Enjoying the view from Limbo
In 1998, Harry Jaffa began a critique of the new vanguard of the American conservative movement with the following pithy summation of what was at stake: The end of the Cold War has also brought an end to the remission of the disease of moral relativism that is corroding the life of western civilization. It would certainly seem that the salvation of the...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 29, 2026 · Last modified October 30, 2026
Donald Trump has attempted to whitewash his absolute handover of U.S. foreign policy to the interests and demands of Vladimir Putin by pointing to the latter’s pathetic gesture of releasing an American prisoner who had been held in a Russian jail for four years on charges of — oh, the irony of it all — fighting for Ukraine. As though this release were...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 20, 2026
The standard critical explanations circulating in the public discussion to account for Donald Trump’s recent caution-to-the-wind support for Vladimir Putin’s aims in Ukraine, and his simultaneous overt branding of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine as the only true impediment to peace in the region, have been variations on the theme of Trump’s shortsighted eagerness to lower American fuel prices in a desperate attempt to turn...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 14, 2026 · Last modified October 15, 2026
Today, my YouTube algorithm informed me of a recent Dispatch podcast featuring Jonah Goldberg’s interview with a certain “Hannah Arendt scholar,” Roger Berkowitz, focused on Professor Berkowitz’s new book about Arendt and friendship. The topic was interesting on its face, so I took the bait and clicked on the recommendation, which turned out, as such things typically do, to be an excellent reminder...
The following is from a written exchange with a student who has been reading Plato recently. Why should I love wisdom? Loving wisdom and being wise are helpful for a truly good life? No, loving wisdom and being wise are not helpful for a truly good life. They are the truly good life. Loving wisdom is the truly good life for a human....
The following is a slightly edited version of a brief reply I offered to a regular correspondent who expressed disappointment in her seeming inability to bite her tongue, let alone to control her emotional response outright, when faced with irrational or obnoxious ideas or behavior from those around her, such as coworkers. This kind of self-control is especially important when the people you...
Artificial intelligence will never be human. It will never have the best characteristics of humans. Neither will it ever have the worst characteristics of humans. What it will be, and all it will be capable of becoming, is an emulation, an imitation, a digital simulation, of the best and worst characteristics of humans. However, as it can only be simulating those elements of...
The Chinese Communist Party propaganda machine — machine being a keyword here — is flooding the world of the weakminded (aka the internet, such as in this piece from Fox News) with the “news” that a humanoid robot has “shattered” Usain Bolt’s 100-metre dash world record at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. I saw the headlines, repeatedly, on my office computer’s...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 17, 2026
To those U.S. military veterans who were once friendly readers of my writing but turned against me when they fell under the spell of the dumbest and most corrupt man ever to run for commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, and who pooh-poohed my criticisms of said dunderhead with refusals to accept his own frequent pro-despot words (and later policies) at face value,...
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...
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