Enjoying the view from Limbo
Magnifying Lens.– Everything that is ugly, corrupt, degrading, demoralizing, and cheapening about modern life (or is it just human nature?) is deepened and broadened in a big city. My rough calculation, after a few recent visits to Seoul: For each million people added, the vices and ruptures in civil society that are intrinsic to city life are multiplied in severity ten times. More...
Nancy Pelosi, a profiteering progressive fool who happens to be the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, made a brief visit to Taiwan this week. Communist China objected, and claimed her visit was a terrible provocation — because they want to do to Taiwan what Vladimir Putin is currently trying to do to Ukraine. Time Magazine, or whatever they call their online...
Public Intellectual.— Your mind shrinks to the size of your audience. The more frequently you accept the artificial self-reduction of speaking to please the smallminded — or rather the more you invite the spiritual diminution of needing to please them — the more likely it is to become a permanent condition, such that you gradually become less able to expand your thoughts back...
Dr. Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci’s righthand fabricator in the Trump administration’s totalitarian overreach squad during the pandemic, has now said in a television interview that she and they knew they “overplayed” the vaccines, which, while they (allegedly) reduce the risk of severe illness, do not significantly reduce either the risk of contracting Covid-19 or the risk of spreading it to others. She further...
False dichotomy.— Is the American left using the January 6 Capitol riot as an opportunity to smear all “conservatives” (i.e., non-leftists) as domestic terrorists or insurrectionists? Yes. Does this mean the January 6 Capitol riot never happened, was no big deal, was a false flag operation, or was just a patriotic protest misrepresented by the media? No. By analogy, a black man who...
The Enlightenment has thrived in today’s popular imagination and in the social sciences that are its children (products of the Enlightenment’s attempt to reduce human nature to just another subject of empirical investigation) on the basis of certain myths. As these myths are used to justify so many absurdities today, from our theories of public education to the sheepish surrender of our common...
Nothing epitomizes the moral and political discourse of this moment more definitively than the rhetorical reduction of all dissenting opinions or alternative voices to just so many expressions of irrational hatred. This is what our age of rambling academic Marxism and raging democratic tribalism have wrought. Having forsaken the rational assumptions that (a) there is an ahistorical truth and (b) all meaningful thought...
If a man just can’t stand metaphors and wishes to ban figurative language from the marketplace of ideas, one should approach that man’s own words and thoughts — especially his best and most interesting ones — as having been conceived and expressed under the peculiar misapprehension that his own metaphors (including and especially his most extraordinary ones) were literal statements. Paradoxically, some of...
This morning I noticed two news items that tell a very consistent story, a story that would seem ominous, were we not all resigned by now to the irreversible trajectory of our civilizational decline. Since, on the other hand, we all know (I presume) that we are currently and inevitably cascading into the darkest night — though not necessarily the longest one —...
Government vs. God / Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 21, 2022
The other day, I had a written exchange with a Korean student about the problems of modern education, and specifically the narrow agenda-driven nature of modern teaching content and methods. Along the way, as one example of the problem, my student noted the gulf between political theory as presented at school and the lessons in political philosophy that she and I had discussed...
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