Enjoying the view from Limbo
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published March 20, 2025 · Last modified March 27, 2025
Since my website has essentially become a repository of judgments and reflections that almost no one currently alive on this planet will ever read, let alone care about, why not open it up today for the words of another man in a similar situation, though one whose voice speaks with considerably more practical urgency than mine? His pleas will fall on ears at...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 9, 2025 · Last modified January 31, 2025
Of war and worms.– I have taught a Russian girl whose serious beau, whom she hoped to marry, was a Ukrainian fighting on the front lines to defend his homeland against Vladimir Putin’s — not “Russia’s,” so let us please put that lie away for good, but Putin’s — brutal and unprovoked assault on her boyfriend’s country. He had already been wounded and...
Had I been an American citizen on November 5th, I would have voted for neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump. Unlike certain Democrats and other nihilists today, however, I do not deny the basic humanity or the right to live in my community of any actual American who felt compelled to come down on one side or the other that day. I understand...
Justin Trudeau has testified under oath that the Kremlin-sponsored media outlet RT is “currently” funding bloggers and other personalities “at the right,” among whom he specifically names Canada’s most famous pop intellectual du jour — or rather du hier — Jordan Peterson. Trudeau’s wording is sufficiently hazy to avoid directly claiming that Peterson himself is knowingly on the take from the Putin regime,...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 14, 2024
To say that Donald Trump is the worst thing that ever happened to American politics would be analogous to saying that the horrible smell in your kitchen is the worst thing that ever happened to the raw meat you left out on the counter overnight. That is to say, the truly worst thing is not the after-effect, nor even the effect itself, but...
A serious student whose enthusiasm for classic literature decidedly tends toward Jane Austen and Plato — toward a reality in which life’s dark shadows eventually give way to the bright sunlight of understanding, or at least to the enlightening glow of irony — wrote to me to express her frustration at being unable to find the greatness in Dostoevsky, in spite of having...
Have tongue, will shine shoes.– I was seeing the red headline at the top of my internet homepage all morning in Korea, alerting me to “live coverage” of the Republican National Convention, available at the touch of a “click here.” Finally, quite late in the morning, which I presume means near the end of the evening’s fermented festivities in Milwaukee, morbid curiosity got...
Pushkin wrote the following lines almost exactly two hundred years ago, describing with grim fatalism his vision of liberty’s chances in his fatherland:
“With Freedom’s Seed”
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow.”
With freedom’s seed the desert sowing,
I walked before the morning star;
Listen to Elon Musk talking about the “tragic loss of life” in Ukraine that could be ended if only the Ukrainian government would concede its losses and sit down to negotiate with Russia, because a happy Russia is a profitable Russia. Listen to Senator Mike Lee, a former freedom-pitching politician who, having sold his soul to Donald Trump’s cult of populist demagoguery for...
Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim-immigration activist, who, like all activists, is easily susceptible to the foolish weakness of reducing all reality to his favorite cause, has led his Freedom Party to victory in the Dutch election, and will be the country’s next prime minister. That might be favorable news if you were viewing the situation entirely through the lens of concern over Western civilizational...
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