Enjoying the view from Limbo
The trouble with followers.– The weakminded types who are quickest to join a crowd for fear of being left alone outside also tend to be the quickest to run for the door for fear of being left alone inside. Seeing how it feels.– Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was one of the loudest MAGA cheerleaders while Donald Trump was lying and rabble-rousing to foment...
For months, Donald Trump’s presidential path has been determined, both overtly and implicity, by his glaringly obvious desperation to quell the public appetite for transparency about “the Epstein files,” a grotesque treasure trove of documents which, as we already know, includes so many references or allusions to Trump’s long-term friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and so many indications of his...
Coding the future.– Elon Musk asserts with enthusiasm that in ten years there will no longer be jobs for humans — where by humans he means, in general, humans not at the very top of the digitized food chain, and in particular humans other than himself. Avarice being a native illness of the soul, it is not surprising that those most severely infected...
A tyrant is not a man who desires bad things. (No one desires bad things.) A tyrant is a man who is ignorant enough to have no idea what a good thing is or where to find one; who was raised poorly enough never to have learned the difference between wishing something could be so and believing one has every right to force...
Enduring fame is either an emblem of vulgar vanity or an indication of past virtue. In either case, vanity or virtue, the remnant is generic, in that it can in no way reveal what is personal or individual in the doer, but rather, if anything, obscures it even more completely than the mists of time can obscure the person who remains “unaccomplished” and...
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 18, 2025 · Last modified October 28, 2025
In Trump Fantasy Land, America’s aspirational (thus far) dictator and Nobel Peace Prize earner has just brokered perpetual peace in the Middle East. In reality, of course, which never looks very much like Trump’s imagination, a hostage exchange has taken place, though at the point when there were very few Israeli hostages who had not already been killed; and a temporary ceasefire agreement...
What men will believe if it supports the rhetorical interests of their tribe. What they will overlook if it undercuts their self-identifying faith in their tribe. And how often the tribesmen will employ the former with the greatest force of absurdity as a psychological bulwark against having to confront themselves with the most disturbing evidence of the latter. Glenn Beck recently hosted a...
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 25, 2025
Back on November 9th, 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s election victory (known to this day among Trump loyalists as “The Steal”), I wrote here of the short-term future of America’s two main political factions. In that rumination, I posed a couple of questions about the prospects for the respective factions in 2024, questions which time has now firmly answered, though...
From W. H. Auden, we have this charming short:
Why are the public buildings so high? How come you don’t know?
Why, that’s because the spirits of the public are so low.
To extrapolate on that theme of matter and form in society, body and soul writ large, I shall dare to venture a few lines of my own….
Human, all too human.– When everything you and your friends once decried as a communist plot to overthrow your country, you and your friends now espouse and embrace with brio to achieve your own ends. And when you manage to convince yourselves — or rather accept without a moment’s doubt or hesitation — that this hypocritical adoption of the very totalitarian methods you...
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