Enjoying the view from Limbo
One year ago today, I was sitting in a hospital bed awaiting surgery for a broken foot, trying to distract myself from the thought of losing my lifelong pastime and natural condition — walking — for an indefinite period of time. That evening, my chosen method of meditative self-discipline was to write about my experience for Limbo. Thus began a series of four...
In a classic example of the way progressivism, like all aggressive irrationalism, devours itself, we have the spectacle of the ubiquitous and increasingly literal policing of politically incorrect attitudes, a social deformity which has now grown into its final (in the sense of fatal) shape: today’s infantile world of safe spaces and public shaming. For generations, progressives attacked so-called social conservatives for their...
Our age is obsessed with pleasure. And pleasure, in our materialist late modernity, has been defined down to its emptiest core: the active rejection and anxious avoidance of pain, every kind of pain, from the most superficial discomfort with one’s immediate situation (consider our fixation on the evils of “stress”) to the relativization and diminution of all purposes and relationships. God forbid, after...
2019 has been a peculiarly difficult year for me in some ways. Most if not all of the trouble stems from an innocent moment of carelessness back in January. Specifically, on January 23rd, walking home from my office, I casually stepped out to cross the street at a busy corner — an intersection I cross every single day — and somehow my right...
How much would you pay for the most valuable thing in the world? If you are a believer in the free market, you might immediately have noticed that the question is deceptive, as it implies that there is a “most valuable thing,” independent of your judgment of its worth to you, whereas all advocates of economic liberty understand that there is no value...
Alabama has passed a law, which the state’s governor nevertheless imagines will be unenforceable for the time being, making it a felony to perform an abortion in that state, with the only exception being cases in which the life of the mother is threatened. I am pleased to see this law passed, not merely because I believe abortion is indefensible in a modern, rights-based...
I am back to where I started, trying to think and write in the midst of the cackling hollowness of the young and mindless — this time a gaggle of twenty-somethings shouting and laughing uproariously about the same nothingness with which teenagers had surrounded me two weeks before. Again I exhaust every resource of the mind in a life or death struggle against...
Recently, a bright-eyed, enthusiastic Korean student asked me for winter reading recommendations. To choose appropriately, I engaged her in two hours’ general conversation aimed at gaining a better understanding of her character. At one point, I asked her the half-whimsical question, “If you were on a plane that was about to crash, whom would you want sitting next to you?” Her eyes widened...
Socialized Medicine / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 31, 2017 · Last modified February 1, 2018
Why were Charlie Gard’s parents not allowed to take him home to die? The answer provided by the Great Ormond Street Hospital is a priceless revelation of the socialist mind, and a perfect realization of the principles of medicine predicted in Brave New World. After claiming that they had “tried absolutely everything” to satisfy the parents’ wishes — “absolutely everything” seems a tad...
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