Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 22, 2023 · Last modified November 24, 2023
There is no living politician I know of whom I would trust unmonitored with my wallet or my cell phone. Why in the world would I trust one with my liberty or my need to know the truth about anything? Steps are being taken, in every advanced country on Earth, towards establishing the latest manifestation of the totalitarian dream, a cashless society, which...
The other day, a serious student who is reading Brave New World wrote with some musings and questions inspired by the World Controller’s explanation, in one of the later chapters, of the World State’s reasons for prohibiting all access to the great art and thought of the past. I reproduce her main questions (in italics) and my replies, below, with only a few...
How to know whether you are still alive.– Do you occasionally think something that cannot be communicated properly without discarding all stock phrases and standard “talking points” vocabulary? Better yet, do you occasionally catch yourself thinking something that, for all your sincerest efforts, cannot be communicated in any language you know? That is to say, do you sometimes feel trapped within an idea...
The Israeli government is not Judaism. Israeli government policy is not scripture. No member of the Likud Party is an earthly representative of God, Abraham, or Moses. It follows that no disapproval of the Israeli government, no disagreement with Israeli government policy, and no criticism of any member of Israel’s ruling party, is inherently either identifiable as or suggestive of antisemitism. To those...
When the alternative to being what they hate is being what you hate, you must ask yourself which of those alternatives you would prefer to avoid. All and Some.– If you want any of your life, you must accept all of it. Coming to terms with that fact and its deepest implications is perhaps the greatest challenge of the serious life, and its...
Benjamin Netanyahu has acted as a blowhard, a media hound, and a flatterer of thugs, tyrants, and autocrats for years. He fawned humiliatingly over Donald Trump to get what he wanted from the manipulable orange fool. He has been a waterboy for Vladimir Putin for years, right up to Israel’s refusal — almost unique among allegedly free countries — to take a hard...
When the print media was dominated by men with high school educations or less, armed with real-world experience and an enthusiasm for clarity of language and for “getting to the bottom of things,” the news was commonly reported with literacy and punchy verve, in vocabulary and grammar suitable to a population of self-governing adults. Today, as the print media — paper or virtual...
Martin Scorsese, the most critically acclaimed American film director of the past fifty years, has released his latest Oscar-baiting three-hour epic of slow-motion violence and depravity, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is supposed to represent — as all of his movies are supposed to do — the horrible truth about America that no one (read everyone) has the courage to face. I...
Everyone’s favorite congress-barmaid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shocked the world by reminding everyone that not only is Israel guilty of the moral crime of defending itself against a gigantic infiltration by a well-organized tribe of murdering, torturing, immolating, kidnapping lunatics, but, even worse, that same racist and sexist nation had the audacity, back in 2019, to deny visas to two of her older and...
What is the point of making observations about the cultural significance of today’s mainstream pop music divas, mainstream Hollywood movies, mainstream social science and humanities professors, or mainstream politicians? These people and their effusions may appear deleterious to good taste and corruptive of morals or freedom, but this is not because of anything they do, in any active sense — they are not...
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