Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 7, 2026 · Last modified August 8, 2026
Within the past few days, the illustrious Dr. Fauci, a man of no small vanity and no great humility, a man who never met a crisis he couldn’t exploit for his own aggrandizement and indeed never met a minor crisis he couldn’t magnify into a major one so as to inflate his own importance and career profile, has been met at last with...
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 3, 2026 · Last modified August 4, 2026
It seems that the vast majority of film critics, both the professional ones and the peculiar number of amateurs among the public chattering class who felt they just had to insert themselves into this particular discussion, are agreed that Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is an exceptionally good film, falling somewhere within a range from “epic masterpiece” (my combination of the two words...
The laws of self-delusion.— When materialists reduce the soul to the body and its “laws,” they are merely admitting that they have no plausible explanation for that element of themselves without which their materialist reductionism could not exist. That is, they cannot account for their experience of themselves qua investigators of matter. They, qua investigators of matter, by definition lie outside the range...
Morbid curiosity getting the better of me this morning, I made the momentous decision to give almost two minutes of my earthly life to popular movie director Christopher Nolan. I watched the trailer for his latest award-baiting film, The Odyssey. Well, to be honest, I should say that I gave about fifty seconds of my life to Nolan, after which the trailer continued...
Lindsey Graham has been part of my personal political consciousness since he served as one of the House managers in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. I remember his portion of the prosecution’s presentation more clearly than anyone else’s, not because it was the most legalistic or the most rationally persuasive of the cases for removing Clinton from office, but because it was, in its...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 12, 2026 · Last modified July 13, 2026
Partisans.– A comprehensive explanation for today’s hyper-partisan politics (aka tribalism) would merely be an elucidation of this aphorism from Nietzsche, published in 1878: Not suited to be a party man. — He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon. From which we may...
Watching Donald Trump these days, with his increasingly unhinged bluster and threats and humorless assaults on common sense, I see more and more of what I have always seen. It is the same thing we would see in Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and any other upside-down man of our time for that matter, were they all as constitutionally inclined toward infantile public exposure...
In case anyone is curious as to why I felt no inclination, let alone motivation, to write anything here in honor of this year’s most auspicious July 4th holiday, allow me to explain the reason. July 4th is Independence Day, a holiday established to celebrate the founding of The United States of America, and this year’s Independence Day was supposed to be special...
The key to participating in the definitive activity of the philosophic life is not, as may sometimes be assumed, merely a matter of having sufficient private time, let alone of being alone for any specific length of time. The essential thing, rather, is the subjective certainty of being free to become immersed in one’s train of thought without any (perceived) threat of interruption....
The thinking life.– What else is modern academic scholarship, as it has been practiced since at least the German universities of the early nineteenth century, but a non-digital precursor to today’s computer-based “artificial intelligence”? Analog AI, if you will. Vast human-designed but meticulously dehumanized data centers of universal thought-collection (called “disciplines”), with hundreds of thousands of nodes (called “professors”) incapable of truly comprehending,...
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