Enjoying the view from Limbo
Special counsel John Durham has completed a four-year investigation into the FBI’s aggressive pursuit of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia prior to the 2016 U.S. election. He has concluded that the FBI gave in to confirmation bias in claiming links between Trump and the Kremlin, treating unsubstantiated private reports as trustworthy evidence, and leaping from legitimate concerns about Trump associates (e.g., Paul...
America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 17, 2023 · Last modified April 18, 2023
A boy with military training who apparently skipped the class about loyalty to country has given his online gaming friends a bunch of secret Department of Defense documents as a means of showing off. The alt-right and the Fox News types — i.e., the half of the Republican Party and the mainstream media that has repeatedly proved in practice that it would willingly...
Mike Lee, since he stopped being the pre-2016 Ted Cruz’s more principled and less self-promoting sidekick and became a pathetic panderer to the Trump cult, seems to have lost his intellectual moorings. No longer sounding like a rare libertarian with a moral compass, Lee increasingly sounds like a slightly less smarmy and disingenuous imitation of the post-2016, pathetically bootlicking Ted Cruz. Lee’s new-found...
Yet again, Jordan Peterson, the energetic academic psychologist cum profiteering alt-right blowhard, has put his mouth where he believes the money is. That is, since most of his paying audience — believe me, he has no interest in any audience that is not paying, and by god they certainly will pay — is comprised of young males who believe Donald Trump is infallible,...
Ron DeSantis, who is planning to run for U.S. President in 2024, and must therefore suck up relentlessly to the Republican Party’s MAGA-QAnon base, which is in love with Vladimir Putin, has publicly adopted the standard position of all current Republicans who have need of gaining the favor of the grassroots, without necessarily being one of them. That is to say, he has...
Knowing all the facts in the world grants not the least bit of understanding of what is actually happening, let alone what is likely to happen, anymore than reciting the dates and numbers of history grants the least wisdom about why events transpired as they did. What is needed, rather, is an understanding of human nature, including its most common weaknesses, defensive postures,...
America Descending / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 16, 2023
Death counts, be not proud.– If you want to sound credible criticizing pandemic alarmists for padding the Covid death numbers and overstating the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, then it would be a good idea to stop shouting “Aha! The vaccine again!” every time an athlete, actress, or geriatric rock star happens to die. Reminder to both tribes: Dying was invented, and...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 4, 2023 · Last modified January 5, 2023
You can make absolutely any factual claim you wish, supported with the boldest and most unflinching evidentiary assurances to back it up, by merely promising that this overwhelming supporting evidence will be made public very soon. How about not making any factual claim at all unless you are prepared to present the evidence at the same time you make the claim? But no,...
Skimming along the surface, gliding at speed over the tips of waves, blissfully unaware of the depths, is of the essence of this age. American businessman and self-appointed moral scourge Ben Shapiro, who is nothing if not of this age, is taking his usual fake-intellectual-for-profit routine to the subject of global conflict, specifically the war in Ukraine. His speed-talking schtick — skimming along...
Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and dozens of other so-called Republicans are now, with increasingly obvious desperation, expressing open hatred and spreading obvious Russian propaganda about Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine, while deliberately ignoring the fact that they would never have heard Zelensky’s name, or have been able to locate Ukraine on a map, had Russia not invaded...
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