Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 26, 2024 · Last modified August 27, 2024
Alexander Vindman, a small man who played a significant role in an isolated moment, but who has been trying to parlay that momentary significance into a more general relevance ever since, has taken to the social media monster called X — where the clowns gather — to “warn” Elon Musk, who runs X, that the recent French arrest of Musk’s counterpart at Telegram...
On social media.– I have never once wondered what Plato ate for lunch. Nor what Dante looked like on the beach, what Shakespeare gave his children for their birthdays, where Vivaldi spent his summer vacation, or which card game Swift played with Stella. Yet our world is now awash in the lunches, beach pictures, birthday parties, vacation diaries, and personal hobbies of a...
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 20, 2024 · Last modified September 15, 2024
A constant, regular ticking. — A world obsessed with time, schedules, and above all precision, will inevitably suffer the peculiar effect of reducing all life and all awareness to the vectors of temporality, namely an ever-growing dread of running out of time. For most people today, this fear — usually unacknowledged, even outright denied, but always palpable — is increasingly causing a kind...
“Say things as simply as possible” — in order to be understood as widely as possible. “Live in accordance with the norms of your society” — in order to be accepted. “Do not do what will be seen as inappropriate, foolish, or out of step by the people around you” — lest one be rejected or even condemned by others. “Keep up with...
All of us are born in a cave, Socrates teaches (Republic VII), staring at shadows cast upon the back wall by images held in front of a fire behind us. From this starting point, he explains that education is the process of turning around in our chairs to see the fire, the objects dancing before it, and the men holding those objects, and...
Hidden premise. — To envy is to resent another for having what you might have had instead. But this implies an assumption that you could have had what the other has, which you would only know if you had actually achieved it yourself, in which case you would have no reason to envy. Hence, envy is, among other things, a convenient veil of...
I have not followed or watched a single event at the current Olympic Games in Paris. I will not watch one. I say this not in protest over the fact that a biological man is beating up biological women in the Olympic boxing tournament. For the record, I pity the biological man in this case, because the individual was clearly born with a...
2024 U.S. Election / Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 27, 2024
The Olympic Games are in Paris this summer, where men routinely urinate on the streets, so much so that the Macron government tried several years ago to reduce the grotesque effects of this Parisian crudity — the new language of love, I suppose — by installing “discreet” pee buckets disguised as planters throughout the city. Thus, people with the bladders of seven-year-olds and...
Nothing gets deeper under the skin of feminists and their right-thinking progressive allies than the once- and long-honored notion of female modesty. This, of course, explains why the entire progressive program, from public policy and historical reinterpretation to education and popular moral messaging, has made the debunking of the “so-called differences” between men and women, and the obscuring of the very definitions of...
Small talk is for killing time or manufacturing artificial familiarity. My personal motto, or self-motivation mantra, is “I don’t waste time,” and few things are more intrinsically repulsive to my character than artificial familiarity. Therefore, small talk is anathema to me….
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