Enjoying the view from Limbo
Someone has leaked a draft of a U. S. Supreme Court decision, written by Samuel Alito, indicating that the court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, the notorious 1973 case that was decided in favor of making abortion a federally guaranteed right. Contrary to the political hay being made of this by the left in general, and the Democratic Party in...
I do not always agree with Garry Kasparov on general matters of ordinary politics, but on Putin and the current stage of Putin’s war of conquest against the West, I know of no other popular voice today who speaks with such clarity and uncompromised principle. Of the many appeasing & contrary to history and reality pieces I have read during Putin’s war of...
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 10, 2022 · Last modified April 22, 2022
On being “absolutely modern.”— We naturally get excited about new ideas, new explanations. In such excitement, all past ideas seem paltry and passé. Such is the nature of enthusiasm. The whole world reflects our excitement back at us, reinforcing the illusion of absolute certainty attending the compelling new thoughts and their accompanying feelings. Hence, all previous modes of thought appear to us as...
Seeing the imperfection of things, it is always tempting, at least to those steeped in centuries of progressive thought in all its forms, to allow disappointment with the imperfect to transmogrify into an assumption that things could have been better. But from a non-progressive point of view, it does not follow from the fact that something is disappointingly inadequate that there must have...
There is all the difference in the world between describing certain beliefs or assumptions as “intolerable” or “unacceptable” as a point of rhetorical emphasis, and describing them this way as a matter of practical governmental policy, i.e., between strongly disapproving of someone’s thoughts and actively engaging the coercive power of the state to criminalize and punish those thoughts. Unless, that is, one happens...
Progressives believe, or say they believe, that the history of “Western civilization” is systemically racist, sexist, oligarchic, intolerant, and so on, not merely accidentally or on its margins, but as an essential element and raison d’être of its existence. In other words, these people believe — their political movement depends on the belief — that the entire philosophic, religious, scientific, artistic, and political...
Whoopi Goldberg is an unfunny comedienne, a poor actress, and a kooky political pontificator for the bored housewives audience. She recently commented, seemingly in the context of trying to reduce everything to white vs. black racial politics, that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man,” since both groups involved — Germans and Jews, apparently — were white. For...
Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in demanding that Spotify remove her music from its platform, in protest against Joe Rogan’s podcast, which discusses the Covid-19 pandemic in terms that do not perfectly align with the Biden administration’s official statements. Since Young and Mitchell are both Canadian by birth and upbringing, it is not surprising that they are so quick to favor authoritarian...
In the past, communities were held together, and public morality maintained, by the personal sense of shame and obligation, the habituation of moderate emotional responses, the concern for family honor, and the desire to prove oneself worthy of the responsibilities of individual self-government. Today, in a quest to root out all moral aberrations and imperfections, societies employ school-indoctrinated slogans, omnipresent cameras, algorithmic monitors,...
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...
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