Enjoying the view from Limbo
Special counsel John Durham has completed a four-year investigation into the FBI’s aggressive pursuit of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia prior to the 2016 U.S. election. He has concluded that the FBI gave in to confirmation bias in claiming links between Trump and the Kremlin, treating unsubstantiated private reports as trustworthy evidence, and leaping from legitimate concerns about Trump associates (e.g., Paul...
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 14, 2023 · Last modified April 15, 2023
The United States of America Today: A Dialogue Truth: Donald Trump, with his self-seeking demagoguery, fear-and-lie-grounded radicalization of millions of his supporters, and open praise and normalization of tyrants and tyrannical methods at home and abroad, has done catastrophic and possibly irreparable harm to his country. Tribalism: But what about Biden, Hillary, and Obama! Truth: Fine. In that case reason affords you two...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 5, 2023
Hostility, incivility, and outright barbarism are breaking out in our midst, on a mass scale. This proves that John Stuart Mill was wrong, and indeed that all progressive views of historico-political development — using progressive in its earlier theoretical sense, rather than in its current euphemistic sense — were wrong. There is no “stage of development” at which a society or civilization…
Yet again, Jordan Peterson, the energetic academic psychologist cum profiteering alt-right blowhard, has put his mouth where he believes the money is. That is, since most of his paying audience — believe me, he has no interest in any audience that is not paying, and by god they certainly will pay — is comprised of young males who believe Donald Trump is infallible,...
An American friend — or rather I ought to say the American friend — responding to my recent article, “Democratic Equality 101,” offered the following musing: The entire discussion of “protecting our democracy” here in the USA makes me want to vomit. The purposeful dumbing down of our citizenry is apparent everywhere. A Constitutional Republic was/is intended to be a safeguard against unruly...
What moderns crave.– We look for emergencies — literally, for emerging problems. They give us respite from the stable emptiness that results from having exhausted last month’s emergency. Modern humans are ever-resourceful in finding emergencies to satisfy their need for some new crisis that absolutely demands attention right now. Not action, mind you, but merely attention. It is not that we moderns want...
“And yes, I’m doing this for profit!” With those smug, pseudo-principled words, every popular “conservative media icon” and “conservative intellectual” tells us, point blank, that we have every reason not to take him seriously, and no reason whatsoever for trusting one word that comes out of his mouth. The modern world of liberty and self-governance is crumbling at speeds that even the bleakest...
I reproduce here, with minor modifications, my reply to a multi-part inquiry from a serious Korean student about the meaning of equality, as that term is used in the context of democratic theory and practice. I have included a few of the student’s own questions (designated with “Q”) from our written exchange, as they form the context for my particular points of emphasis. ...
If democracy, in its essence, is reducible to the principle of one man, one vote, which is to say if, in its purest, most unadulterated instantiations, democracy amounts to some form of simple majority rule, then there is almost no limit to the horrors that might be perpetrated and perpetuated under the auspices of democratic self-government. Furthermore, the special danger of such democratic...
We are told in a thousand ways today that we are engaged in a global struggle to save democracy. Perhaps we are. If so, it would do us well to take a moment to ask what it is that we are trying to save, exactly, and furthermore, whether or in what sense it deserves to be saved. Democracy, we like to say, was...
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