Enjoying the view from Limbo
Books / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 25, 2025 · Last modified February 26, 2025
A question from an ambitious student, paraphrased: What makes poetry poetry? In other words, what are the defining features of a poem that distinguish it from other forms of verbal or written communication? The easiest answer, and probably the one you would find most often in any quick internet search of this question, is that poetry, unlike non-poetry, is written in verse form,...
The Czech Republic, a country with peculiar historical authority to speak of the moral crime of major nations negotiating away another nation’s sovereign territory for their own falsely perceived, cowardice-motivated advantage, has issued an official statement declaring support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s legitimacy as Ukrainian president, and the inviolability of Ukraine’s territorial integrity at the hands of tyrannical aggression. On the first point, they...
From Raymond Aron’s Peace and War (1966): In 1938 France tried to deter Hitler from attacking Czechoslovakia: Hitler was not impressed, and Frenchmen and Englishmen preferred Czech capitulation to the risk of having to carry out their commitments, i.e., their threat. In 1939 Great Britian took the initiative of signing a mutual assistance treaty with Poland in the hope of deterring Hitler by...
Very early in 2016, when I stepped into the midst of the rapidly evolving Trump cult at American Thinker (where I had been a successful and popular contributor for several years) to deliver my first few missives on the folly and danger of supporting an ignorant vainglorious self-promoting sociopath in the Republican presidential primaries — I know, when you state it directly this...
The problem with Donald Trump’s political rise, as I have said many times, is not so much Trump himself, but rather the tens of millions of Americans who are sanguine — nay, enthusiastic — about this buffoonish Putin agent and anti-American demagogue running roughshod over their country’s traditions, decimating its alliances, disrespecting its constitution and its institutions, befouling its public discourse, turning her...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 18, 2025 · Last modified February 21, 2025
Occasionally, one happens upon a certain page of classic literature at a strikingly appropriate moment, such that its evergreen insights appear to have fallen directly into one’s immediate midst and experience like a gracious snowfall of cleansing wisdom, leaving one feeling almost as though a long-dead author had mysteriously inserted this commentary into his work anachronistically, or just yesterday, for your personal benefit....
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 17, 2025
Canada, my home country, disappoints me no end. It has, over the course of my life — the correspondence is so clear that I sometimes believe I may be responsible for it — turned decisively toward the soft despotism of democratic socialism, the relativistic nihilism of multiculturalism, the personality cult normalization of the multi-generational Trudeau dynasty, the most laughable excesses of progressive identity...
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 13, 2025
The government of Ukraine is entering an inevitable phase of resignation and surrender. Her leaders are beginning to admit to themselves, it appears, that in today’s world, if your sovereignty and your freedom depend on the friendship of the United States of America, you will soon lose both. America, for the better part of the past seventy-five years, has consistently been both the...
This past weekend, Donald Trump made what our minute-by-minute age calls “history” by becoming the first U.S. president to attend a Super Bowl game. In other words, true to form, Trump was the first president in American history crass enough to think it appropriate to turn even his country’s most popular annual apolitical entertainment event into a divisive and hyper-political photo opportunity for...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 6, 2025 · Last modified February 8, 2025
The annoying thing about unrestrained government authority is that it does not magically become beneficial when it happens to fall into the hands of the faction you prefer. The insidious thing about unrestrained government authority is that it invariably appears to have become a beneficial thing when in the hands of the faction you prefer. Everything political leaders do is questionable, because only...
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