Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
The populists of the world today, eager above all causes to bury Ukraine, though sometimes euphemizing the death they are willing as “fiscal responsibility” or “not getting mired in others’ problems” or “an end to endless wars” — whose interests do these populists seek to serve? It is not their own to be sure. For in abandoning a large and courageous nation to...
No war strategy is rational which does not include a sober accounting for how you will live next to your former enemy after the fighting has ended. How will relations be normalized? How will past conflicts be put aside under the new post-war conditions? How can some measure of good faith and good will be achieved in the aftermath of the extreme measures...
It is fairly obvious now that President Biden’s administration (not Biden himself, who of course has no idea what is happening or why) wishes to help Ukraine stave off Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion just well enough to inflict severe damage to Putin’s military, but not well enough to defeat him outright or restore all of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. In other words, the goal...
Matt Gaetz, U.S. congressman and living proof that Trump-level strategic thinking is alive and well in American government, has responded to a media question about Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership by suggesting that he would prefer to see Russia rather than Ukraine joining NATO, in order for the alliance to be more effective against China. So that would mean a globally aggressive, West-subverting...
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