Enjoying the view from Limbo
If you absolutely need something to be true, that would be an excellent place to begin your most painstakingly openminded inquiry. For emotional investment is the hardest obstacle for the mind to overcome, and therefore the greatest bar to discovery. A philosopher, essentially, is a man whose investment in a certainty never supersedes his desire for the truth. Consistency across time is not...
If someone told you, in the form of an ultimatum, that the only way to combat some new crisis or impending disaster was to submit yourself, your family, and your friends, to a permanent and institutionally self-perpetuating tyranny, i.e., the enslavement of the vast majority of the human population under a universal regime untethered from any notion of intractable and fundamental limits on...
Party life.— Stay out of the partisan ruse that passes itself off as politics today. No taking sides, no “lesser of two evils” rationalizations, no caring about the parties’ mutual assured destruction shadow play as though you were not their intended victim. To care is to delude oneself that there is something within the realm of practical possibility which would be better, and...
Matt Gaetz, U.S. congressman and living proof that Trump-level strategic thinking is alive and well in American government, has responded to a media question about Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership by suggesting that he would prefer to see Russia rather than Ukraine joining NATO, in order for the alliance to be more effective against China. So that would mean a globally aggressive, West-subverting...
Global Climate Hysteria / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 31, 2023 · Last modified August 1, 2023
A few days ago, I returned to the issue of climate alarmism, using as my kick-off point the predictable public and media response to the recent unusually severe rainy season in Korea, where I live. As I noted then, it was all but impossible here, for a few wet weeks, to mention the rain in any context without being met immediately by a...
Everyone who is even vaguely attentive to American politics, and even half-honest about the evidence of his own senses, knows that Joe Biden is no more serving as the active president of the United States — the “here” at which, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops — than I am. That is to say, everyone can see as clear as day that...
During the past several weeks, Korea has had an unusually long and severe rainy season, one of the worst I have experienced during my sixteen years in this country. Predictably, as with any weather event whatsoever, not to mention any mention of any weather event, the country is now awash in climate change doomsday prognostications. Say the word “rain” to anyone here today,...
America Descending / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 26, 2023 · Last modified July 27, 2023
In keeping with his annual tradition, Barack Obama has posted his 2023 summer playlist, which is to say the collection of songs he claims to have on his portable listening device at the moment. Amusingly, one musician, someone called Lucy Dacus, objected to being included, using the opportunity to accuse Obama of being a war criminal. Good for her, I say! After all,...
To treat what we moderns call “culture” as an absolute — as we do when we speak of multiculturalism or cultural appropriation — is to reduce humanity as a species to its social conventions and habits, which means to deny the existence of any underlying human nature, which nature may, under varying conditions, manifest itself in alternative conventions and habits. In other words,...
Books / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 21, 2023 · Last modified July 22, 2023
Milan Kundera, the Czech-born, French-naturalized novelist — I avoid the standard appellation “Czech novelist” out of respect for Kundera’s own reasons for rejecting it — died last week. I will not describe him as the greatest or most important European novelist since World War II, as some might, not because I question that judgment but because I am wholly unqualified to make it....
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