DAREN JONESCU

Enjoying the view from Limbo

Category: Ideas and Reflections

America Descending / Ideas and Reflections

Impious Thoughts On A Passing Nation

To everyone who has ever accused me personally, or any other critic of Donald Trump for that matter, of suffering from the non-existent ailment (but all-time great example of psychological projection), “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” I offer the following: Dear Jonas, Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an...

Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics

On Greenland and National Interests

Ted Cruz, who back in the latter days of 2016 willingly defined himself for all time as the single most spineless and snivelling anti-man in American politics, now seeks to reassert that title against increasingly aggressive competition, by stating, in support of his master’s latest evidence of mental deterioration, that it is “overwhelmingly” in America’s “national interest” to acquire Greenland. As though concepts...

Ideas and Reflections

Reflections on Body and Soul

Against Stoicism.— Each of us, when we slam a window on our finger or stub our toe, is instantly two years old again. If you think this reveals a profound truth about our nature or “undermines all our pretenses of reason and civilization,” then you are either of the nature of a materialist cynic who shouts his atheism, prayer-like, to the heavens, or...

Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost

Shooting An Elephant: Little Rascals Edition

The leaders of the MAGA cult, looking at every video of an ICE shooting in Minneapolis, insist that they see, and therefore that you must also see, an honorable law enforcement officer being rammed by a car driven by a domestic terrorist and therefore fully justified in defending himself with lethal force against this act of extremist violence. The cult submits its perceptual...

Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics

On America’s Flight From History

For decades, the world has been stabilized, in the sense that the democratic or nascently democratic nations’ greatest external threats and adversaries have been relatively constrained, by a tacit acceptance of, and acquiescence to, U.S. military and diplomatic preeminence. That is to say, Europe, most of the Americas, and much of East Asia had welcomed, or at least submitted relatively comfortably to, America’s...

Ideas and Reflections

Ancients and Moderns, Soul and Body

“The soul” is mankind’s general name for everything we are and are meant to be. “The body” is our name for every obstacle, hardship, and distraction that would prevent us from becoming what we are and are meant to be. The old war between the Ancients and the Moderns turns on the fact that the Ancients understood this relation and therefore perceived the...

Ideas and Reflections

Around Nietzsche’s Values, the World Revolves, Trivially

Nietzsche is, without question, the most influential philosopher in today’s world, and his influence has grown steadily for more than a century. While it is probably true that more people read Nietzsche’s words these days than those of any other major philosopher, book sales are certainly not the way a philosopher achieves profound influence. Rather, the great philosophers influence the world to the...

America Descending / Ideas and Reflections

The Real Trump Derangement Syndrome Strikes Again

In the immediate aftermath of the murder of the politically trivial and offensively pseudo-Christian MAGA grifter Charlie Kirk, Rob Reiner, a knee-jerk and sometimes offensive Hollywood progressive (though one who actually earned his living and reputation through honest work rather than by playing up to powerful political factions), offered an appropriate and elegant public statement about Kirk’s killing. Here is the Huffington Post’s...

America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics

A Picture Truly Worth A Thousand Words

In a brilliant response to the infamous meeting in Miami in which Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner attempted to sell their country and all their allies to the Kremlin in exchange for some financial kickbacks for themselves and their immediate supervisor, i.e., Vladimir Putin’s American branch plant manager, Donald Trump, Ukraine has sent its own team of negotiators to the same city to...

America Descending / Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections

Final Judgments, Without Tragedy

Here is the final paragraph of Allan Bloom’s indispensable essay on the fate of the American mind: This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved...