Enjoying the view from Limbo
Human, all too human.– When everything you and your friends once decried as a communist plot to overthrow your country, you and your friends now espouse and embrace with brio to achieve your own ends. And when you manage to convince yourselves — or rather accept without a moment’s doubt or hesitation — that this hypocritical adoption of the very totalitarian methods you...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 13, 2025 · Last modified September 14, 2025
Luckily, I am not an American. In the past, I often felt quite the opposite sentiment, as anyone who has ever read my public writings from the pre-Trump era would know. One of the most flattering things that was ever said to me came from an American reader-correspondent many years ago, an elderly veteran with a highly independent and inquisitive mind, who defended...
Ideas and Reflections / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 26, 2024 · Last modified August 27, 2024
Alexander Vindman, a small man who played a significant role in an isolated moment, but who has been trying to parlay that momentary significance into a more general relevance ever since, has taken to the social media monster called X — where the clowns gather — to “warn” Elon Musk, who runs X, that the recent French arrest of Musk’s counterpart at Telegram...
An Orwellian entity called the European Court of Human Rights has declared that duly elected governments which pursue paths of fiscal responsibility and rational restraint with regard to the neo-Marxist demands of climate activists are by definition guilty of violating human rights, such rights now implicitly including the right to have one’s society and economy micromanaged by unfettered climate communists. In Scotland, it is...
Candace Owens, a profiteering self-promoter and political putterer who barely saves herself from being dismissed as equivalent to the blustering conspiracy buffoon Alex Jones by being cuter and blacker than Jones — two qualities always valued at a premium in the popular “conservative media” — has been cut loose by The Daily Wire, a nonsense outfit most closely identified with a slightly cleverer...
Ireland, whose most influential modern artist described its capital, a century ago, as “that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” and which seems to have been a country on the edge (or further) of collapsing into some strange combination of drunken suicide and murderous self-indulgence for centuries, finds whatever life force it has left (not at all paradoxically, but rather characteristically)...
Whatever one thinks of the ultimate validity or political importance of the right to free speech, there is an ironclad condition that must be understood as essential to the concept, and no free speech defense which ignores or seeks to limit this condition can amount to anything but a self-contradiction.
The notion that democracy is best served by restricting the public exchange of ideas to only those ideas pre-approved by one political party or faction is absurd. The notion that allowing ideas with which you disagree to be uttered in a public forum constitutes a threat to your freedom is a clear admission that you lack confidence in your own ideas or your...
Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in demanding that Spotify remove her music from its platform, in protest against Joe Rogan’s podcast, which discusses the Covid-19 pandemic in terms that do not perfectly align with the Biden administration’s official statements. Since Young and Mitchell are both Canadian by birth and upbringing, it is not surprising that they are so quick to favor authoritarian...
Neil Young is attempting to put the final seal on any pretense that rock music was ever about “speaking truth to power” or any such nonsense — not a moment too soon in my opinion. He is threatening to pull all of his music off Spotify unless that online service removes podcasts that “spread misinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines, specifically focused on the most...
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