Enjoying the view from Limbo
America Descending / Communist Canada / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 20, 2021
In the current American climate, any white police officer knows perfectly well that if he harms a black person in any context other than a genuine life-or-death shootout, or is even perceived to have done so, his normal life, his family’s safety, probably his career, and certainly his future privacy and sense of self-determination, are over. In such a climate, and with such...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 18, 2021 · Last modified April 19, 2021
If you want freedom, you must fight for it. Let us examine the meaning of “fighting.” Vladimir Putin ordered his most prominent and popular Russian critic, Alexei Navalny, murdered by poison, as has been his standard operating procedure in dealing with all political opponents throughout his thinly-veiled dictatorship. The dying Navalny was transported to Germany so that doctors there could save his life....
Communist Canada / Liberty's Labors Lost / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 18, 2021
You never know what you have till it’s gone and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything. — Steven Wright, stand-up comedian.
I can think of no more psychologically incisive summary of this moment in the trajectory of modern civilization. Modernity, as that term relates to the philosophical and political premises of the last four centuries…
Recently, a student asked me whether possessing the virtue of moderation can make a person happy. “What I can be sure about,” she said, “is that not being moderate makes me unhappy.” It does not follow from this, however, she observed, that being moderate actually causes happiness — unless happiness is defined merely as the absence of unhappiness. A Stoic or Epicurean might...
So it turns out that Dr. Fauci, whom I have had pegged as a bureaucratic hack and a scientific fraud from day one of the American takeover of the Pandemic that Ate a Planet, was probably directly involved in supporting and funding the research at the Wuhan laboratory that created the virus. From the Washington Post: Fauci has inspired critics in some quarters...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 14, 2021 · Last modified April 15, 2021
This week’s celebrity Republican in the mainstream media is John Boehner, who has dragged himself out of his drunken stupor long enough to slur his way through some sort of memoir in which he aggrandizes himself and begs for media love by taking potshots at every other prominent Republican from his musty corner, as the loudmouth bum at the end of the bar...
Almost everything that passes itself off as intelligent comedy today — particularly that of the “social criticism” or “political humor” variety — is in fact nothing but helpful compliance and submission to the oppressive ruling class, exactly as genuinely intelligent humor can never be. A true satirist aims his sharpest spears at the established powers and attitudinal norms, and says precisely the thing...
Life imitates art.– When fiction is transformed by circumstances and attentive subjectivity into the reader’s own self-revelation, it effectively ceases to be fiction, and becomes something more like figurative memoir. Hence, I may say without any hint of hubris or exaggeration that as of this moment, Brave New World is my autobiography, The Trial my last few diary entries, and Invasion of the...
Every society, without exception, tends to harden its founding presuppositions and hopes into a set of stated and unstated rules for living. Gradually, the great character and thought needed to bring a society into being give way to the forced teaching and rote learning of the simplified and simplifying rules deemed necessary to preserve that society. And this in turn reduces maturation to...
Progressives are preternaturally disposed to defend their tyrannical inclinations by intellectual subterfuge, such as by turning issues around on their opponents through obfuscation. For example, it is typical for progressives today to defend their wish to confiscate guns or severely regulate gun possession on the grounds that in a civilized society, citizens would not be carrying weapons around in the streets — perhaps...
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