Enjoying the view from Limbo
The Labour Party, as I write this, is in the process of achieving an extraordinary landslide victory in the UK general election. The Tories and Reformers will try to tell themselves and anyone else who might listen to them, as they have been insisting for weeks leading up to the vote, that the problem is simply that the British public has “failed to...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 4, 2024
Much of the discussion about the U.S. presidential election has revolved around the question of Joe Biden’s fitness for office, and above all his fitness to serve a prospective second term. This narrative feeds all too well into the general tenor of our progressive late modernity with regard to the question of age, wherein it has become increasingly common and disturbingly easy to...
On being aloft.— I know that if I had never heard the works of Mozart and Beethoven, my understanding of the art of music, the soul of modernity, and the heights of human aspiration would be far dimmer, and my own thoughts and tastes far coarser. I fear, by contrast, that if I ever willingly heard a song by Taylor Swift or Billie...
I just tuned in for a few minutes of the presidential debate between Joe Biden’s ghost and Donald Trump’s tape loop, already in progress. By chance, a CNN hairdo/moderator was just embarking upon a line of questioning related to foreign policy issues, beginning with Ukraine. Here are my impressions: Biden is reciting talking points that are presumably being fed into his ear by...
For several years, the great debate about so-called artificial intelligence has been whether or not it will end the world as we know it. The answer is in: Yes it will, and in the most efficient and literal sense. No, it may not lead to the aggressive takeover of the planet by an out-of-control army of conscious and mean-spirited robots — although it...
Nigel Farage, the relatively well-spoken, relatively reasonable, and relatively principled British politician — I eschew the word “statesman” and its accompanying concept, as that species went extinct decades ago — who is commonly identified as the hero (or villain) of the Brexit movement, has, on the eve of a British election, reasserted his ideological alliance with the worst elements of the worldwide “far...
If you vote for Joe Biden, you must hope that he has enough sense or conscience left in him to resist or at least curtail the most extreme instincts of his Democratic Party advisors (read puppetmasters), for which hope we have not a shred of encouraging evidence. If you vote for Donald Trump, you must hope that his Republican Party advisors (read lackeys)...
Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 15, 2024 · Last modified June 17, 2024
A student recently told me about a book she had just read, Annie Ernaux’s classic of anti-motherhood indignation, La Femme Gelée. She said the book, which describes Ernaux’s life as a housewife and mother, made her feel as though she were “in prison,” and as though such a repetitive life of caring for babies, cooking meals, shopping, doing house chores, sleeping with her...
On Pain “No pain, no gain,” as we so commonly say. That is probably true, but one must never forget that most pains deliver no gains at all. Pain is a necessary condition for gain, but it is far from being a sufficient condition. On the contrary, apart from simple physical pain caused by unavoidable injury or illness, most suffering is the result...
I assume he did it, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on the relevant laws, or even to know exactly what he is accused of having done. But I base my good-faith assumption that the New York jury of his peers got it right on the reflection that Trump is a conniving, two-faced, self-serving New York real estate liar who has...
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