Enjoying the view from Limbo
During the acknowledged period of the Cold War (which never really ended), the nuclear risk, though serious, was always somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Soviet Union’s goals and strategies were systemic, rather than personal. That is, the Cold War was waged not against one unstable individual who, if feeling threatened — including from within his own country — might become rabid...
I love and cherish freedom — not the word, not a particular material advantage that I associate with some byproduct of freedom, but the thing itself. This is a testament to the power of imagination, and to love’s natural capacity for clinging to ideals; for I have never seen real freedom in my midst, let alone experienced it with any fullness in my...
You cannot make this stuff up. Here is the first sentence of a new Politico rah-rah piece on the United Nations’ “tough” response to Vladimir Putin’s military invasion of Ukraine: U.N. Security Council members had one clear message for Russian President Vladimir Putin: We know what you’re up to, and you need to quit it now — or else. “Or else” what? We...
During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, those of us naturally inclined to resist propagandistic media hyperbole and distrust tyrannical models of government “efficiency” spent a good deal of our time, and inordinate amounts of our nerves, arguing with some of the dumbest or most fear-driven humans we had ever encountered, over the strange new question of whether allowing the governments of...
The most dehumanizing aspect of enslavement is the sense of completely losing control of one’s essential actions, i.e., of having one’s realm of practical choice, such as it is, reduced to the inessential and transitory. The most desperate aspect of incremental enslavement is the awareness that one is in the process of losing control of one’s essential actions. The most infuriating aspect of...
Liberty's Labors Lost / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 5, 2022
A few days ago, I took a student for lunch and enjoyed my first experience of being asked to present my proof of vaccination as a condition for being granted the privilege of eating soup in a restaurant. I took the opportunity to explain to my student, with whom I happened to be reading Brave New World that day, the special emotional significance,...
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...
What the budding socialist says explicitly: “I am willing to pay more taxes in order to help the underprivileged.” Implied meaning (Level 1, moral belief): “Everyone should be willing to pay more taxes in order to help the underprivileged.” Implied meaning (Level 2, moral imperative): “Everyone must pay more taxes in order to help the underprivileged.” Implied meaning (Level 3, political activism): “The...
Tyranny is a gossip whispering anxiously about his neighbors. Democracy is a crowd alternately screaming its envy and singing its lust. Freedom is a lively and unconstrained conversation among equals. The tyrant and the democrat are therefore united in their hatred of the free man — the former, because the free man appears impervious to gossip, and is therefore a threat to the...
If governments explicitly spelled out the truth on all the “emergency measures” and “crisis responses” they have initiated during the pandemic — namely that not one of these new measures, powers, or mandates will ever be repealed, but rather, on the contrary, that every one of them will be expanded, and cited as convenient precedent, in perpetuity, to encompass an ever-increasing range of...
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