Enjoying the view from Limbo
Donald Trump has nominated Amy Barrett, a woman who was just a vaguely familiar name to most Republican voters until today, and who has the full-voiced support of the GOP establishment from Mitch McConnell on down, to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court. This is it! America’s great turnaround begins today. Her presence on the court will finally set the...
2020 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 26, 2020
I gave this post its very formal, impressive title as a simple bit of irony. If you are an American voter, and you wish to vote for someone who might actually have a chance of winning the 2020 United States Presidential Election, you must vote for Republican Donald Trump, a lifelong world famous crap merchant, or Joe Biden, a babbling fool who has...
It takes more than an hour to make stuffed peppers. At best, that hour’s effort will give me, or perhaps one or two other people, five minutes of vanishing sensory pleasure. A student sends me a message asking how to handle her anger with a rude coworker. I reply that being spoken to rudely is annoying, but causes you no essential harm, whereas...
What post-Soviet progressives have gradually learned, and what anti-totalitarian observers from Tocqueville to Huxley understood long before them, is that oppression maintained with hard walls will be short-lived. For hard walls, precisely because they are so overtly rigid, are vulnerable. Men locked within those walls naturally convulse at restraint so bluntly asserted. They will not produce, thus gradually rotting the oppressive power structure...
I am the last person to go around denigrating a person’s dying wishes, let alone advising that anyone ignore or outright refuse to respect a person’s dying wishes. As Milan Kundera says in his excellent musing on artistic intentions, Testaments Betrayed, if a farmer on his death bed tells his son not to cut down the old tree next to the house, we...
Among the many pernicious effects of the worldwide panic over The Pandemic that Ate a Planet, few are as disturbing as the ease with which public authorities and media propagandists have been able to turn ordinary citizens against one another, effectively raising a universal lynch mob prepared to publicly destroy their neighbors at the drop of a virus-infected hat. Here is a news...
Within hours of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the machinery of U.S. federal politics was churning on in all its glory — or rather, gory. Mitch McConnell was insisting that the senate would vote on Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg, although he would of course do everything in his power to prevent the same thing from happening if a justice died so close to...
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. This is very important, because they recently made a movie about her, and by watching it you can realize how cute she used to be, back when she was a British actress as well as a world historical “feminist icon.” Feminist icon: a symbolic representation of Marxism, in female form. I hope Ginsburg’s death...
Washington Post headline at the moment of this writing: “Trump alleges ‘left-wing indoctrination’ in schools.” My first reaction: “Gee, what a revelation.” My second: “Does the Washington Post really expect its readers to find Trump’s claim wild and outrageous?” My third: “Yes they do, and their expectation will prove true. The indoctrinated rarely know they are indoctrinated — and what is more, they...
When one objects to lawless government responses to a public health problem — or any other social issue for that matter — it is natural to be asked occasionally, and also appropriate to ask oneself, “But if we are not simply taking a knee-jerk libertarian position, then where exactly should we draw the line limiting government action in such atypical situations?” Here, with...
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