Enjoying the view from Limbo
This past week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the poster boy for the logical fallacy of “argument from authority,” publicly stated that if Donald Trump were to win the presidency in 2024, he, Fauci, would retire from the elite executive branch bureaucratic position where he has enriched himself at the public trough more brazenly, and for more years, than almost anyone in American history. His...
Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 10, 2022 · Last modified March 11, 2022
March 9th was Election Day in Korea, as the country chose its new president. In every election, this country chooses a new president, because the presidency is a five-year, one-term affair. That is the kind of sound decision a country makes when it is building a new republic after decades as a developmental one-party state. Tucker Carlson and his fellow Putin propagandists, so...
During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, those of us naturally inclined to resist propagandistic media hyperbole and distrust tyrannical models of government “efficiency” spent a good deal of our time, and inordinate amounts of our nerves, arguing with some of the dumbest or most fear-driven humans we had ever encountered, over the strange new question of whether allowing the governments of...
Government vs. God / Liberty's Labors Lost / Pandemic that Ate a Planet
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 11, 2022
A young woman I have known for many years, who has been my student and my teaching assistant, and with whom I have engaged in many lively discussions about philosophy, the Bible, and global politics, has reached a sudden impasse in her life plans and her career path — an impasse defined by vaccine mandates. We live in the era of mass intimidation...
Neil Young is attempting to put the final seal on any pretense that rock music was ever about “speaking truth to power” or any such nonsense — not a moment too soon in my opinion. He is threatening to pull all of his music off Spotify unless that online service removes podcasts that “spread misinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines, specifically focused on the most...
In France, 91% of the adult population is fully vaccinated for Covid-19. And yet the French government has just passed an even stricter version of its “vaccine passport” law, barring the unvaccinated from all restaurants, cafes, sporting events, and essentially any other social outing of any kind, unless and until they comply. “They,” just to reinforce the point, are only 9% of the...
The United States Supreme Court has struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate on private businesses as unconstitutional. The three dissenting “liberals” on the court, however, objected that the majority’s decision constitutes judicial “overreach” because the anti-mandate justices were choosing to overlook the opinions of “experts.” This dissenting opinion represents a classic, almost perfect example of progressive thinking. Striking down or objecting to...
Today I found, on my MSN news feed, a typical fearmongering headline in these days of continuous authoritarian propaganda: “Omicron Patients Becoming ‘Really Sick in a Different Way.’” The quotation in that headline, as I discovered, is from a “leading ER doctor,” specifically an associate professor from Columbia University Medical Center. The linked news item is a short video report, in which scare...
Liberty's Labors Lost / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 5, 2022
A few days ago, I took a student for lunch and enjoyed my first experience of being asked to present my proof of vaccination as a condition for being granted the privilege of eating soup in a restaurant. I took the opportunity to explain to my student, with whom I happened to be reading Brave New World that day, the special emotional significance,...
If governments explicitly spelled out the truth on all the “emergency measures” and “crisis responses” they have initiated during the pandemic — namely that not one of these new measures, powers, or mandates will ever be repealed, but rather, on the contrary, that every one of them will be expanded, and cited as convenient precedent, in perpetuity, to encompass an ever-increasing range of...
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