Enjoying the view from Limbo
False dichotomy.— Is the American left using the January 6 Capitol riot as an opportunity to smear all “conservatives” (i.e., non-leftists) as domestic terrorists or insurrectionists? Yes. Does this mean the January 6 Capitol riot never happened, was no big deal, was a false flag operation, or was just a patriotic protest misrepresented by the media? No. By analogy, a black man who...
If you found a woman’s private diary under a pillow at a drug rehabilitation facility, would you read it, publish it, use it to humiliate her family and potentially cause serious material harm to the woman herself? If you would, then you would fit right in among today’s American conservatives. Perhaps I come to this story very late, because I try to avoid...
Dinesh D’Souza, having been given a presidential pardon by his owner after being convicted of violating federal election law, has decided to devote the rest of his earthly life — or the rest of Trump’s shelf life as a viable gravy train for conservative media profiteers, whichever ends first — to licking Trump’s boots on the “election fraud” fraud, specifically by accusing anonymous...
In her opening statement at the January 6th hearings in the U.S. Congress, Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick “Deep State” Cheney, spelled out an interpretation of that day’s Capitol riot that, if it had crossed all the Ts and stated its unstated premises, would essentially have supported the interpretation I have offered here in Limbo all along. Put simply, all or...
When, in the aftermath of every well-publicized mass shooting, emotional or opportunistic people say things such as, “How many children have to die before you are willing to do something about guns?” they are not really engaging in dialogue, trying to understand alternative points of view, or even seeking any reply at all. They are merely trying to score rhetorical points against “the...
The vast majority of Trump supporters who wanted to prevent the certification of the 2020 electoral votes, including those who were prepared to fight on Capitol Hill to stop Joe Biden from becoming president on January 6th, 2021, were not, as per the standard talking point of our day, “trying to overturn an election.” Nor were they “trying to destroy American democracy.” On...
Dr. Oz, a television celebrity who, like his endorser and “friend” Donald Trump, has tried to parlay empty fame and business success into a political career, slightly led Pennsylvania’s GOP senate primary after initial vote counting. Today, it appears that the absentee votes are tipping the scales toward one of Oz’s rivals, Dave MacCormick. Donald Trump’s response to this on social media: He’s...
2020 U.S. Election / America Descending
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 18, 2022 · Last modified May 19, 2022
Ben Shapiro is basically Rush Limbaugh for smug millennials, which is to say a moderately clever profiteer of the Republican establishment, but one who substitutes snotty rich boy arrogance and snide self-certainty for Limbaugh’s everyman persona, playful wit, and self-deflating vanity. Dinesh D’Souza is a less clever and less circumspect version of Shapiro; he doesn’t know how to hedge his bets against future...
The spoils.– Deliberately kill tens of thousands of civilians on the road to victory — “the awful reality of war.” Deliberately kill tens of thousands of civilians on the road to defeat? National ignominy and shame that will live for generations. Russia today, along with, incidentally, all of Vladimir Putin’s well-known international apologists and allies in “alt-right” demagoguery and its media affiliates. French...
Vested emotional interests, almost inescapable in life, are a constant threat to rational deliberation. If heightened by extreme circumstances, they may prove the enemy of reason itself. The current gulf between the two sides in the debate over the 2020 U.S. election and its fallout provides an object lesson in the danger of allowing one’s mind to become immersed in emotional interests, which...
Follow: