Enjoying the view from Limbo
Australia is sending troops to the Solomon Islands (Bloomberg) in order to quell violent protests. The protests are the latest escalation in an ongoing domestic dispute (ABC Australia) regarding the tiny nation’s recent decision to diplomatically unrecognize democratic Taiwan in favor of bowing before totalitarian China. In other words, Australia is taking active coercive steps, at the behest of an anti-Taiwan government, to...
A map must be read, which is to say it must be deciphered, thought through, examined and understood. Digital navigation is not a replacement for the map; it is a replacement for the map reader, i.e., for the mind’s processes of absorbing and contextualizing information. Calculation is a difficult skill which must be studied as a child, and then practiced regularly for years...
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 24, 2021 · Last modified November 26, 2021
The dependent man tends to judge himself more highly to the extent that he is liked by others, and therefore feels a compelling vested interest in gaining approval, which is to say that he increasingly uses others’ acceptance of him as an emotional surrogate for the self-understanding that he lacks. This tendency naturally drives him ever farther from any considerations of the good,...
The IOC has issued an official claim that it has had video contact with Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, and that she seemed “relaxed,” thus reassuring the world that the Chinese Communist Party is in no way abusing or restricting her — weeks after the CCP very directly abused and restricted her by wiping out her social media post accusing a Xi regime...
America Descending / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 22, 2021
Bill Kristol, who has chosen to express his disdain for the divisive and anger-infested rhetoric of the Trump cult that destroyed “his party” by throwing his support behind the Marxist front group that calls itself the Democratic Party today, has outdone himself, even by his own high standards of collegial, grinning, Harvard-man hypocrisy. Responding on Twitter — where the intellectuals gather — to...
Everyone is angry and outraged. Offended and shocked. An indignant crusader for justice. Above all, and most indicative of the mood of the age and the tenor of “public discourse,” everyone is absolutely, vehemently unwilling to brook disagreement. Today’s ideal teenager is a rabid-faced, frothing little girl overflowing with barely verbalized seething hatred toward all the grown-ups. Today’s ideal political representative is a...
I just read this headline from the Associated Press: “House moves toward OK of Dems’ sweeping social, climate bill.” So often these days, one reads of “sweeping bills,” “sweeping reforms,” “sweeping measures,” or “sweeping new mandates.” The metaphor is apt, if hackneyed, because it is very much of the essence of progressivism to view politics as a matter for brooms. In other words,...
Peng Shuai, a Chinese women’s tennis player, was foolish enough to write about an abusive relationship with a top-level member of the Chinese Communist Party on her Chinese social media page. She, along with her post, has since disappeared from the internet and apparently from any contact with the outside world. Now, a formal denial of her earlier accusations against Xi Jinping’s former...
My attitude toward the crowd is neither sympathy nor a craving to be understood, but rather retreat: to my privacy, to my separate space, to the few companions whom I can teach or from whom I can learn, to the rare authors (nearly all dead) who deepen my intellect, to my developmentally beneficial errors and failures, to my unanswered questions, and to the...
Let us cut through all the hocus pocus about the “One-China Policy” and how it should be interpreted, about “historical claims,” and about “avoiding instability in the region.” First, there can be no stability in a region in which the dominant player is an aggressive totalitarian slave state with the biggest military in the world. A house presided over by an oppressive and...
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