Enjoying the view from Limbo
Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 11, 2020
The director of the U.S. CDC claims that it is likely America will see three thousand COVID deaths per day over the next sixty days. Needless to say, he does not mention that if this prediction comes true, it would make each of the next two months only half as deadly as the worst month of the 1918 flu pandemic, which deaths were...
A few days ago, White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Birx, Dr. Fauci’s priggish schoolmarm understudy, went out of her way to establish for all who ever doubted it that she is (a) a hyperbolic alarmist worthy of the nether regions of the Trump campaign’s legal team, (b) quite ignorant and narrowminded, and (c) a leading candidate for Upper Class Twit of the...
I see that Walter Williams, an influential and distinguished American proto-libertarian economist, professor, and political columnist, has died. A few thoughts, as they occur to me. To be an American black man and a classical liberal at the same time is to put a big X on one’s forehead and one’s life, in contemporary political and “cultural” terms. Williams followed this path, unwaveringly...
I have written several times over the past, oh, let’s say four years (hmm…) about the sudden and complete shift of the U.S. House Freedom Caucus into an anti-American, anti-Constitution, corporate GOP appendage, the unfreedom caucus. When they essentially forced their only principled member, Justin Amash, out of the group (and the Republican Party) for his refusal to reject every single pro-liberty position...
Feeling small compared to the cosmos is not an illness, but rather a sign of higher health, the strong soul’s humility. Seeking smaller surroundings to insulate oneself against that feeling of cosmic smallness is an illness. The need to feel “big enough” for one’s environment at all costs indicates a fundamental fear of the beautiful, the rare, and the great, which is to...
Some readers familiar with my background and professional biography might wonder how I ended up in this unorthodox, fringe-dwelling sort of university teaching career in South Korea, rather than having pursued the more traditional and “prestigious” academic path typically prized by those who spend their early adulthoods on the educational path I followed. Here, in a nutshell — and I choose that idiom...
The roots of political philosophy grew from Socrates’ lifelong frustration with all the politicians, rhetoricians, and sophists active and influential in the political arena, who through all his attempts to question and challenge them on this issue, could never provide one rationally plausible definition of politics’ essential concern, justice. In short, Socrates found that none of the men important in the political life...
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 4, 2020 · Last modified December 5, 2020
To escape a perceived object of fear, late modern humanity will eagerly sacrifice anything — up to and including human life itself, the soul of man. In self-defeating hopes of protecting his most worthless and subhuman objects of desire — immediate comfort and immediate pleasure — late modern man will enslave both himself and his neighbor without hesitation, even seemingly without differentiation, thereby...
Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 4, 2020
If I were an old man, and I were told that for the sake of my health, the government was going to universally restrict normal life throughout my community indefinitely, causing widespread unemployment, poverty, small business failures, suicides, untreated cancers, mass hysteria, and a general breakdown of civility and goodwill among my fellow citizens, would I thank the government for protecting me at...
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. — I suspect we will not be hearing that middle name too often in the mainstream media — is out there today courageously urging his fellow Americans to overcome their fears, to come together with strength as the American people always have during a crisis…and to hide from each other by avoiding their loved ones at Christmas, by not...
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