), offered an appropriate and elegant public statement about Kirk’s killing. Here is the Huffington Post’s...
The European Union appears to be on the verge of doing the bravest thing anyone could do in this moment of escalating and ever-more blatant pro-Kremlin machinations by the White House, namely taking their collective security into their own hands the way one must do when one finally comes to terms with the fact that one has been abandoned by one’s strongest ally....
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 2, 2025 · Last modified December 3, 2025
In a brilliant response to the infamous meeting in Miami in which Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner attempted to sell their country and all their allies to the Kremlin in exchange for some financial kickbacks for themselves and their immediate supervisor, i.e., Vladimir Putin’s American branch plant manager, Donald Trump, Ukraine has sent its own team of negotiators to the same city to...
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