Enjoying the view from Limbo
Recently, Senator Mike Lee endorsed Donald Trump for president yet again, proving, yet again, that his own political survival and prospects for personal gain take primacy in his heart over all concerns for constitutional government, republican principles, and whatever else he used to claim, sincerely or otherwise, to stand for. He saw what happened to Mitt Romney, Utah’s most celebrated political son, when...
2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 19, 2024 · Last modified January 20, 2024
The danger of the Republican Party’s fateful decision, back in 2016, to hold onto its traditional voter base by playing along with Donald Trump, was never primarily that he would promote or embark upon explicitly anti-republican policies (although he has certainly done that), or that he would convert the GOP into a populist apologist faction for tyranny on the global stage (although he...
Vivek Ramaswamy has dropped out of the Republican Party primaries in a manner that perfectly completes the first stage of his campaign to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. He is the one primary candidate who at no point in the process had any intention of winning the primaries or setting himself up as a serious contender. His whole purpose all along,...
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 15, 2024 · Last modified February 5, 2025
The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said of a famous American director (I quote from ancient memory), “He points the camera somewhere, I suppose, but he doesn’t see anything.” Today, four billion would-be cinéma vérité auteurs are pointing their own cameras “somewhere,” as we may suppose, but the assumption that all this pointing and shooting constitutes seeing, or revealing, anything —...
Any two objects seen from a great enough distance will look fundamentally similar. The closer we get, the more differences we will begin to discern. The same is true with mental distance. The unfamiliar tends to group itself together in our minds, naturally. As we get to know individual instances within the group, they separate themselves from this new generality in our minds, and we see….
We spend a lot of time (which is itself an illusion) hemming and hawing with mock-profundity about what we are going to do, as though we were making decisions, rather than merely waiting to do what we must do. We must either flow with the wave in which we inevitably find ourselves, or struggle to remain standing and resistant against its force. But...
One of the U.S. Democratic Party’s leading propaganda outlets, MSNBC, is blithely reporting today, in this new year of our Election Lord 2024, that: a Politico report indicates that the Biden administration is quietly shifting away from backing Ukraine’s bid for total victory. Instead, the White House is now thinking about how to best position Ukraine for negotiations that are likely to lead to territorial...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 1, 2024
Lost in the Cloud.— We are all, today, in all our endeavors, at the mercy of everything we ever did, everything we ever said, and everyone with whom we ever interacted in any way, at any time, under any circumstances. In practice, this means that standing apart from others, or disagreeing in any way with current moral or political orthodoxies, no longer merely...
It is typical these days, among those still sufficiently sentient and resistant to ideological indoctrination to have wayward thoughts, to wish others a Merry Christmas with a disclaimer to the effect that Christmases, at this historical moment, do not seem to offer much to be merry about. While I certainly sympathize with that mixed tone of well-wishing lamentation, I always try to remind...
2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published December 24, 2023
In 2012, Barack Obama directly told Dmitry Medvedev to beg the latter’s leash-holder, “Vladimir,” to be patient until after Obama’s upcoming “last election,” at which time he, Obama, “would have more flexibility” with regard to accommodating Putin’s wishes on (Russian) defense matters. In 2014, Putin occupied Crimea, a direct and overt violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, in response to which Obama did exactly nothing....
Follow: