Enjoying the view from Limbo
All of us are born in a cave, Socrates teaches (Republic VII), staring at shadows cast upon the back wall by images held in front of a fire behind us. From this starting point, he explains that education is the process of turning around in our chairs to see the fire, the objects dancing before it, and the men holding those objects, and...
A serious student whose enthusiasm for classic literature decidedly tends toward Jane Austen and Plato — toward a reality in which life’s dark shadows eventually give way to the bright sunlight of understanding, or at least to the enlightening glow of irony — wrote to me to express her frustration at being unable to find the greatness in Dostoevsky, in spite of having...
The United Kingdom — the falsest country name outside of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — has devolved into tribal ignorance, untethered anger, seething racial hatred, and mass thuggery on all sides. And now, to make matters worse, she even has riots too! It seems that the chief emblem or symptom of modern British society, soccer hooligans, has spilled out of the...
Hidden premise. — To envy is to resent another for having what you might have had instead. But this implies an assumption that you could have had what the other has, which you would only know if you had actually achieved it yourself, in which case you would have no reason to envy. Hence, envy is, among other things, a convenient veil of...
I have not followed or watched a single event at the current Olympic Games in Paris. I will not watch one. I say this not in protest over the fact that a biological man is beating up biological women in the Olympic boxing tournament. For the record, I pity the biological man in this case, because the individual was clearly born with a...
Joe Biden is the lamest lame duck in American presidential history, having been pushed out the door of a speeding car and right off a cliff, never to matter again, in favor of a vice president who has hitherto done absolutely nothing in that role other than give the opposing party plenty of silly moments to laugh at whenever Biden’s own brand of...
2024 U.S. Election / Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 27, 2024
The Olympic Games are in Paris this summer, where men routinely urinate on the streets, so much so that the Macron government tried several years ago to reduce the grotesque effects of this Parisian crudity — the new language of love, I suppose — by installing “discreet” pee buckets disguised as planters throughout the city. Thus, people with the bladders of seven-year-olds and...
Nothing gets deeper under the skin of feminists and their right-thinking progressive allies than the once- and long-honored notion of female modesty. This, of course, explains why the entire progressive program, from public policy and historical reinterpretation to education and popular moral messaging, has made the debunking of the “so-called differences” between men and women, and the obscuring of the very definitions of...
Joe Biden has pulled himself from the 2024 presidential election at last. This is the predictable time for Democrats to praise Biden for his courage, as though hanging around months too long, effectively doing everything humanly possible to hand the election to the man he has been saying was going to end democracy and usher in an authoritarian future for America, were some...
Small talk is for killing time or manufacturing artificial familiarity. My personal motto, or self-motivation mantra, is “I don’t waste time,” and few things are more intrinsically repulsive to my character than artificial familiarity. Therefore, small talk is anathema to me….
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