Enjoying the view from Limbo
Now that Trump has spoken publicly about the new coronavirus outbreak, the American blogosphere will be dominated for days with vigorous arguments (i.e., rabid posturing) for or against one’s favorite political representative, as though this issue had any proper connection to politics. Of course, in this age, everything is connected to politics. Not to political philosophy, political community, or political history, mind you...
Korean authorities have just announced 334 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in the country, bringing the national total to over 1,500. Almost all of these new cases are in Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people a couple of hours’ drive from both Seoul and Busan (the two biggest population areas). And they were completely predictable, as I have explained in previous posts...
Death by Education / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 27, 2020
The profit motive and the news.– The non-government-owned news media (i.e., the media of a free people) is an industry in which businesses make money by selling you the information that you believe you need. The media therefore has an essential, existential motive to convince you that you do in fact need their information. Whether they will seek to convince you through reason...
Some people don’t know when to shut up. Some people don’t know which issues are not worth politicizing. Some people don’t know how little they really know. Some people don’t know that their hatred does not count as wisdom. Some people, as my father used to say, don’t know their a**es from third base. All of the above applies to the current political...
I live in Korea, which has the second largest number of confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, after neighboring China of course. Koreans have a tendency to react with extreme caution and/or outrage, and with near-perfect unanimity, to such highly-publicized concerns. Thus, libraries have been shutting down indefinitely, schools and universities (including mine) are delaying the start of spring semester, and small businesses...
2020 U.S. Election / Socialized Medicine / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 25, 2020 · Last modified February 26, 2020
As a follow-up to my recent couple of posts related to Bernie Sanders’ surge, or momentum, or momentous surge, or whatever we are supposed to call it — I call it yet more evidence of the truth of everything I argued in The Case Against Public Education — I think it may be valuable to take a look at the real clash of...
Patterico has a very good post at his blog today, examining both sides of the “Trump vs. the socialist” dynamic that is causing principled conservatives and constitutionalists in America to lose sleep as they look ahead to November 2020. For some time, he has been toying with the idea of voting for a Democrat (hopefully a “moderate” one) as a small stand against...
The Democratic Party’s half of the Washington establishment is in knots over the strong primary season start by Bernie Sanders. They would apparently prefer to be represented in the 2020 presidential election by a senile compulsive-lying dimwit, a Harvard compulsive-lying leftist-of-convenience, a billionaire weenie who thinks the government ought to have the authority to restrict your sugar intake, or someone named Amy Klobuchar....
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, in his dying hour, describes his mind’s eye view of the Earth, as a final life lesson for his friends. The most striking feature of his remarkable quasi-mythical account is his speculation that the true surface of the Earth is not the ground we walk on, which we mistakenly call “the Earth,” but rather the upper limits of our...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 22, 2020 · Last modified February 23, 2020
I have nothing to say today about Roger Stone’s sentencing, or Donald Trump’s almost certain eventual presidential pardon of Stone, which he will issue for no reason other than because Stone is a Trump “strategist” (aka sycophant). Nor do I have any conjectures to make about Trump’s rehiring of a very young “loyalist” (aka bootlicking groupie) as head of the presidential personnel office,...
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