Enjoying the view from Limbo
If someone told you, in the form of an ultimatum, that the only way to combat some new crisis or impending disaster was to submit yourself, your family, and your friends, to a permanent and institutionally self-perpetuating tyranny, i.e., the enslavement of the vast majority of the human population under a universal regime untethered from any notion of intractable and fundamental limits on...
Len Goodman, a BBC personality of some sort, joked during a discussion of various foods related to the Queen’s jubilee that he had once been hesitant to try curry, which his grandmother used to refer to as “foreign muck,” although he has since become an enthusiastic curry eater. In response to this utterly innocuous comment — the sort of comment that could only be...
Whoopi Goldberg is an unfunny comedienne, a poor actress, and a kooky political pontificator for the bored housewives audience. She recently commented, seemingly in the context of trying to reduce everything to white vs. black racial politics, that “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man,” since both groups involved — Germans and Jews, apparently — were white. For...
There is a bias today in favor of simpler, easier-to-understand language. We see it in education systems, in word processing programs’ auto-correct protocols, and in the rise (clever business in an age of school-indoctrinated illiteracy) of for-profit proofreading companies such as Grammarly. Though seemingly apolitical in nature, this ubiquitous impulse to verbal and written simplicity comes from the same ultimate source as the...
If you knew that someone in your circle of acquaintances had once said or done something, whether in jest, in anger, or in ignorance, that might be regarded as impolite or offensive in certain company, or even just objectionable to people of certain points of view, and further knew that if you highlighted that knowledge in public, you could — due to a...
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...
I have said and done things in my life — and thought far more than I have said or done — that today’s Overseers of Righteous Certainty (ORCs) would condemn as politically unacceptable, and as grounds for summoning me before the Marxist Tribunal of Progress to confess my guilt, sign my confession, and then accept my oblivion as an obsolete man, a relic...
America Descending / Death by Education / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published May 17, 2021
I just read the following headline from the Associated Press: “Fauci says pandemic exposed ‘undeniable effects of racism.’” And Dr. Fauci’s self-serving deference to the latest trends in neo-Marxist race politics is worth discussing because…? A couple of days back, I read of an adjunct instructor in literature at St. John’s University in New York who uttered “the n-word” during an online lecture...
In 2021, if you live anywhere in the Western democratic world, you are guilty of systemic oppression, domestic terrorism, and/or hate crimes, if you express any opinion, or are even found through indirect means to have recently (aka at any time over the past thirty years) entertained any thought or rumination, which is now judged by the court of progressive preemptive condemnation to...
Roger Federer has won more Grand Slam tennis titles than any other man in history. He has spent more weeks as the number one ranked player in the world than anyone else, including 237 consecutive weeks at one stage (that’s four-and-a-half years, for the arithmetically challenged). By any standard, he merits the unqualified epithet “Champion.” Or rather, he did. Today, he is just...
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