Enjoying the view from Limbo
Modernity is hell-bent on proving what would be without need of proof if we still experienced life as humans. Case in point: it wants to demonstrate through experimentation that mortality gives life its purpose, its interest, and its reason to carry on. People before the age of science used to intuit this simply by recognizing that they were going to die, feeling afraid…
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 14, 2024
To say that Donald Trump is the worst thing that ever happened to American politics would be analogous to saying that the horrible smell in your kitchen is the worst thing that ever happened to the raw meat you left out on the counter overnight. That is to say, the truly worst thing is not the after-effect, nor even the effect itself, but...
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have debated. Everything about that last sentence is absurd. Kamala Harris is an ill-informed fool and tool of the Democratic Party establishment. Donald Trump is a full-blown ignoramus about political matters whose only area of legitimate knowledge, if one may call it that, is salesmanship, albeit mainly in the snake oil sense of the word. A debate, in...
In Book I of his Politics, Aristotle offers a rational argument for the natural legitimacy of slavery. A modern person, encountering this fact for the first time, is likely to respond in one of two ways: (1) “Well, that shows how much we have advanced since Aristotle’s time, and makes it hard to take his political theories seriously;” or, (2) “I wonder how...
Keir Starmer, the latest in a string of mealy-mouthed and/or self-aggrandizing party men to occupy 10 Downing Street in the shadow of a giant whom they all knew before entering the place that they could never live up to, has decided, in true socialist fashion, to wear his insecurity on his sleeve more overtly than his predecessors. Specifically, Starmer has chosen to remove...
I have occasionally been asked over the years why I chose Limbo as the defining theme of this website. It seems quite self-evident to me, because the notion of Limbo — and I take my notes on this concept primarily from Dante Alighieri — encapsulates so much about me, on so many levels. I belong among the in-between people: the unsaved who are...
Ideas and Reflections / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 26, 2024 · Last modified August 27, 2024
Alexander Vindman, a small man who played a significant role in an isolated moment, but who has been trying to parlay that momentary significance into a more general relevance ever since, has taken to the social media monster called X — where the clowns gather — to “warn” Elon Musk, who runs X, that the recent French arrest of Musk’s counterpart at Telegram...
In a little over two months, the identity of the next President of the United States will be determined. I choose my words carefully. I say that the identity of the next president will be determined, not that it will be revealed. To be fair, there is a vague sense, which may be more a factor of one man’s marketing genius than of...
On social media.– I have never once wondered what Plato ate for lunch. Nor what Dante looked like on the beach, what Shakespeare gave his children for their birthdays, where Vivaldi spent his summer vacation, or which card game Swift played with Stella. Yet our world is now awash in the lunches, beach pictures, birthday parties, vacation diaries, and personal hobbies of a...
A few notes on the Democratic National Convention, a political event I would be even less likely to watch than a Republican National Convention. At least this year’s RNC (of which I watched a total of about one minute) involved some intrigue concerning how the party was going to frame itself so as to hold the wide range of voters it needs in...
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