Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 12, 2026 · Last modified July 13, 2026
Partisans.– A comprehensive explanation for today’s hyper-partisan politics (aka tribalism) would merely be an elucidation of this aphorism from Nietzsche, published in 1878: Not suited to be a party man. — He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon. From which we may...
Watching Donald Trump these days, with his increasingly unhinged bluster and threats and humorless assaults on common sense, I see more and more of what I have always seen. It is the same thing we would see in Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and any other upside-down man of our time for that matter, were they all as constitutionally inclined toward infantile public exposure...
In case anyone is curious as to why I felt no inclination, let alone motivation, to write anything here in honor of this year’s most auspicious July 4th holiday, allow me to explain the reason. July 4th is Independence Day, a holiday established to celebrate the founding of The United States of America, and this year’s Independence Day was supposed to be special...
The key to participating in the definitive activity of the philosophic life is not, as may sometimes be assumed, merely a matter of having sufficient private time, let alone of being alone for any specific length of time. The essential thing, rather, is the subjective certainty of being free to become immersed in one’s train of thought without any (perceived) threat of interruption....
The thinking life.– What else is modern academic scholarship, as it has been practiced since at least the German universities of the early nineteenth century, but a non-digital precursor to today’s computer-based “artificial intelligence”? Analog AI, if you will. Vast human-designed but meticulously dehumanized data centers of universal thought-collection (called “disciplines”), with hundreds of thousands of nodes (called “professors”) incapable of truly comprehending,...
CBS, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump, Inc., has obtained by way of a phone call with “senior U.S. officials,” a full rundown of the fourteen-point “memorandum of understanding” between the United States and Iran, which lays the groundwork for final treaty negotiations to end the dumbest own-goal defeat in American military history. In sum, these fourteen points summarize the...
Back in January, when the Iranian people took to the streets in yet another desperate cry for international support against their theocratic oppressors, and faced death by the thousands for their courage, Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful lying coward, took to social media, where he does all his brave fighting, to send a message to those risking everything on the streets of...
In 1987, in a speech at the annual convention of Kiwanis International, in the context of arguing for his proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Ronald Reagan reiterated his famous remark from twenty years earlier, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation.” How many people in attendance when Reagan delivered...
Mark Levin, former rational human and Reaganite, has used his X account to promote a post claiming that “Nick Shirley says he has proof” that Marjorie Taylor Greene was “bribed” to turn against Donald Trump. I don’t know who Nick Shirley is, and I don’t know why Marjorie Taylor Greene really turned against Trump. But I do know that Mark Levin, who used...
The fatal flaw of all democratic arrangements: The only person who ought to be granted power over other people is one who is temperamentally averse to possessing practical power over others, who sees none of the personal material advantages of power as desirable in the least, and who has pressing concerns and abiding enthusiasms which would make the commitments and duties of political...
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