Enjoying the view from Limbo
Lo and behold, it turns out that right from the beginning of Donald Trump’s election fraud hoax, the leading voices in the so-called conservative media — the prime time hosts at Fox News — openly stated among themselves that they knew this was a hoax, that there was no massive election fraud, and that Joe Biden had won the election. But they decided,...
The more practical power one has (or believes one has), the less able one is to admit error or rethink previous decisions. The willing assumption of godlike authority, and by extension the creation of a permanent audience before whom one exercises that authority, seems to infuse the soul with a parallel dread of being seen to lack godlike infallibility. This dread (sometimes mistaken...
America Descending / Government vs. God / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 14, 2023
Headlines I have read over the past several hours…. NFL World Reacts To What Donald Trump Said About Rihanna. Well, I know there are three extremely popular entities in that exciting headline, none of which any of us would ever have heard of if we lived in a semi-rational universe. And as completely uninteresting and irrelevant as is whatever Rihanna does, or whatever...
Any deliberative process will eventually work its way down to a binary choice — A vs. B. The danger in all deliberations is that the last two options left at the end of the winnowing will not be the best two options that were available to you at the outset, which is to say that you will overlook or undervalue other alternatives that...
An American friend — or rather I ought to say the American friend — responding to my recent article, “Democratic Equality 101,” offered the following musing: The entire discussion of “protecting our democracy” here in the USA makes me want to vomit. The purposeful dumbing down of our citizenry is apparent everywhere. A Constitutional Republic was/is intended to be a safeguard against unruly...
What moderns crave.– We look for emergencies — literally, for emerging problems. They give us respite from the stable emptiness that results from having exhausted last month’s emergency. Modern humans are ever-resourceful in finding emergencies to satisfy their need for some new crisis that absolutely demands attention right now. Not action, mind you, but merely attention. It is not that we moderns want...
“And yes, I’m doing this for profit!” With those smug, pseudo-principled words, every popular “conservative media icon” and “conservative intellectual” tells us, point blank, that we have every reason not to take him seriously, and no reason whatsoever for trusting one word that comes out of his mouth. The modern world of liberty and self-governance is crumbling at speeds that even the bleakest...
I reproduce here, with minor modifications, my reply to a multi-part inquiry from a serious Korean student about the meaning of equality, as that term is used in the context of democratic theory and practice. I have included a few of the student’s own questions (designated with “Q”) from our written exchange, as they form the context for my particular points of emphasis. ...
Death by Education / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 2, 2023 · Last modified February 3, 2023
An adjunct professor foolish enough to teach an art class at a totalitarian reeducation camp in Minnesota (aka Hamline University) showed a medieval painting depicting Muhammad, after having directly advised students in the course syllabus and during the semester that this painting would be shown and discussed in her online lecture, and offering an opportunity for any students who might be inclined to...
Any age, society, or political regime requires a justification for its existence, which is to say it needs a justifying person — a type or example of something great and enduring which was made possible, or rather more possible, by the prevailing conditions of that age, society, or regime. A human being who is recognizably of his time but also unqualifiedly for all...
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