Enjoying the view from Limbo
“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...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 10, 2022
Elon Musk, who soiled himself for all time by defecating on the people of Ukraine last week, has decided to raise his profile in the pantheon of profiteering punks to yet another level of shame. This time, rather than waiting for a tyrannical government to actually invade a smaller, sovereign neighbor, destroy much of that neighbor’s infrastructure, and kidnap thousands of its children...
That cynical men will exploit a human problem for their own petty advantage, without concern for ultimate outcomes beyond their own immediate gain, is obvious. This cynicism explains most of what is called “foreign policy,” most of what is called “medicine,” most of what is called “education,” most of what is called “entertainment,” and most of what is called “lawmaking.” But none of...
The problem with libertarians is that they believe that if everyone were left to live as he pleases, human life in general would improve. But when did men in general ever improve themselves through the unrestricted pursuit of what pleases them? Is pleasure happiness? Is comfort the good? Is greatness achieved through living without limits, without conflict…
The reason advertisements consistently portray everyone as a smiling idiot, a self-absorbed advantage-seeker, a gushing sentimentalist, a self-righteous slogan-spouter, a hypersexual poseur, or an all-knowing and assertive fake expert, is that professional advertisers know how to do their job. The essence of their job is to attract the greatest number of targeted consumers by appealing to the most common tastes and tendencies of...
Once you accept the general premise that safety trumps freedom, there is absolutely nowhere to draw the line. For all life is risk, difficulty, unexpected threats, and the ever-present, universal certainty of impending death. Thus, on the above premise, freedom can never be the primary concern or the highest goal. If I see you stepping in front of an oncoming car, I will...
You may appreciate a man’s talent for making money, but you must never admire him for it. For this would mean regarding wealth, or the getting of wealth, as the gifted wealth-getter himself does, namely as a mark of personal greatness. On the contrary, one could do worse than to adopt the following as a general rule: No extraordinarily rich man — especially...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 20, 2021 · Last modified July 31, 2021
Today’s mass entertainment is obsessed above all with two themes: superheroes and zombies. This is self-revealing, as we are indeed trapped in the age of the undead, whose only mode of living is to suck the life out of others, and whose only hope of being saved from their emptiness is to lose themselves in the last realm of imagination left for hollow,...
I hate corporate slogans, celebrity spokesmen, logo-infested products, and the like. Make something well and tell me about it. If I like it and think I need it, I will buy it. Do not lie to me to try to sucker me into buying your product. Do not pay some famous actor or singer to “represent” your product as a means of cajoling...
Black Lives Matter. What does that even mean? You don’t know, so don’t bother trying to answer. You don’t know, because the phrase actually means exactly nothing, or at least nothing to do with the words that comprise the phrase. It is a slogan meant to sound brave and ideological precisely to obscure or deflect from its lack of any comprehensible significance in...
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