Enjoying the view from Limbo
Sincerity — if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Rand Paul gave the world a master class in the practical application of George Burns’ famous joke about the entertainment industry. A consummate libertarian of the performer class, Paul spoke in the U.S. Senate last week about his unwillingness to support any more military aid to Ukraine. His speech was passionate but...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 19, 2023
The American government’s old guard establishment in both parties wants Ukraine to lose the war, but slowly. The establishment’s upstart wing, comprised mainly of populists of the right, including the farcically-named House Freedom Caucus, wants Russia to win, and quickly. Neither side is quite willing to state its genuine position directly, at least so far, although the loonier puppets of the populist faction,...
It is fairly obvious now that President Biden’s administration (not Biden himself, who of course has no idea what is happening or why) wishes to help Ukraine stave off Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion just well enough to inflict severe damage to Putin’s military, but not well enough to defeat him outright or restore all of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. In other words, the goal...
Many of the same people urging Ukraine to accept land concessions as the necessary price of “peace,” where peace is defined as an invading dictator’s willingness to cease immediate hostilities, are, in their domestic political views, vehemently opposed to so-called redistributionist justice. In the latter case, they regularly cite both the moral illegitimacy of violating the property and self-determination of some in order...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be the most serious, the most rhetorically eloquent, the most naturally curious, and the most well-read person to run for U.S. President in recent memory. On the rare occasions when I have heard him speak, the experience has been almost jarring. Here is a man running for elected office who can think on his feet, who expresses...
Tucker Carlson, cut loose from the, ahem, moderating tether of Fox News, has taken his Putin fantasy world propaganda to yet another level, with the help of British comedian cum better-red-than-dead peacenik fool Russell Brand, and with the amplifying support of the populist right’s new god of free speech, Elon Musk. Carlson does this because he is a craven, power-loving attention-seeker who has...
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the thug who leads Russia’s most effective military force — a private group of criminals nominally allied with the Kremlin — is now threatening the official Kremlin leadership with armed rebellion, and openly declaring the war in Ukraine to have been undertaken on false pretenses, with phony rationalizations based on fabricated nonsense about non-existent threats from Ukraine and NATO. In other...
Special counsel John Durham has completed a four-year investigation into the FBI’s aggressive pursuit of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia prior to the 2016 U.S. election. He has concluded that the FBI gave in to confirmation bias in claiming links between Trump and the Kremlin, treating unsubstantiated private reports as trustworthy evidence, and leaping from legitimate concerns about Trump associates (e.g., Paul...
America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 17, 2023 · Last modified April 18, 2023
A boy with military training who apparently skipped the class about loyalty to country has given his online gaming friends a bunch of secret Department of Defense documents as a means of showing off. The alt-right and the Fox News types — i.e., the half of the Republican Party and the mainstream media that has repeatedly proved in practice that it would willingly...
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 14, 2023 · Last modified April 15, 2023
The United States of America Today: A Dialogue Truth: Donald Trump, with his self-seeking demagoguery, fear-and-lie-grounded radicalization of millions of his supporters, and open praise and normalization of tyrants and tyrannical methods at home and abroad, has done catastrophic and possibly irreparable harm to his country. Tribalism: But what about Biden, Hillary, and Obama! Truth: Fine. In that case reason affords you two...
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