Enjoying the view from Limbo
A tyrant is not a man who desires bad things. (No one desires bad things.) A tyrant is a man who is ignorant enough to have no idea what a good thing is or where to find one; who was raised poorly enough never to have learned the difference between wishing something could be so and believing one has every right to force...
The other day it was John Bolton, and I noted here, as many others did elsewhere, that this had nothing to do with “classified documents” and whatnot, but was a simple and straightforward personal attack against someone within the Republic sphere who had become a public critic of Donald Trump. Today it is Chris Christie. For the apparently no-longer-acceptable behavior of appearing on...
The American voting public, roughly a hundred and forty million people, is divided neatly down the middle between a faction that wishes The United States of America to cease to exist and dissolve itself into the United Nations, after abjectly apologizing for its existence while shamefacedly redistributing all of its wealth to the rest of the world in an act of penance for...
Artificial intelligence is to the realm of learning and knowledge what the welfare state is to the realm of practical motivation and productivity. Reducing the sense of lack, need, and concern in practical life makes people not only less likely to want to work hard, less willing to devote their lives to some kind of meaningful productive activity, but also, at the highest...
Britain and France, perennial rivals in their own minds for European preeminence, have just turned significantly to the socialist left in national elections. In both cases, the shift in power appears more radical when viewed in terms of elected representatives than in terms of actual total votes. Nevertheless, the reality remains: The two leading European nations of the modern era (Germany is not,...
The Labour Party, as I write this, is in the process of achieving an extraordinary landslide victory in the UK general election. The Tories and Reformers will try to tell themselves and anyone else who might listen to them, as they have been insisting for weeks leading up to the vote, that the problem is simply that the British public has “failed to...
Decadence, in normal language, means “deterioration” or “decay.” (The Latin root suggests falling down and the French derivative form suggests decaying.) For a long time in English, the word has been used only about human behavior and social conditions. If we say someone is decadent, we are saying his way of life is deteriorating or wasteful, such as one who lives for luxury...
Should we be surprised that “Lula,” the Brazilian bore much adored among international socialists, is publicly blaming Ukraine and the U.S. for the war, accusing them of having precipitated the conflict by refusing to “negotiate” with Vladimir Putin or to make concessions to him in advance, i.e., by neglecting to adopt appeasement as their official stance before making Putin angry? Or that Noam...
Private property, contrary to two centuries of socialist activism against the idea, is essentially a moral tenet, one of the most universal and naturally occurring of all moral tenets. As such, it is perhaps the single most effective social tether on the monster of coercive violence which lurks just around the corner in all human societies. And while in common perception it is...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 20, 2021 · Last modified July 31, 2021
Today’s mass entertainment is obsessed above all with two themes: superheroes and zombies. This is self-revealing, as we are indeed trapped in the age of the undead, whose only mode of living is to suck the life out of others, and whose only hope of being saved from their emptiness is to lose themselves in the last realm of imagination left for hollow,...
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