Enjoying the view from Limbo
I just read this headline from the Associated Press: “House moves toward OK of Dems’ sweeping social, climate bill.” So often these days, one reads of “sweeping bills,” “sweeping reforms,” “sweeping measures,” or “sweeping new mandates.” The metaphor is apt, if hackneyed, because it is very much of the essence of progressivism to view politics as a matter for brooms. In other words,...
According to progressive morality, which is really progressive politics, to disagree with or disrespect someone’s choices and attitudes — provided they are the correct choices and attitudes of the moment — is to violate his rights. This is tantamount to saying that rights are essentially protections against being judged. To judge a person’s preferences (in relativist lingo, his “lifestyle”) is thus inherently to...
Governments around the world are well along the path toward forcing all places of employment to monitor their employees or potential employees for vaccination status; forcing all private gathering places, such as restaurants or theatres, to restrict access to their businesses (i.e., their private property) to people with “their papers” in order; and forcing all individuals in and out of the “health care...
Government vs. God / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 2, 2021
Anything you have ever done or said, in any context, is grounds for moral condemnation today, if that word or action is deemed inconsistent in any possible way with current progressive attitudes. And the condemnation is absolute, disqualifying you from employment, public service, public discussion — in effect from anything that the Tribunal or its millions of ideological allies (or self-protective cowards) wish...
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...
If an elected government can sweep away a nation’s founding principles, pride, and moral essence in three months, then that nation’s principles were already reduced to sand, its pride no better than a dust ball, its moral essence just a bit of dead skin. Joe Biden and his communist puppeteers have achieved nothing, in fact, that was not effectively a fait accompli. That...
Progressives are preternaturally disposed to defend their tyrannical inclinations by intellectual subterfuge, such as by turning issues around on their opponents through obfuscation. For example, it is typical for progressives today to defend their wish to confiscate guns or severely regulate gun possession on the grounds that in a civilized society, citizens would not be carrying weapons around in the streets — perhaps...
Boycotting is a perfectly legitimate form of behavior within a democratic political structure. A group of individuals strongly object to the way a business or other entity is using its profits or its public profile to promote ends of which that group disapproves. Knowing that this entity is able to exert public sway, or to influence public opinion, precisely because, or to the...
Racism, if it means anything definable at all (and I have never been completely certain that it does), is strictly a description of a certain subjective attitude regarding racial differences, and in particular an attitude of irrational or illegitimate bias for or against people primarily on the basis of race, however race is defined. Racism cannot be treated as a crime, because it...
A man when alone — I mean truly alone, not merely waiting for others to arrive — occupies his own depths. He lives in ocean currents and the most profound silence. Two such deep-flowing individuals, in conversation, may hope to preserve some of that serious silence between them. For the source of all conversation — using that word in its essential, definitive sense...
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