Enjoying the view from Limbo
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 5, 2019 · Last modified February 6, 2019
As regular visitors may know, I’ve been temporarily dragged away from Limbo into something closer to my version of Hell, i.e., a modern hospital. Surrounded by people at all times, prodded by strangers, bombarded with incessant noise of all sorts, and every bit of privacy overruled in favor of unwanted exposure — essentially, modern progressive society in microcosm. As a result, my writing...
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 1, 2019 · Last modified January 25, 2020
(See Part One) If the civilized life is akin to a long walk through nature — and that includes human nature — then its definitive character is not destinations, not “highlights,” but continuity. The key to continuity, in all matters of will, is the avoidance of distractions. Destinations, too, when regarded as definitive, become mere distractions. A destination is not only an end...
I have been away from Limbo for a couple of days. The reason is explained in the following: Day 1 The Moonlight Sonata is being performed at this moment, but only I can hear it. In fact, even I cannot hear it. I hear Beethoven’s mind interspersed with the cackling cacophony of mindlessness. Beethoven, mercifully going deaf, shares his private musings on passion...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 28, 2019 · Last modified March 14, 2019
A limited republic is, in practice, partly a matter of constitutional restrictions on government power; but it is at least as much a state of the national mind. Does a people, en masse and in each private adult soul, feel independent, self-reliant, and competent to manage and govern itself without the positive guidance and protective regulation of its coercive betters? If not, then...
After three weeks of posturing about The Wall, in a life-or-death fight to gain approximately one-quarter of the funding supposedly required to build this imaginary barrier, Donald Trump has signed a makeshift temporary end to the government shutdown which provides exactly zero funding for any walls, real or imagined. Naturally, the agreement was forged by his literal “right-hand man” — i.e., his puppet-master...
New York State legislators and other criminal minds are cheering today because Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed into law a bill essentially removing all restrictions on abortion at any stage of pregnancy, right up to natural birth. In other words, a bunch of people who want to kill babies are cheering because they just passed a law to make this easier. Okay, I...
In the latest on the longest “government shutdown” in U.S. history, President Trump, having caused the shutdown in quest of a fraction of the funding needed to build his quasi-wall (which of course was always more a magic word for his cult than a serious proposal), and having then offered to extend DACA — an affront to national sovereignty — in exchange for...
I don’t know what “the other side” would be in this case, or in what possible way Rudy Giuliani’s complete and utter incompetence and bald-faced lying could be of any help to “them,” but it’s just getting weird at this point. Patterico — one of the only people left in America’s “conservative media” who didn’t sell his soul for audience and money (so...
Some old fart decides to confront a bunch of high school students in MAGA hats. The teenagers try to act cool, hiding behind the safety of numbers to mock the confrontational old fart. In other words, a normal afternoon in any residential neighborhood in America; this is crabby Mr. Smith who lives on the corner, shouting over the fence at the noisy kids...
If sunset is a perennial symbol of glorious endings and the gaining of understanding, then what does that make moonset, sunset’s widely overlooked and uncelebrated mirror image? A symbol of new beginnings and their inherent innocence? But sunrise, nature’s other glory-stealer, is the obvious bringer of new beginnings. Or perhaps, as befits the moon — the secondary, feminine, modest, passive, reflective light —...
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