Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
The world may already have ended: I just noticed that Noam Chomsky of all people has publicly stated something aligned with what I myself was thinking during my morning walk today. Specifically, he commented about a year ago that AI systems such as ChatGPT are “basically high-tech plagiarism. It’s a system that…accesses an astronomical amount of data and finds regularities and strings them...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 5, 2024
If Ukraine loses its war of survival against a scheming KGB autocrat after all this devastation and bloodshed, the loss and its inevitable global implications will be entirely on the heads of those tens of millions of Americans who pretend to want to make America great again, which fake goal they propose to accomplish by electing the most corrupt and ignorant man ever...
Cool (adj.): appealing to others’ fashionable tastes or preferences in such a way as to allow those others to feel that in liking you (the cool one), they are expressing their own independent and original minds.
In short, coolness is, to both the cool one and his admirers, merely a collectively aggrandizing euphemism…
The U.S. Congress has passed, and President Biden has signed into law, The Inflation Reduction Act. This law will bring sweeping changes to the United States economy and society, and, indirectly, to the world. None of those changes will be in any way related to inflation per se, let alone to reducing it. So why, the innocent child might reasonably ask, is it...
It’s all relative.— I have never felt particularly brave in my life. Nor do I believe I have ever acted with any special degree of courage even in an isolated moment. On the contrary, I have often been disappointed at what I have regarded as a deficiency in this area. These days, however, judging myself relative to what I see around me, I...
One of the great Kafkaesque elements of this moment in humanity’s collapse is the repeated sense, experienced only by the conscious minority, we happy few, that we are watching our fellow men behaving as people behave in nightmares — walking directly into obvious traps or off cliffs, seemingly without an iota of doubt or concern. We watch those around us, and around the...
A few days ago, Harry Potter author and knee-jerk progressive J.K. Rowling tweeted support for one Maya Forstater, who got fired from her job as a tax specialist for saying that “pro-science” progressives ought to accept the fact that men cannot change into women, even if this fact hurts some men’s feelings. For her simple expression of a belief so basic that until...
Someone in Tennessee has hung an effigy of U.S. Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn from a tree, accompanied by the amusing slogan, “STOP THE HATE.” In response to this, I see that Soopermexican at Right Scoop is describing this as “the winner of the political demonstration most lacking in self-awareness.” I disagree. “Lack of self-awareness” is giving them too much benefit of the doubt....
The following, originally published at American Thinker in 2012, was my attempt to offer a synoptic account of the intellectual grounding of modern constitutional republicanism — i.e., political freedom — and of how that grounding is undermined by progressivism. This essay is assigned annually in a required discussion course taught at University of Missouri, where I suppose it has made hundreds of young...
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