Enjoying the view from Limbo
In about three weeks, the United States of America — a formerly awe-inspiring name which now has about as much real world resonance as “the British Crown” — will elect its next president. As has been the case for a number of elections, the mainstream options fall into the “Could it get any worse?” category, while the non-mainstream options, such as they are...
From the travel diary of a visitor in the realm of the last man: But I always think of these moments of decision as being like a long, winding slide. Everyone enjoys a slide, so you gladly wait your turn, propped up by the familiar faces and encouraging words of those already in line, until you get your chance to sit at the...
I have not written much on this website recently. As I scan the internet these days, and come to terms with the extent to which everything that is ever written, has ever been written, will ever be written, and can ever be stolen and regurgitated in plagiarized form by a property-obliterating computer technology that short-sighted people today are all imagining will be both...
An expert is a person who knows more than you do about one thing, and very likely less than you about almost everything else — including, potentially, about the presuppositions underlying his own area of expertise, which he sees not as presuppositions but as facts. That false perception of his presuppositions is part of what identifies him as an expert. Political life is...
2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 26, 2024
The U.S. is apparently “unimpressed” with Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan for victory over Russia. This sage judgment coming from a country that has been involved in several major wars over the past sixty years, and has lost every single one of them due to inept planning, cowardly leadership, lack of moral purpose, and a world-historical genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 18, 2024 · Last modified September 21, 2024
Howard Stern is a deeply unfunny man who has parlayed amorality into a form of media immortality by creating a niche, the “shock jock,” in which unfunny people can pass themselves off as humorists merely by being willing to say what semi-civilized people would have the decency not to say in public. He is thereby peculiarly responsible for vulgarizing the taste and gutterizing...
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...
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