Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 1, 2025
In the past few days, Donald Trump has publicly floated the idea of granting a presidential pardon to a convicted serial sex trafficker and child abuser, even sending his own personal lawyer, who also happens to be the deputy attorney general of the United States, to meet with that vile creature to discuss her terms. Now, as an obvious adjunct of this transparently...
If you absolutely need something to be true, that would be an excellent place to begin your most painstakingly openminded inquiry. For emotional investment is the hardest obstacle for the mind to overcome, and therefore the greatest bar to discovery. A philosopher, essentially, is a man whose investment in a certainty never supersedes his desire for the truth. Consistency across time is not...
The human ego is a clever, skulking beast, always ready with a scheme to protect itself against the humiliations inherent in so much of human life, specifically by artfully reframing these humiliations as acts of will, and ascribing causality to what is in truth only an inescapable effect, distorted by imagination. Necessity is the mother of invention, and few needs are greater in...
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