Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 30, 2021
We live in a world in which character and courage are measured in increments of one, by which I mean that we encounter so little public virtue today that any instance which does appear stands out before our consciousness in startling contrast with the surrounding moral emptiness. There can be no doubt, at the first glimpse of such an anomaly, that we are...
These days, the standard of newsworthiness in “protest movements,” at least in North America, seems to be “The smaller the bigger.” The news media has taken to shamelessly reporting with the utmost seriousness events that may be represented with headlines such as, “Dozens gather across the country to protest Anti-Asian hate.” The importance of a “protest” or “movement” is now determined, in other...
Communist Canada / Liberty's Labors Lost / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 18, 2021
You never know what you have till it’s gone and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything. — Steven Wright, stand-up comedian.
I can think of no more psychologically incisive summary of this moment in the trajectory of modern civilization. Modernity, as that term relates to the philosophical and political premises of the last four centuries…
So it turns out that Dr. Fauci, whom I have had pegged as a bureaucratic hack and a scientific fraud from day one of the American takeover of the Pandemic that Ate a Planet, was probably directly involved in supporting and funding the research at the Wuhan laboratory that created the virus. From the Washington Post: Fauci has inspired critics in some quarters...
Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 27, 2021
A student sent me a text message today consisting of the following questions: “Why is it important to try to think and find the existence of my soul? Why do you live?” Interestingly, the second question implies that the terms of the first question — thinking and finding the existence of the soul — are coextensive with the question of why I live....
The Bidens and the Harrises stood in dim light at sunset outside the White House, all wearing black masks, all bowing their heads, surrounded by votive candles, in a show of public mourning for the “500,000 dead” in America from Covid-19. Yes, it was yet another instance of modern sentimental man’s favorite ritual of feelgood self-identification: the moment of silence. And of course,...
I just read a new headline from The Washington Post that absolutely crystallizes the essence of our hysteria pandemic: “The coronavirus is airborne. Here’s how to know if you’re breathing other people’s breath.” The details of the article, urging the use of carbon dioxide monitors as a proxy gauge for determining whether the air in any given space has traces of human breath...
Regular readers may have noticed that I am writing very little these days concerning The Pandemic That Ate a Planet. Living in Korea, which was the first epicenter of the outbreak outside of Wuhan, China, back in February 2020, I hit the ground running on this coronavirus debacle and its political exploitations right at the outset, and then maintained a consistent stream of...
A pandemic — even a second-level one by historical standards — is a totalitarian’s dream come true. Suddenly, progressives have complete, hysteria-induced access to all the moral weaponry they have tried to invoke for years in the name of “global climate change” with only partial success. The whole thrust of the climate change movement, since its beginnings fifty years ago, has been to...
Doug Ford, the “conservative” premier of Canada’s most populous province, my native Ontario, has once again instituted a province-wide “stay-at-home order,” promising that those found in violation of his government’s strict but nebulous new rules on private behavior (i.e., living) and business activity (i.e., supporting oneself) — those whom Ford labels “bad actors” — will be punished. Will this ever end? I know...
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