Enjoying the view from Limbo
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism? / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 29, 2026
Inevitably, the news comes that the Trump administration is deeply engaged in negotations aimed at establishing “a long-term stake in a vast share of Venezuela’s oil fields.” That is, a long-term U.S. Government ownership stake in Venezuela’s natural resources. So Trump invades a socialist country and deposes its leader, only to come to terms with the rest of the socialist regime at the...
Donald Trump, in his typically infantile manner, has responded to not getting his way in trade bullying with Canada by signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Of course no one in Canada will ever recognize or use this name. And of course the only Americans who will ever use it are the diehards still clinging to their Trump fantasy...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 2, 2026 · Last modified May 7, 2026
“Artificial Intelligence” is the purest of lies, with each of the words of which the phrase is comprised denoting a falsehood as complete as is the phrase taken as a whole. For what it euphemizes as artifice is merely theft; and what it aggrandizes as a form of intelligence is simply an extremely efficient consensus-generating algorithm, one made possible only, and entirely, by...
Political thought which begins from the premise that the primary purpose of government is to restrict freedom for the good of society has chosen to reduce adults to children, hence effectively equating the universal good with safety and comfort, and thus setting the stage for an inevitable rebellion in the name of liberty. Political thought which begins from the premise that the purpose...
The Ring of Gyges.– The modern world is running a live test version of Glaucon’s brilliant challenge to Socrates in Book II of The Republic. The amoral thrill of being able to violate, invade, and steal everyone’s life, privacy, and property with impunity is now within reach of all of us, and above all, within the legislative reach of every government, and of...
There has been no greater gift to the American Left than Donald Trump, for he and his personality cult embody everything that the Left tried for decades to pin, falsely, on American conservatives, without much success. Suddenly with Trump, every leftist lie about conservatism became an all too horrible truth, every untenably vulgar smear all at once an inescapably vulgar reality. Except for...
Having outlined my basic premises and principles in Parts One and Two, I have arrived at a point where I may finally reply directly to the last of your original questions, which, once again, was… 3. Then what makes something advanced? I would like to know the examples of advances from your point of view. You phrase the question in two parts, which...
Here in the second part of this discussion, having explained that the concept “advanced” admits of various measurements, corresponding to the various senses in which a new technology may be judged relative to its antecedents, I took a moment to prepare the pathway to a more specific reply to my student’s third and final question about my views concerning which innovations, according to...
A few months ago, I stumbled into a conversation with a most inquisitive student about the role of advanced technology in modern life, and specifically how our age’s technological obsession has blinded us to fundamental questions, not only about the ultimate human value of our rapid material changes, but also about the terms on which we categorize technological innovations as “advances” in the...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 22, 2025
Back in 2013, when Barack Obama was well into his second term of running roughshod over American principles and destroying the last remnants of the constitutional guardrails against excessive executive power, I wrote an essay for American Thinker in which I attempted to outline the wide array of forces that had been gradually corralled into a generational shift away from the moral premises...
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