Enjoying the view from Limbo
Talk about not having a rooting interest! John Bolton is currently trying to sell his “memoir” by representing it as a steaming pile of Trump gossip, “revealing” that the president is an incompetent boob. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is anxiously fighting to have the book’s publication blocked as a national security threat, while simultaneously insisting that it is a pack of lies. I suspect...
A news article (aka propaganda screed) from Associated Press reports (i.e., carefully frames so as to avoid the real heart of the story) that California’s public school superintendent, Tony Thurmond, has praised and endorsed a decision by the Berkeley Unified School District to rename schools named for “Confederate leaders or other racially charged figures” whose names on the schools “exacerbate feelings of racial...
A quick recap of recent progress in swamp-draining. Over the past two months, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, who actually had the personal authority to make the decisions at issue, has: signed the most superfluous and bankrupting spending bills in U.S. history, in response to an economic “crisis” directly and deliberately precipitated by his own and his party’s destructive “emergency”...
Earlier today, I posted a short essay on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s complete sellout of the principles of constitutional jurisprudence, in the form of his majority opinion on radically changing the meaning of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s wording on sex discrimination in the workplace to “protect” voluntary sexual behavior, rather than merely biological sex, i.e., inborn reproductive traits. The crux...
There is just nothing — nothing, zero, nada — to say in favor of voting for Donald Trump. There wasn’t in 2016 (although at least it was understandable when Hillary was looming), and there certainly isn’t today. I have already dealt with all the usual excuses and rationalizations too many times to recite them again here. Today, however, yet another of the standard...
I am not a collectivist. Nor am I in the least bit inclined, either by philosophic temperament or by close observation of current civilizational trends, to believe that there are very many lives today — black, white, yellow, or mauve — that “matter” in the big scheme of things. In any case, those lives which do matter will always be the lives of...
Today I see that Wendy Mesley, a long-time CBC journalist, has been thrown down the memory hole, like so many these days, for committing one of the cardinal sins in the Marxist faith. Specifically, Mesley’s television program was “suspended” because, during a discussion of racial inequality, she “used a word that should never be used.” That phrase, “used a word that should never...
What is Progressivism? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 14, 2020 · Last modified June 15, 2020
You have been hearing it for months. It has been a constant background chatter, a shiver at the surface of daily life. It insinuates itself into almost every conversation with relatives, old friends, coworkers, random acquaintances. “This virus is so frightening.” “I’m worried about my kids getting this thing.” “What scares me is the second wave — that might be even worse!” Late...
Last evening, I ate dinner with a student at a department store food court. At one point in the conversation, while talking about the kind of attitudes and responses that pass for “normal” today, I suddenly had an odd thought. Looking around the large, moderately crowded but “socially-distanced” court, I mused aloud, “If someone from the government walked in here right now and...
If you are a reasonably intelligent, somewhat politically ambitious man, and you see that the political class in your society is exploiting a crisis as a means of establishing extremely illiberal powers far beyond the legitimate necessities of the current crisis — powers of the sort that no state ever relinquishes once the precedent has been set and publicly accepted — then if...
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