Enjoying the view from Limbo
An essential worker, defined not as our totalitarian age defines that term, but as reason and human nature define it: A person whose work is necessary in a given context. For example, in the context of a private family household, in which an income is essential to eating and maintaining a home, a person who earns money for the material continuity of that...
So inured have we become to our upside-down world, in which unfettered greed is the only moral law, and lust for material power and popular admiration the only understandable motives, that it has seemingly become difficult for many people even to recognize, let alone to appreciate the value of, actual manhood. Here, then, is a primer in how a man would think, if...
If you knowingly serve drinks to an alcoholic, are you not guilty of enabling his deterioration? If you give heroine to a junkie, are you not an accomplice in his destruction? If you hide a schizophrenic’s medication, are you not abetting his lapse into unreason? Today, the world is watching a megalomaniacal narcissist, an infantile sociopath, spiraling toward a crash landing of world-historical...
News does not become “fake” merely because the greatest fraud in the history of a nation calls it that. General Michael Flynn, in publicly advocating the idea that President Trump should impose martial law and employ the U.S. military to “redo” the election, is acting like a man who knows he will never again have to answer the charge of being a Russian...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 22, 2020 · Last modified December 25, 2020
Strictly speaking, the opposite of life is not death, but rather non-life. Everything depends, then, on how one defines life, in order to determine, by implication, what non-life entails. That is to say, it is possible that death is not essentially opposed to life at all, if life is defined in such a way that non-life may be attributed to a being that...
Jupiter and Saturn, as seen from South Korea — December 21st, 2020.
If Vladimir Putin had carefully groomed and trained a man to become President of the United States for the purpose of destroying the nation’s soul, turning the country into warring factions that hate and distrust one another at the most fundamental level, and planting a fulltime apologist for Putin himself right in the White House — one willing to stand in open and...
The best writer writes as the most intimate friend speaks, namely as though he were talking to himself, and for himself. He also hesitates to take his writing too seriously, and may even be suspicious of it. The best teacher is not the one who can answer all your questions, but rather the one who knows how to ask questions, and what the...
One of the great Kafkaesque elements of this moment in humanity’s collapse is the repeated sense, experienced only by the conscious minority, we happy few, that we are watching our fellow men behaving as people behave in nightmares — walking directly into obvious traps or off cliffs, seemingly without an iota of doubt or concern. We watch those around us, and around the...
Government vs. God / Ideas and Reflections / Pandemic that Ate a Planet
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 18, 2020
For decades, we all tried to deny this looming cloud to some degree in order to carry on with our daily lives and interests. Some even tried to deny the threat outright, on the grounds that they could still carry on with their daily lives — as though “daily life” were evidence of freedom. This year, however, denial has become impossible: You live...
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