Enjoying the view from Limbo
On July 5th, a group of “protesters” toppled a large public statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore’s Little Italy. The statue broke into chunks as it hit the ground. The “protesters” threw the pieces into the harbor. And if Americans of Italian descent find this overtly violent expression of hatred for their heritage upsetting or threatening…well, Columbus was racist. Recently, a group of...
They deliberately prolonged it, so it was prolonged. Now they hope to frighten you by noting that it is lasting longer — as though this were not their stated intention (and implicit wish) from the outset. Dr. Fauci, continuing his daily struggle to justify his superfluous bureaucratic existence, now insists that the lockdown has saved “millions of lives” — and that anyone who...
Just the other day, in the context of discussing the wave of monument destruction currently devouring the American heritage, I parenthetically asked whether, now that even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, not to mention such lesser lights as Teddy Roosevelt, are being officially banned from the public square, or the public school, as inappropriate viewing, it can be long before Mount Rushmore gets...
Over the past week, there have been a few interesting developments in the People’s Republic of America. California has begun the process of renaming public schools named after Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, arguably the two most revered and celebrated founding fathers, because it has been determined, upon reassessment, that the author of the Declaration of Independence and the man who led the...
Today I see that Wendy Mesley, a long-time CBC journalist, has been thrown down the memory hole, like so many these days, for committing one of the cardinal sins in the Marxist faith. Specifically, Mesley’s television program was “suspended” because, during a discussion of racial inequality, she “used a word that should never be used.” That phrase, “used a word that should never...
What is Progressivism? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 14, 2020 · Last modified June 15, 2020
You have been hearing it for months. It has been a constant background chatter, a shiver at the surface of daily life. It insinuates itself into almost every conversation with relatives, old friends, coworkers, random acquaintances. “This virus is so frightening.” “I’m worried about my kids getting this thing.” “What scares me is the second wave — that might be even worse!” Late...
Last evening, I ate dinner with a student at a department store food court. At one point in the conversation, while talking about the kind of attitudes and responses that pass for “normal” today, I suddenly had an odd thought. Looking around the large, moderately crowded but “socially-distanced” court, I mused aloud, “If someone from the government walked in here right now and...
If you are a reasonably intelligent, somewhat politically ambitious man, and you see that the political class in your society is exploiting a crisis as a means of establishing extremely illiberal powers far beyond the legitimate necessities of the current crisis — powers of the sort that no state ever relinquishes once the precedent has been set and publicly accepted — then if...
Black Lives Matter. What does that even mean? You don’t know, so don’t bother trying to answer. You don’t know, because the phrase actually means exactly nothing, or at least nothing to do with the words that comprise the phrase. It is a slogan meant to sound brave and ideological precisely to obscure or deflect from its lack of any comprehensible significance in...
Here is an enthusiastic rant about socialists by Razumihin, Dostoevsky’s crystallization of the good-natured man of common sense, in Crime and Punishment: I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to...
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