Enjoying the view from Limbo
Len Goodman, a BBC personality of some sort, joked during a discussion of various foods related to the Queen’s jubilee that he had once been hesitant to try curry, which his grandmother used to refer to as “foreign muck,” although he has since become an enthusiastic curry eater. In response to this utterly innocuous comment — the sort of comment that could only be...
Rulers, like the rest of us, always do what they believe is best for themselves. They may also, as per their actual mandate, do what is best for the society and citizenry; but this latter motive is not the norm, and is entirely contingent on their judgment, in any given situation, that what is best for the society and citizenry happens to coincide...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published June 3, 2022 · Last modified June 4, 2022
I just read a very sober and balanced assessment of the conceivable outcomes in Ukraine, written by one Andrew Latham, a very sober professor of International Relations and member of a very sober-sounding Washington think tank calling itself “Defense Priorities.” For “Defense” in that name, read “Surrender”; for “Priorities,” read “Rationalizations.” For Professor Latham’s short essay is a wonderful object lesson in that...
What is disturbing about today’s university is not the recognition that so few people in it see the world as I do. Disagreement or minority status never bothers me. Rather it is that so few are able even to comprehend the possibility that anyone might not see the world as they do. The uniformity of assumptions and presuppositions, the perfect conformity of all...
The absolute worst and most immoral thing to do would be to assist Ukraine’s effort in its war of self-defense just enough, and just long enough, to heighten the severity of the conflict and ensure that millions of innocent people will be killed or displaced, and then to get skittish, pull back, and become all prudish and pragmatic about not wanting to disrupt...
Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 31, 2022 · Last modified June 26, 2022
The primary aims of the university, from its medieval foundations until about fifty years ago, were to prod a young person into doubting his youthful certainties, to shake the foundations of his most cherished and comforting assumptions, to push him into a vast, confusing marketplace of ideas and sensibilities, where…
When, in the aftermath of every well-publicized mass shooting, emotional or opportunistic people say things such as, “How many children have to die before you are willing to do something about guns?” they are not really engaging in dialogue, trying to understand alternative points of view, or even seeking any reply at all. They are merely trying to score rhetorical points against “the...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 27, 2022
I just did a quick online search, and found exactly what I expected to find. In Ukraine, gun ownership is not regulated by statute, the country enjoys high rates of private gun ownership, and “Citizens are permitted to own non-fully automatic rifles and shotguns as long as they are stored properly when not in use.” Meanwhile, Ukraine is the only country on the...
There has been another mass shooting at an American school. Thus, there has inevitably been another uninterrupted news cycle focusing everyone’s rapt and mock-mournful attention on every titillating detail of the “terrible day”: The crying children, the traumatized parents, the heroic individuals who did their best to save lives, and of course every available tidbit on the killer’s identity, grievances, and personal story....
You can stop an expansionist tyrant by thwarting all his aims and pushing him back into his hole. Or you can empower and embolden him with completely gratuitous concessions and appeasement — usually at the expense of some convenient victims which you arbitrarily assume the moral authority to use as pawns in your appeasement game — so that the tyrant becomes more dangerous...
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