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...
Anything that cannot be justified as contributing to the advance of my ultimate human goal — the glimpse of eternity, a share of wisdom, god-like happiness, call it what you will — must be regarded as an obstacle and liability, and therefore rejected or actively diminished in significance in my life, as the case admits. It is the easiest thing in the world,...
Whoopi Goldberg is an unfunny comedienne, a poor actress, and a kooky political pontificator for the bored housewives audience. She recently commented, seemingly in the context of trying to reduce everything to white vs. black racial politics, that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man,” since both groups involved — Germans and Jews, apparently — were white. For...
There is a bias today in favor of simpler, easier-to-understand language. We see it in education systems, in word processing programs’ auto-correct protocols, and in the rise (clever business in an age of school-indoctrinated illiteracy) of for-profit proofreading companies such as Grammarly. Though seemingly apolitical in nature, this ubiquitous impulse to verbal and written simplicity comes from the same ultimate source as the...
If you knew that someone in your circle of acquaintances had once said or done something, whether in jest, in anger, or in ignorance, that might be regarded as impolite or offensive in certain company, or even just objectionable to people of certain points of view, and further knew that if you highlighted that knowledge in public, you could — due to a...
American conservatives — and I am thinking primarily of the famous money-grubbing ones on television, radio, and internet, but this applies to the grassroots dupes as well — love to spew venom and vitriol at the many public victims of “cancel culture” who have felt compelled to apologize to their executioners in a desperate attempt to save themselves. These so-called conservatives ought to...
I have said and done things in my life — and thought far more than I have said or done — that today’s Overseers of Righteous Certainty (ORCs) would condemn as politically unacceptable, and as grounds for summoning me before the Marxist Tribunal of Progress to confess my guilt, sign my confession, and then accept my oblivion as an obsolete man, a relic...
Reply to a dear friend.— The battle is lost, I’m afraid. But every war has lost battles, and it is narrowminded to succumb to despair over one loss, however severe it may seem to us in the moment. The war is much longer than we can conceive from our most immediate, self-interested perspectives — which is why we easily mistake a lost battle...
As happens frequently these days, the cancel culture mob has once again tried to deny its own existence by screaming from the rooftops, “There is no such thing as cancel culture! We are the cancel culture mob, so we ought to know!” In the latest case, the victim of the mob’s spiteful claims of non-existence was a popular podcaster, as described in a...
America Descending / Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 17, 2021
I just read the following headline from the Associated Press: “Fauci says pandemic exposed ‘undeniable effects of racism.’” And Dr. Fauci’s self-serving deference to the latest trends in neo-Marxist race politics is worth discussing because…? A couple of days back, I read of an adjunct instructor in literature at St. John’s University in New York who uttered “the n-word” during an online lecture...
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