Enjoying the view from Limbo
Imagine you are an ambitious career man being offered a prestigious executive position at a major corporation. You learn, however, that the last man who had that job was ordered by the boss to violate the fundamental law of his country, his personal principles, and a solemn oath sworn on the Bible; that the boss not only announced this demand to the whole...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 20, 2024 · Last modified July 25, 2024
I watched approximately thirty seconds of the Republican National Convention live on the internet. The first fifteen of those seconds were devoted to a careful examination of the first half of a sentence by Donald Trump’s former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The second fifteen second block was my intensive study of the vice presidential nomination speech of J. D. Vance, which only...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 19, 2024 · Last modified July 25, 2024
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania, there has been a lot of talk, on both sides of the false dichotomy that declares itself the whole truth of American politics, about how crimes like this are the “result” of the alarmist and life-or-death rhetoric that characterizes political speech today, the only debate being over which side...
Have tongue, will shine shoes.– I was seeing the red headline at the top of my internet homepage all morning in Korea, alerting me to “live coverage” of the Republican National Convention, available at the touch of a “click here.” Finally, quite late in the morning, which I presume means near the end of the evening’s fermented festivities in Milwaukee, morbid curiosity got...
As if aching to remind everyone that, heroic gestures on a podium aside, he is still just a girl with a cult, Donald Trump has, after weeks of teasing America with his “four or five” not so secret options, selected as his running mate the man who is no doubt the very worst of the bunch, J. D. Vance. Trump’s short list apparently...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 15, 2024 · Last modified July 16, 2024
The fatal shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania — the state to which Barack Obama was referring when he spoke of the uneducated underclass “clinging to their Bibles and their guns,” interestingly — is the kind of moment in American politics that tends to crystallize divisions, blur rational judgment, and send the media (all forms) into seizures of exploitation mania. I...
George Clooney, a grinning celebrity who has never done a single thing in his career as a popular entertainer that will be remembered, let alone celebrated, beyond his space-occupying, mega-carbon-emitting lifespan, but who was given a Hollywood star gold pass to the nefarious Council on Foreign Relations and is therefore officially qualified to speak about political matters as though he had some kind...
My country, wrong.— There are broadly two ways to criticize one’s own country. The first is to despise what it was and is, and desire its replacement with something else. The second is to despise what it has become — that is, what it has been replaced with — and lament the loss of what it was or ought to have been. I...
Britain and France, perennial rivals in their own minds for European preeminence, have just turned significantly to the socialist left in national elections. In both cases, the shift in power appears more radical when viewed in terms of elected representatives than in terms of actual total votes. Nevertheless, the reality remains: The two leading European nations of the modern era (Germany is not,...
It is always comforting to remind yourself, as you watch them seeking to tear down your world, that your world, at least as they understand it, is also their world, whatever they may believe. Hence, everything they take from you is a theft from themselves, everything of yours that they destroy is one more thing they can never have, and every sign of...
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