Enjoying the view from Limbo
Twitter recently limited the user privileges of Donald Trump Jr., for the peculiar “offense” of citing a popular video (which I have not seen) in which a group of Houston doctors claim to have used hydroxychloroquine successfully in treating COVID-19. The social media company — which in my opinion ought to have every legal right to make such a decision — defended its...
The other day, a student of a taciturn and sometimes pessimistic temperament, whom I have counselled for the past couple of years as she tries to reorient her life, sent a short e-mail to tell me about her interesting and enjoyable first day at a new, temporary job. “Thank you for making me do something,” she wrote. “I mean your giving me some...
I am not one who often dreams vividly, or typically remembers his dreams. However, since childhood, I have occasionally had extremely clear, easily memorable dreams, some of them recurring ones, of the sort that seem to highlight my spiritual condition at a certain time. Strangely, I have experienced two dreams of this type recently, which I will relate to you now, as accurately...
Given the continuous coronavirus fearmongering and demands for lockdowns and mask mandates, combined with endless expert “advisories” declaring that there can be no return to even some parts of normal life on this planet until there is a COVID-19 vaccine, common sense dictates that we — I mean all of us on Earth — are about to be confronted with new universal compulsory...
Among Nietzsche’s many excellent insights into the mind of nineteenth-century socialism, here is one from his early days (1878) that particularly appeals to my way of thinking: The Socialists demand a comfortable life for the greatest possible number. If the lasting house of this life of comfort, the perfect State, had really been attained, then this life of comfort would have destroyed the...
In this year of revolutionary activism, the DNC’s predictable decision to prop up Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee placed Biden’s handlers (a term more apt and all-encompassing in Biden’s case than is typical among presidential candidates) in the emasculating position of having to effectively promise a vice-presidential pick who would satisfy the morally infantile tonalities of this American progressive moment, specifically...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 1, 2020 · Last modified August 5, 2020
Yesterday, one expert* noted that there is an interesting feature of America’s current spasm of societal implosion that distinguishes today’s “protests” and “calls for change” from all the more legitimate, i.e., sincere, moments of upheaval in the past: this supposed “movement” has no visible leaders. Past uprisings, such as in the 1950s or ’60s, had highly identifiable (and sometimes competing) figureheads, individuals whom...
Experts, contrary to the popular connotation of that word, are simplifiers. More precisely, at their worst, which is to say at their most expert, they are simplistic people who, for the sake of their egos or to assuage their insecurities (or both), carefully and systematically evade the unknown — which is to say almost everything — by reducing the complexity of the cosmos...
Another classical liberal argument for protecting freedom of speech for Marxists, communists, and the like, which has been in and out of vogue since at least John Stuart Mill, is that the true and the good will always win in an open debate of ideas. There are a few problems with this famous assertion on its face. For one thing, in order to...
A few years back, Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto professor of psychology, shot from little-known academic to international celebrity intellectual, based largely on his strong remarks against politically correct language laws on an Ontario public television program. Watching Peterson’s rise to prominence, I recognized in his trajectory many of the same crossroads choices I had been dealing with myself as a writer,...
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