Enjoying the view from Limbo
Many of the same people urging Ukraine to accept land concessions as the necessary price of “peace,” where peace is defined as an invading dictator’s willingness to cease immediate hostilities, are, in their domestic political views, vehemently opposed to so-called redistributionist justice. In the latter case, they regularly cite both the moral illegitimacy of violating the property and self-determination of some in order...
North American Muslims, by a large majority, strongly oppose the use of public schools to promote the sexual deviancy normalization agenda of the radical left. Do they take this position because: (a) they have been tricked by the anti-democratic American extreme right wing, as Justin Trudeau has alleged, in a brilliant example of classic Trudeauesque snobbish condescension; (b) they are too ignorant to...
When Vladimir Putin’s regime finally falls, or the Botox Tyrant himself withers and dies, probably in prison somewhere, will the apparent entity we call “Tucker Carlson” actually go poof, and the last two years of his “life” simply disappear entirely from the universe and the collective memory? I commit this thought to writing here in the nature of an experiment. Specifically, if my...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 16, 2023 · Last modified July 23, 2023
Almost two thousand years ago, the Romans rounded up Christians and other offenders against official beliefs and fed them to wild dogs and lions, as a form of popular religious expression/entertainment. A few hundred years ago, it was Christians of Europe and America rounding up alleged witches, and burning them at the stake or hanging them, as an expression of religious orthodoxy. What...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be the most serious, the most rhetorically eloquent, the most naturally curious, and the most well-read person to run for U.S. President in recent memory. On the rare occasions when I have heard him speak, the experience has been almost jarring. Here is a man running for elected office who can think on his feet, who expresses...
The most important part of any conversation is the silence. For speaking is thought translated into verbal symbols, and thought is by definition a silent, private activity of the soul. Thus, a conversation consisting only, or even primarily, of words flying back and forth involves little speaking in the strict sense, but only talking, much as Wilde wrote that a woman who cannot...
Tucker Carlson, cut loose from the, ahem, moderating tether of Fox News, has taken his Putin fantasy world propaganda to yet another level, with the help of British comedian cum better-red-than-dead peacenik fool Russell Brand, and with the amplifying support of the populist right’s new god of free speech, Elon Musk. Carlson does this because he is a craven, power-loving attention-seeker who has...
The writer’s primary goal is not to appeal to readers, nor even to appeal to good readers, but rather to be worthy of good readers. He cannot control whether any such readers will exist, or whether, if they do exist, they will ever discover or appreciate his writing. He must concern himself only with what he can control — though even that only...
In fact pleasures and pains are the things with which moral virtue is concerned. For pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions. Hence the importance, as Plato points out, of having been definitely trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things; this is what good education means. — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.iii,...
When the only true thing either side in an argument ever says is “They are lying,” why take sides? The public voices of the neo-Marxist Left insist there is no such thing as a conservative intellectual, merely proving that they have neither any idea what either of those words mean, nor the innate inquisitiveness to find out. In other words, by adopting the...
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