Enjoying the view from Limbo
It is very true that videos can lie. It is equally true that government officials can lie. But when several videos shot independently by several different people from several different angles present one consistent picture, while several government officials mouth one script written or approved by one government official, then we are being asked whether we are more inclined to believe several different...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 6, 2026 · Last modified January 7, 2026
For decades, the world has been stabilized, in the sense that the democratic or nascently democratic nations’ greatest external threats and adversaries have been relatively constrained, by a tacit acceptance of, and acquiescence to, U.S. military and diplomatic preeminence. That is to say, Europe, most of the Americas, and much of East Asia had welcomed, or at least submitted relatively comfortably to, America’s...
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...
The recent actions of the United States of America and the Russian Federation with regard to Afghanistan and Ukraine, respectively, offer us a tidy summary of some essential differences between a declining democracy and a declining tyranny — differences which, characteristically, the tyranny recognizes and hopes to exploit, but the democracy does not. Democracy regards twenty years as too long to sustain a...
The current rivalry between the United States and China has much less in common with the Cold War than with the old Russia-China tensions. For the Cold War was, as common parlance would have it, “a clash of ideologies,” whereas today’s semi-hostile relations between the U.S. and China are really just a turf war between ideological allies whose respective self-interested ambitions have inevitably...
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