Enjoying the view from Limbo
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 14, 2023 · Last modified April 15, 2023
The United States of America Today: A Dialogue Truth: Donald Trump, with his self-seeking demagoguery, fear-and-lie-grounded radicalization of millions of his supporters, and open praise and normalization of tyrants and tyrannical methods at home and abroad, has done catastrophic and possibly irreparable harm to his country. Tribalism: But what about Biden, Hillary, and Obama! Truth: Fine. In that case reason affords you two...
Neil deGrasse Tyson.– I doubt you could find a recent interview or quasi-debate featuring this man in which he does not explicitly remind his interlocutor and audience, typically as a preface or premise to one shouted certitude or another, that he is a scientist, and that he is looking at the question at hand from the scientist’s perspective — the implication being, of...
Can machines think? Well, as everyone says, machines can do what their creators can do, only faster and better. But their creators are humans, and humans of a purely practical, materialist orientation — doohickey specialists and thingamajig experts. Such humans do not and cannot, in the strictest sense, think. Zero times a million equals zero. Therefore, machines cannot think. Calculate, yes. Compile and...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 5, 2023
Hostility, incivility, and outright barbarism are breaking out in our midst, on a mass scale. This proves that John Stuart Mill was wrong, and indeed that all progressive views of historico-political development — using progressive in its earlier theoretical sense, rather than in its current euphemistic sense — were wrong. There is no “stage of development” at which a society or civilization…
Hypocrisy.– Beware all public voices who cite the profit motive as evidence that someone or some organization is acting dishonorably, disingenuously, or without sincere regard for the public good — and who make these claims on a for-profit basis. Treat with extreme skepticism the motives or reasoning of anyone who preaches, with a material vested interest, about the vested interests behind someone else’s...
The open-minded person says, “I will always try to give a fair hearing to words and ideas that I do not like, or which make me uncomfortable; for my preference and comfort are not valid measures of the true, the good, and the beautiful, which will as often as not prove to be cleverly hidden behind some discomfitting word.” The closed-minded person says,...
America Descending / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 26, 2023 · Last modified March 28, 2023
Has Donald Trump committed offenses for which he could and should be indicted? Very likely. Has Joe Biden done so? Equally likely. Two pigs who have made their livelihoods, in various ways, slurping at the elite level of the public trough for ages, abusing their power and influence in ways that only seem normal and “within bounds” from the point of view of...
Without the body, nothing else is possible. That is to say, the body is the necessary condition of all earthly existence. Does it follow from this that the body is the essence of life, to which we must look for all our understanding of ourselves and our choices? If you answer yes, then you are a materialist. Without the feelings, which are rooted...
The aggressive effort to reduce “Western” or “European” civilization to its alleged sins — racism, sexism, imperialism, systemic inequality, cultural appropriation, greed, and the rest of the neo-Marxist talking points — serves as a convenient diversion from the truth that these same sins, such as they are, may be found equally, though perhaps with regional variations, in all times and places. By hiding...
In light of what all half-sentient humans now know about the origins of the Covid-19 virus (and what many of us who are slightly more than half-sentient were very confidently assuming all along), I just want to put this little human interest story out there for your consideration. On February 10, 2022, Luc Montagnier, one of the most renowned, admired, and honored virologists...
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