Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ireland, whose most influential modern artist described its capital, a century ago, as “that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” and which seems to have been a country on the edge (or further) of collapsing into some strange combination of drunken suicide and murderous self-indulgence for centuries, finds whatever life force it has left (not at all paradoxically, but rather characteristically)...
Cool (adj.): appealing to others’ fashionable tastes or preferences in such a way as to allow those others to feel that in liking you (the cool one), they are expressing their own independent and original minds.
In short, coolness is, to both the cool one and his admirers, merely a collectively aggrandizing euphemism…
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 22, 2023 · Last modified November 24, 2023
There is no living politician I know of whom I would trust unmonitored with my wallet or my cell phone. Why in the world would I trust one with my liberty or my need to know the truth about anything? Steps are being taken, in every advanced country on Earth, towards establishing the latest manifestation of the totalitarian dream, a cashless society, which...
The other day, a serious student who is reading Brave New World wrote with some musings and questions inspired by the World Controller’s explanation, in one of the later chapters, of the World State’s reasons for prohibiting all access to the great art and thought of the past. I reproduce her main questions (in italics) and my replies, below, with only a few...
In 2019, a young comedian named Shane Gillis won the career-making prize most North American comics dream of, earning a job as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. In response to this hiring, someone named Seth Simons took to social media to draw attention to a past performance in which Gillis (“who is white,” as the media would announce today, as though...
Russell Brand, a moderately clever British comedian who has of late taken to playing the celebrity-pundit-for-profit game on the internet, and who has thus effectively self-identified as an opponent of the radical Marxist zeitgeist, has, not surprisingly, become the latest popular target of a progressive pogrom, aka he is being “cancelled.” In this case, the modus operandi appears to be the same one...
Ten years ago, early in the second term of America’s first overtly socialist presidency, I wrote a book review at American Thinker, “Progressivism: Revenge of the Sociopaths,” outlining the unofficial blueprint, published a century earlier, for the Marxist transformation of America, namely Philip Dru: Administrator by Edward Mandell House. A few years later, I incorporated that review into my series, “Progressivism 101,” on...
Apparently, the Biden administration is preparing to emulate its neo-Marxist counterpart to the north, the Trudeau dynasty, in officially recommending that Americans imbibe no more than two alcoholic drinks per week. Two observations on this exciting news. First, it is interesting, not to say portentous, that the U.S. government is suddenly going all temperate on alcohol at the same time that the uniparty...
To treat what we moderns call “culture” as an absolute — as we do when we speak of multiculturalism or cultural appropriation — is to reduce humanity as a species to its social conventions and habits, which means to deny the existence of any underlying human nature, which nature may, under varying conditions, manifest itself in alternative conventions and habits. In other words,...
Books / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 21, 2023 · Last modified July 22, 2023
Milan Kundera, the Czech-born, French-naturalized novelist — I avoid the standard appellation “Czech novelist” out of respect for Kundera’s own reasons for rejecting it — died last week. I will not describe him as the greatest or most important European novelist since World War II, as some might, not because I question that judgment but because I am wholly unqualified to make it....
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