Enjoying the view from Limbo
2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 26, 2024
The U.S. is apparently “unimpressed” with Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan for victory over Russia. This sage judgment coming from a country that has been involved in several major wars over the past sixty years, and has lost every single one of them due to inept planning, cowardly leadership, lack of moral purpose, and a world-historical genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 14, 2024
To say that Donald Trump is the worst thing that ever happened to American politics would be analogous to saying that the horrible smell in your kitchen is the worst thing that ever happened to the raw meat you left out on the counter overnight. That is to say, the truly worst thing is not the after-effect, nor even the effect itself, but...
Keir Starmer, the latest in a string of mealy-mouthed and/or self-aggrandizing party men to occupy 10 Downing Street in the shadow of a giant whom they all knew before entering the place that they could never live up to, has decided, in true socialist fashion, to wear his insecurity on his sleeve more overtly than his predecessors. Specifically, Starmer has chosen to remove...
The United Kingdom — the falsest country name outside of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — has devolved into tribal ignorance, untethered anger, seething racial hatred, and mass thuggery on all sides. And now, to make matters worse, she even has riots too! It seems that the chief emblem or symptom of modern British society, soccer hooligans, has spilled out of the...
Britain and France, perennial rivals in their own minds for European preeminence, have just turned significantly to the socialist left in national elections. In both cases, the shift in power appears more radical when viewed in terms of elected representatives than in terms of actual total votes. Nevertheless, the reality remains: The two leading European nations of the modern era (Germany is not,...
The Labour Party, as I write this, is in the process of achieving an extraordinary landslide victory in the UK general election. The Tories and Reformers will try to tell themselves and anyone else who might listen to them, as they have been insisting for weeks leading up to the vote, that the problem is simply that the British public has “failed to...
Nigel Farage, the relatively well-spoken, relatively reasonable, and relatively principled British politician — I eschew the word “statesman” and its accompanying concept, as that species went extinct decades ago — who is commonly identified as the hero (or villain) of the Brexit movement, has, on the eve of a British election, reasserted his ideological alliance with the worst elements of the worldwide “far...
If you vote for Joe Biden, you must hope that he has enough sense or conscience left in him to resist or at least curtail the most extreme instincts of his Democratic Party advisors (read puppetmasters), for which hope we have not a shred of encouraging evidence. If you vote for Donald Trump, you must hope that his Republican Party advisors (read lackeys)...
The U.S. Libertarian convention has chosen its presidential nominee, i.e., has chosen the man who will be the flagbearer for freedom defined as the liberty to get stoned or marry your dog — if that is your “rational preference.” There was one moment in Chase Oliver’s acceptance speech — captured and disseminated by Al Jazeera, for obvious reasons — when the new figurehead...
If the history of civilization has taught us anything — and by “us,” I mean non-progressives, progressives being constitutionally opposed to learning from history — it is that government will never be perfect, will rarely be good, and will usually be dreadful. Tyrannical impulses, fatal compromises of principle, and catastrophic blindness are such intractable facts of the human condition that it is an...
Follow: